The Biden Conundrum: Democrats' Identity Politics Chickens Come Home to Roost

Democrats playing to the woke mob in 2020 may have opened Trump's only path back to the White House in 2024.

Donald Trump’s best chance at becoming president again—his only chance—is if Democrats keep Joe Biden as their nominee, and Biden suffers some new catastrophe, such as a public cognitive breakdown, an international crisis blowing up on his watch, or the economy getting substantially worse than it already is. So what’s keeping them from replacing Joe with a newer model?

It’s by no means certain that Biden’s weaknesses would doom him against Trump, but it is a danger for him. Democrats can nullify those weaknesses by swapping their obviously-decrepit incumbent for someone who can put together a sentence, fake normalcy, and claim a degree of separation from whatever mess Biden creates that could potentially outweigh Trump’s perception of criminality in voters’ minds. Gavin Newsom absolutely fits that bill, but any reasonably-presentable blue state governor would suffice.

It also makes perfect sense why Democrats (including Newsom) are still maintaining a public pretense of rallying around Biden. Trump’s most potent talking point in the Republican primary right now is his national polling lead against Biden (never mind the problems with those polls, or the fact that state polls, which track how we actually decide elections, have Trump losing). Feeding assumptions that Biden will be our opponent lulls Republicans into a false sense of security about nominating Trump, whom Democrats need to be their opponent.

All Democrats have to do is decide on a successor and have Biden bless him sometime before the Democrat National Convention next August. (As for getting Biden to agree, what’s the use of having a crooked Justice Department and equally-crooked presidential family of the same party if the party can’t use the former to intimidate the latter into playing ball once in a while?)

No, Democrats’ real obstacle to replacing their senile standard-bearer is the choice they made to appease identity-obsessed leftists in 2020 by “balancing” the white male at the top of their ticket with black female Kamala Harris. They focused so much on checking off “representation” boxes that it apparently didn’t occur to them that making an abrasive moron next-in-line for the presidency of the United States might cause problems down the line when paired with the oldest president in American history.

It’s one thing for a vice president to have to compete for her party’s nomination in an open primary. But the optics of Biden stepping down and blessing any successor other than his current official successor would be hard not to read as an insult—and Harris loyalists are taking it as just that. From CNN:

“Some of us need to say that they are acting in many ways like agents for the MAGA crowd,” Rev. Al Sharpton told CNN. He plans to call on Democrats to stop during CBC weekend in Washington, DC. “I can only think that they are either politically stupid or working for the opposition.”

And according to conversations with more than a dozen Democratic strategists, elected officials and people close to the vice president, many will join Sharpton in urging Democrats to stop their groaning over the Biden-Harris ticket and end the chatter of potentially replacing the vice president […]

“There’s a lot of people in Washington who would love that job,” said Jim Messina, a Democratic operative who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. “I think that a lot of the criticism at the at the vice president is borderline misogynistic and there’s a lot of people who judge her harder than they would judge a male politician (in) that role.”

[Maryland Gov. Wes] Moore, the only Black governor in the US, said, “The attacks on her, they hit different – they hit our ears differently. And I think people should remember that.”

Live by race-mongering, die by race-mongering.

This is not an insurmountable hurdle—a party machine doesn’t get to be what the Democrats are today without some talent for either bribing or pressuring politicians like Harris into going along with whatever’s best for the party—but it is a real one, created entirely by Democrats’ years of feeding leftist ideology.

If only our own house wasn’t such a mess going into this election, conservatives could take more comfort in the enemy’s dilemma.

It is a remarkable irony of modern politics that both major parties are currently dealing with forces (the GOP by MAGA grift, Dems by the woke mob) trying to keep them chained to weak, inept embarrassments as their respective standard bearers, setting up a rematch most of the country doesn’t want.

And if they get their way in locking in Trump vs. Biden as the choice, the outcome may no longer be up to the campaigns, the parties, or the activists—the deciding votes could well instead come down to whichever candidate’s incompetence, obnoxiousness, sleaze, and general unfitness for one of the most important jobs on the planet drives more people into voting for the other guy or leaving the presidential box blank come November 5, 2024.

Democrats will have to fend for themselves against the woke monster they’ve created, but conservatives have a pretty simple solution to ours: just nominate someone who would actually be a good president and isn’t actively repulsive to normal voters, Ron DeSantis. That’s what will determine if this election is decided by the last-minute whims of jaded independents, or earned by the purposeful efforts of of a serious movement: whichever movement decides to cast off its embarrassment before it’s too late.