Without a doubt the biggest mistake of my career prediction was to insist, until relatively late in the race, that Donald Trump would not win the 2016 Republican nomination for president. I was worried that he had made a mistake similar to mine prediction that Joe Biden would eventually drop out of the 2024 race — something he insisted he wouldn't do until announced his decision to step aside today at 13:46.
My basic view of politics, which contributed to this bad prediction about Trump, is that political parties engage in something that roughly resembles. optimal behavior of game theory and they employ reasonably rational strategies in an effort to win elections and fulfill their other goals. And I didn't think Trump was a very rational choice for Republicans. I thought he would have less of a chance against Hillary Clinton than another Republican and also that, if elected, he would undermine many of the traditional goals of the Republican Party in foreign policy and other areas.
Well, what do I know? Maybe Trump wasn't such a bad candidate: after all, he beat Clinton, even though she was such a weak candidate that most other Republicans probably would have won, too. And Trump was able to do the blocking and basic tackling of the issues the GOP cares most about, like cutting taxes and appointing conservative Supreme Court justices. Now, Trump was a one-termer and contributed to low GOP legislatures in 2018 and 2022, so the jury is still out on whether this was a good bet for Republicans — the verdict will likely depend on whether he can to regain the presidency in November. And that's not to mention what Trump will mean for the long-term legacy of the Republican Party or the country.
Compared to the Republicans' decision on what to do with Trump, I thought the Democrats had more agency about Biden following his own disastrous debate. Unlike the Republicans in 2016, the Democrats hadn't even bothered to hold a competitive primary, if at all, the Biden one. the flaws might even have been apparent earlier — so the voter will argument was weak. And unlike Trump in October 2016 after the premiere of the tape “Access Hollywood”, after which some Republicans asked him to leave – Biden wasn't even the Democratic nominee yet since the party's convention hadn't been held. And Biden has always been a loyal Democrat who got one a great boost to the party's formation finishing the nomination in 2020, not someone who gave his party the middle finger.
It's worth remembering that a lot had to break for Trump to win in 2016. Without the Comey letter, Clinton probably held on. Then there was a polling error in Trump's favor, and he won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, while Biden is to the disadvantage of the Electoral College.
So nothing was certain, but Biden was probably going to lose, and there was a better chance that he would lose badly. In what will be the final run of the Trump vs Biden version of our model, Biden had a 27 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. But that was it probably exaggerating his chances:
That's why I was literally willing to put my money where my mouth was when it came to Biden. 27 percent isn't high to begin with, but I thought his actual chances were about half that, maybe 10 to 15 percent, if he stayed in the race.
Of course, it's one thing to say that political parties act rationally, but the “Democratic Party” is an abstraction. The United States is not a parliamentary system where a leader is out if he fails to maintain the trust of party members. If Biden had simply refused to leave the stage, it would have been difficult to replace him, however by no means impossible under the rules of the party. However, as I have arguedstaying in the race would also have been an irrational decision for Biden, likely leading to a loss for Trump and severely tarnishing what otherwise it might have been a pretty good legacy.
Unlike some commenters I respect, I am not inclined to praise Biden after his decision today. Instead, I'm more ambivalent. I give him credit for leaving now instead of prolonging the agony even further; I had imagined that one was waiting for us really ugly week for the Democratic Party, and today was the last possible moment he could have walked away with most of his dignity intact. However, as someone who was from the beginning of Biden's skepticismI think Biden should have stepped aside many months ago when there would still have been time to have a competitive primary appearance. I think the people who thought it was a good idea to run this version of Biden for another term: des family members like Hunter Biden to strategists like Jen O'Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon, and Ron Klain, should be viewed with skepticism and should not be within 100 miles of the war room of Kamala Harris or whoever happens to be the nominee democrat
And it will probably be Harris, who already has support from many major factions of the Democratic Party, including, most notably, Biden, whose campaign was responsible for electing the vast majority of DNC delegates. There is no obvious choice other than Harrisno alternative that had started any kind of running start; if anyone else wanted the nomination, they probably should have made it clear as soon as the debate was over.
me extensively covered the case for and against Harris last week. I certainly think he will have a better chance than Biden. For what it's worth, I'm going to proceed with caution before making any kind of official prediction of his chances; We'll probably wait 7-10 days to turn the model back on and see what the polls say now that she's a real candidate instead of a hypothetical one.
as much as me endorse the idea of a “mini-primary” in principle, may be too difficult to pull off under the circumstances. But what the Democrats really deserved as real primaries. Could Harris prove to be a better candidate than in 2020? Maybe, but a primary would have been a good test of that. Would a candidate like Gretchen Whitmer have been as good on the campaign trail as she appeared on paper? We could see that too. The value of a primary is in the optionality it offers and the additional information it reveals, since a primary campaign is a reasonably good simulation of a general election.
Under these less-than-ideal circumstances, I think Harris is an underdog, although we'll see what the model says. And if he loses, we'll probably resurface some dead Biden to say the Democrats made the wrong decision. But if the election is as important as Democrats say, they need to do what they can to maximize their chances, even if they're below 50 percent. Faced with a difficult position, party leaders like Nancy Pelosi they played their hand wellignorant White House BS and gradually increasing the pressure on Biden and finally getting him to resign without having to go too nuclear At the very least, they've reduced the risk to the downside that the fund will actually fall out of the campaign, say, because of another disaster in the September debate, and the landslide Republican margins in the House and Senate. We've learned a lot in recent weeks about who the selfish and irrational actors are within the Democratic Party. But at least this time cooler, more sensible heads have prevailed.
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