The Time For Pretending Is Over: The Only Way To Save American Democracy Is To Build A Political Coalition To Reelect Joe Biden

A majority of Americans reject Trumpism. But the anti-Trump majority needs to do the tough work over the next 9 months of reassembling a winning political coalition. There are no short cuts.

For many months, a lot of good people have been in a bit of denial about what needs to happen to prevent Donald Trump from re-entering the Oval Office about one year from now. As the general election is just a bit more than nine months away, it is clear that there is only one way to prevent the calamity of a second Trump Administration. The coalition that elected Joe Biden president needs to be reassembled to get him reelected as president. There is no other way to stop Trump. It is time for everyone that opposes Trump to end their wishful thinking that this problem will disappear through some other mechanism.

As I said in a prior column, it is Biden or Bust.   

The voters who have been resisting this reality fall into a number of buckets.

The first bucket is comprised of loyal Republicans who think their Grand Old Party can still be saved. They put their hopes in the 2024 presidential nominating process. Surely, they believed, their party would not nominate a man for the nation’s highest office who instigated a violent mob to riot against the peaceful transition of power, the very hallmark of American democracy. When given a chance to choose, they thought Republican primary voters would finally see Trump for what he is – a dangerous, authoritarian, narcissistic, lying scoundrel – and vote for a standard-bearer that held conservative views but lacked Trump’s distasteful values and questionable commitment to the Constitution. Sorry, but no. The results from New Hampshire yesterday prove what has been clear for months in polling. The modern GOP is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the MAGA universe. For Never-Trump Republicans and Independents, if you want to prevent a second Trump presidency you are going to have to vote for Joe Biden.

I’ve been disappointed at the hesitancy many distinguished “Never-Trumpers” have demonstrated expressing this reality publicly. Even the conservative Never-Trumper David French, who has been strongly anti-Trump for years, equivocated in a recent interview before confessing that he would vote for Biden:

The hard call for me is, do I write in again or do I vote for the Democratic nominee, presumably Joe Biden? And ordinarily, I would write in because the Democratic nominee would be sort of so far away from my policy preferences that I couldn’t — I just couldn’t, in conscience — vote for a Democratic president. But particularly in foreign policy, Joe Biden is getting some really big things right.

Republicans and Independents, if you reject Trump, please start saying publicly that you are going to vote for Biden. Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney - you can’t write books saying how horrible Trump is but then fail to tell voters that you plan to vote for the one person than can defeat him. Even if he is a Democrat. Every vote will be needed. 

The second bucket of voters in denial that they will need to start putting effort into ensuring Biden wins in November have put their faith in judicial processes to keep Trump off the ballot (or disqualify him in enough voters’ minds to prevent his nomination). Some are counting on the four criminal cases to go to trial before the election and result in Trump being a convicted felon by sometime this spring or summer. Others are putting their chips on Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment to bar Trump from primary and general election ballots because he “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States in connection with the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

First, it is worth pointing out the irony of claiming Trump needs to be defeated to save American democracy by relying on inherently anti-democratic processes to prevent a candidate, who enjoys massive public support, from the ballot. If this occurred in a foreign country, our State Department would be tut-tutting that the practice violated democratic norms.

But putting this aside, those counting on either of these processes to get rid of our nation’s Trump problem are engaged in wishful thinking on multiple counts.

With respect to the 14^th Amendment gambit, I think the likelihood of the Supreme Court allowing the leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination to be removed from the ballot based on the findings of a single state court judge during a truncated five-day trial to be close to zero. I know there are esteemed legal minds who believe Trump engaged in an insurrection three years ago. The problem is that there are a host of thorny contested legal and factual issues that have to be resolved at a high level of certainty before many millions of voters are denied the opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choosing. Trump and his party are entitled to substantial due process on the question of whether the January 6 riot was an “insurrection or rebellion” as the Framers of the 14th Amended defined those terms and whether Trump “engaged” in it. The big problem is, however, that the election has already begun and there is no existing process in election law to make this kind of huge decision in time for it to be fairly adjudicated. I just don’t see the Supreme Court allowing this level of judicial interference with an ongoing election. Trump will be on the ballot, I believe, in Colorado and all the other states, like Maine, that are trying to boot him off.  

(By the way, if the Supreme Court were to open a pathway that Trump could be kicked off the ballot for January 6, you can be sure states like Texas and Florida will find a way to kick Biden off their ballots based on the idea that he has joined a rebellion by allowing so many migrants to enter the U.S. during his presidency or some other concocted theory).

As for the criminal trials, I predicted previously that the indictments would strengthen Trump as a candidate and undermine candidates competing against him. Unfortunately, I was right. I am equally unconvinced that the trials will weaken Trump as a candidate against Joe Biden. Entrance polls from Iowa GOP primary showed that two-thirds of the voters thought Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president in 2020. Over half the voters in New Hampshire’s GOP primary reported that they would find Trump to be “fit for the presidency” even if he were convicted of a crime. These folks are not changing their minds based on a trial that will begin to sound like a broken record about the January 6 riot. Voters also do not care that Trump pilfered classified documents and hid them in Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, Trump will use the trials to counter that it is Biden who is violating democratic norms by trying to have his political rival put in jail prior to the election.

It is also becoming clear that Trump’s strategy of pushing these trials until after the election is working.

So again – there will be no judicial quick fix to our deep political mess. Anti-Trump voters should stop fixating on each new court filing or legal maneuver and start putting energy into voter registration campaigns and other measures to win the election at the ballot box. The only way to keep Trump out of the White House will be through electoral politics, not a judicial ruling.

The final bucket of voters that will need to accept the reality of the Trump or Biden choice before us are those who voted for Biden in 2020 but want to vote for someone other than Biden in 2024.

I can sympathize with how these voters feel.

A lot of younger voters believe that Biden is breaking his promise from 2020 to be a “transitional” figure. I think a lot of younger voters heard this and decided they were willing to support Biden as the Democratic candidate in 2020 because of the unique threat that Trump posed, the odd situation of the pandemic, and the need for a unified opposition to Trump. But they believed they were promised that Biden would not run for reelection, and they would have the chance to vote for a younger candidate in 2024.

Other voters, who were happy to vote for Biden back in 2020 and like what he has done as president, feel in their gut that Biden is too old at age 81 to be running for another 4-year term. I get emails from these voters that read “Wouldn’t it be great if Biden would just step aside so [blank and blank] could take on Trump?”

And finally, there are progressive voters who also put aside their ideological preference during the 2020 primaries for the sake of getting rid of Trump, but now want to vote for someone they see as a true progressive in 2024. Many of them are very upset about Biden’s position on the Israel-Gaza War. They are threatening to vote for independent or third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jill Stein, or Cornell West. Some are saying they may not vote at all.

Young voters, concerned voters, and progressive voters, I get it – you want to vote for someone for president that reflects your personal values and has the energy to take on Trump. (I’ll be writing a lot more about what the Biden campaign will need to do to convince these voters that Joe Biden does indeed share their values). But I am asking you now to face the reality that either Joe Biden or Donald Trump is going to win the 2024 election. 

First of all, it is clear from all the fundraising and campaigning Biden is doing that he is running come hell or high water. Time and energy spent mentally devising a Democratic dream ticket is wasted effort better dedicated to raising money for a Democratic candidate facing a tough race. Take solace in the statistic that over the past 100 years, an incumbent president ran for reelection 16 times and won 11 of those races.

For young and progressive voters who believe that neither Biden nor Trump reflects their values, ask yourselves if it makes sense to vote for the candidate that at least comes closest to doing so?  Or will you allow the person who shares your values the least to become president because you stay home or vote for a third-party candidate who has no chance of winning? You have nine-months to make this decision. It is possibly one of the most consequential decisions you may ever make for the future of this country. But face reality – staying home or voting for a minor-candidate is essentially an action that will help Donald Trump get the keys to the White House for another four years.

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I understand why many voters have been hoping the Biden vs. Trump battle would not have to be fought, that the very future of American democracy would not be at stake yet again. The reason is we did this a mere four years ago and it was mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting. I remember driving in my car listening the to radio when it was announced the Biden had won Pennsylvania and clinched victory in the Electoral College. I was overcome by emotion and just started crying. And I was already pretty sure he was going to win by then. The tears came out because experiencing the close and tense election campaign for over a year was such a huge tension (on top of the pandemic), that once it was over and that overwhelming sense of pending doom was lifted, that relief just came pouring out.

No one wants to have to do relive that experience all over again. 

I am sorry to say, we are all going to have to do so.