Why call for Biden to step down now?

Question

Why did the Democrats wait so long to start calling for Biden to step down for the next election? Why didn't they back another candidate during their primaries?

Answer 1

Biden has always been a "party man". Doing what was asked of him by his political party without any strong positions of his own. Having a president like this is very useful to the party. It was easier to not allow his ability become an issue.

Going against an incumbent isn't something that happens.

After the debate happened, his ability became an issue that could no longer be ignored regardless of anyone's specific opinion. Now that a national dialog has begun, candidates that are implicitly tied to Biden's reelection are forced to a position. Candidates that are up for election or reelection by being forced to a position can no longer say nothing. It is now in the news cycle.

Before the national dialog, it was "safe" for candidates and office holders to say nothing. Now by saying nothing, they are implying that they agree that Biden's abilities are OK. They are in the "between a rock and hard place" position. Do they side with or push away from their party's defacto leader?

Approval ratings, election finance laws ($100,000,000+), etc. are at stake for what to do about if or should / when Biden steps down.

For those people that are speaking up, there are completely separate reasons (specific to each person calling for Biden to step down):

• Better to win against Trump
• Better for their own candidacy
• Better to be seen not tied to someone they see as a possible loser

It also seems that it is now the safe position.

Answer 2

Why did the Democrats wait so long to start calling for Biden to step down for the next election? Why didn't they back another candidate during their primaries?

Sometimes a prior event that's similar sticks in the political memory of the party. In this case, there's some similarities to Jimmy Carter.

Carter won the 1976 election. His opponent was the deeply unpopular Gerald Ford (who barely won the nomination), who had overseen the disastrous end to the Vietnam War, as well as pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon. Nixon had been forced to resign over the Watergate scandal, something that helped to drag Ford down in the polls.

Carter's presidency had been chaotic, however. He didn't have a good relationship with members of his own party, and had been suffering in the opinion polls. Ted Kennedy (the last surviving Kennedy brother) challenged Carter openly for the 1980 Democratic nomination. It proved to be a disastrous decision, as Carter won more primary elections, but Kennedy had pulled a significant chunk of support of the party away. The open feuding only helped to highlight Carter's unpopularity. The 1980 election was a landslide for the Republicans, with Ronald Reagan running away with a sobering 489-49 in the Electoral College, and 50.7% to Carter's 41%, a nearly ten point gap, despite the fact that the Democratic Party as a whole did not fare quite as badly in local races (despite losing 34 seats, Democrats still held the House, and they would retake 26 seats in 1982).

Since then, the political conventional wisdom is that internecine party fights over the nomination for an incumbent president are harmful to the party as a whole. Only one elected president has ever been denied his party's nomination, and it was Franklin Pierce in 1852.

It's also worth noting that since Carter, the only presidents to lose a re-election bid have been George H.W. Bush (1992) and Donald Trump (2020). Remember, the incumbent president is already known to the public and that sort of knowledge is something hard to build for anyone else. Thus parties tend to stick with poor candidates through thick and thin.

Joe Biden is also a Democratic fixture. He was a Delaware Senator for 36 years, Vice President under Barak Obama for another 8, and is now a sitting president. Biden has lots of deep political connections that would be hard to overcome. A good example would be James Clyburn of South Carolina. In the 2020 primary, Clyburn made a speech that has been touted as the reason Biden won the state). In order to oust biden, you'd need to have his allies like Clyburn abandon him. So far Clyburn is sticking with Biden.

Answer 3

When Biden ran in 2020, there were good reasons to assume that he would pass the baton after his first term.

The logical successor would be the vice president, and herein lies the problem: Kamala Harris is so unpopular that her chances of winning the election are were generally considered worse than Biden's.¹ (That her lack of popularity may be partly rooted in the latent sexism and racism of the electorate is of no importance in this context.) Nominating a different candidate then would bring with it a host of problems: It would seem a betrayal to Harris; and it would result in a true primary competition, with all the damaging infighting that goes with it.

Probably for those reasons, Biden announced his renewed candidacy more than a year ago. That the party went along with it has a number of reasons, first and foremost that he himself is the center of the party establishment. It would have taken a major, concerted revolt to oppose him. Ezra Klein describes the party power structure in an opinion piece in the New York Times:

The White House and the Democratic Party apparatus it controls are powerful. Congressional Democrats will not get their bills prioritized or their amendments attached if they are too critical of the party leadership. Nonprofit leaders will stop getting their calls returned. Loyal party donors will abandon you if you’re branded a heretic. “I would be crucified by them if I spoke out of line,” an anonymous Democratic state party chair told NBC News early this month. “I know when you get out of line, they all of a sudden have a shift of priorities, and your races, your state is no longer on the map.” That was far truer a year ago, when Biden’s position in the party was unchallenged.

These actions, decisions and calculations by Democratic Party elites were neither unusual nor conspiratorial. This is simply how parties work.

And then it is likely that the party power brokers agreed that Biden's candidacy would be the strongest bet, in a mixture of misreading the public opinion, echo-chamber delusion, simple mis-assessments of Biden's shape (information of which was carefully curated by his inner circle) and time working against him. It is likely a costly accumulation of mistakes, but at every turn the alternatives seemed worse, leading to an outcome most party officials now privately regret.

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¹ That has over the last year changed with Biden's continued rating plunge; even before the debate, his ratings were probably worse than Harris'.

Answer 4

I don't recall where I read it, but in general, primary challenges (i.e. where someone from within the same party challenges the incumbent) is bad news for the party. As Wikipedia puts it (but note the paragraph is uncited):

In U.S. politics, a primary challenge is when an incumbent holding elective office is challenged by a member of their own political party in a primary election. Such events, known informally as "being primaried," are noteworthy and not frequent in the United States, as traditionally political parties support incumbents, both for party unity and to minimize the possibility of losing the seat to an opposing party. In addition, officeholders are frequently seen as de facto leaders of their party, eligible to establish policy and administer affairs as they see fit. A primary challenge thus interferes with this "spoil of office," and is largely discouraged.

In the specific case of Biden:

So far, no serious candidate has emerged to challenge Biden. The reason may be fairly simple. Incumbent presidents are rarely replaced, whether via the old smoke-filled rooms of party bosses or in the plebiscitary field of the modern primary election system. And when they do face serious, existential challenges, their challengers tend to highlight the incumbent’s weaknesses, bruising them for the general election.

Since political parties tend to want to win elections, just as the individual politicians do, it takes particular circumstances for someone to mount a challenge. It usually requires an ideological divide within the incumbent’s party that a challenger can capitalize on. But Biden’s Democratic Party doesn’t appear to have the kind of rancorous divides that existed when previous incumbents faced real challenges.

As you can see from the link (which is from 2023), people were already concerned about Biden and his mental fitness. It's just that until the first debate, those mental issues weren't concerning enough (or not in enough focus) for someone to mount a challenge.

Answer 5

According to the press reports, after his bad performance in the debate with Trump, private polling (commissioned by the Democrats) indicated that Biden was essentially wiped out in all 6 battleground states. This was apparently a major contributor to the decision of senior Democratic leaders to pressure him to withdraw as a candidate, despite the number of delegates he has etc.

When the campaign commissioned new battleground polling over the last week, it was the first time they had done surveys in some key states in more than two months, according to two people familiar with the surveys. And the numbers were grim, showing Biden not just trailing in all six critical swing states but collapsing in places like Virginia and New Mexico where Democrats had not planned on needing to spend massive resources to win.

And apparently this weighted in with Biden, who had previously committed to withdraw in such circumstances...

Biden told reporters at a NATO news conference he would drop out if polls showed he could not win. About a week later, he said he would reevaluate whether to stay in if he had “some medical condition that emerged” and doctors told him that would be an issue. The next day, the White House announced that Biden had Covid-19. [...]

There are, of course, questions whether Harris can do any better at this point.

BTW, for a bit of historical perspective:

Biden’s decision to exit the race less than a month before his party’s convention and a few months before voters head to the polls is unprecedented in the modern political era. The last sitting president to abandon a re-election bid was Lyndon Johnson, whose expansion of the Vietnam War in the 1960s split the Democratic Party. But Johnson’s announcement came in March 1968 — eight months before that election.

But since I mentioned that bit of history, one of the staunch Biden allies till the last moment (and who has been mentioned in Machavity's answer) had this angle on it, on the 21st of July, i.e. [in hindsight] on the eve of Biden's decision to withdraw:

Clyburn said in a CNN “State of the Union” interview with Jake Tapper on Sunday [July 21] that he still backs Biden “until he changes his mind” about being the party’s candidate. [...]

“When we had a contested process on the floor of the convention in 1980, we lost an incumbent president, and in 1972, we carried one state, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia,” he continued. “And all of us know what happened in 1968 when we ran Lyndon Johnson out of the race, with a great record Lyndon Johnson had, got rid of him over one issue, the Vietnam War. Here, we are now using one issue to get rid of a president, the result would be the same.”

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The NYT has some public data to back (some of) that up:

In the weeks after the debate, Biden’s position deteriorated in three states crucial to his re-election — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — as well as in other swing states where he had already been trailing by four to five points.

Also

Trump held a 29-point lead over Biden on which candidate was better seen as having the necessary mental and physical health to be president — up from Trump’s 19-point advantage on this question in the April NBC News poll.

By a 49%-31% margin, voters picked Trump as better than Biden on being competent and effective. In April’s poll, Trump’s edge here was 11 points. (And in NBC’s 2020 polling, it was Biden with a 9-point lead on this question.)

Answer 6

Because it wasn't clear enough that Biden's ability was an issue until it was too late.

I don't know how much time you've spent around people in the early stages of dementia, but it isn't a bright-line thing were a perfectly normal person wakes up one morning and is non-functioning.

For the last year or so (up until the debate) people in Biden's cabinet and other advisors have been talking up his cognitive abilities. There's been a fair amount of speculation that this was a ploy to maintain party cohesion or disguise Biden's decline but there's a much simpler explanation: they were telling the truth, because that's how Biden actually was in interactions with them. It's not just possible but probable that Biden was incisive and aware in the morning and early afternoon during meetings and briefings but far fewer people saw his ability wane with the setting sun.

Until the debate. Note that it took place at night (in his timezone).

Now sure, you could make the argument (and many do) that even if it wasn't clear the man is what, 81 years old? This was a reasonably expected outcome for anybody, much less the guy with one of the most stressful and demanding jobs in the world. Even if he made it through the election, what are the odds he made it another 4 years? It's probably also worth noting here that Trump is only very slightly younger...

So it's very likely that, given the political realities mentioned in the other answers, Biden's family and advisors (and supporters) crossed their fingers and shrugged off the warning signs. After all, don't we all have some scatter-brained moments from time to time? Or struggle remembering a particular word? Or forget to do something? If there's a slow, gradual uptick in these sorts of incidents at what point does it cross the line into cognitive impairment? Especially when they have plenty of moments where they are sharp as a tack still?

Everybody (including the patient!) thinks grandpa is fine until it becomes undeniably clear that he isn't.

Answer 7

Quite simply because: Social Inertia, which means you go what's already there, even as it becomes more rigid, and its application to hierarchical systems Organizational Inertia, which means you keep already-existing arrangements in place even as it becomes old, dated and dysfunctional.

This can also take the form of creeping organizational inertia: where counter-measures already in place to offset organizational inertia begin to erode. By this, of course, I'm referring primarily to time limits for positions of power, with recent cases in point being the recent Erosion Of Presidential Term Limits In Russia or the recent Removal Of Presidential Term Limits In Mainland China.

Another way that organizational inertia manifests is in the "clan'ification" of businesses, industries and (yes) positions of power. That's where you start seeing it become more and more confined to families in the given field. For U.S. politics that would mean: more spouses, more Juniors (or whatever the daughter equivalent of Junior is), more siblings.

In technology and complex systems, this analogous forms of inertia manifest as Technological/Structural Debt, the primary counter-measure being Refactoring. This also applies to legal systems.

What's going on with Biden can be seen as an analogue, witnessed in a sibling species, of the time, that inevitably arises, where the Silverback is challenged and overthrown; where the organizational inertia of the group reaches its limit.

This applies across the board and (as already alluded to above) is not confined to just one part of the world ... nor to just one group within a given region. There are actually two silverbacks for two subgroups in the U.S., the other (of course) being Trump; and the tendency to "go with what's already there" is quite similar.

In many ways the two groups reflect one another, both in terms of their respective situations and their behaviors, and it is almost comical to see their lack of self-awareness in this respect. Indeed, in my observations of the two groups and their respective dynamics, I have noticed the remarkable similarity between the behavior in their mutual interaction with that of The Silverback Versus Silverback Conflict seen here. So, you might say that this is a case where the effects of organizational inertia literally comes head to head up against itself.