‘A Party Not a Cult’: Democrats Contrast Biden Ouster with Republicans’ Yearslong Trump Struggle

Washington, D.C. – As their Republican opponents and even some fellow progressives unload on establishment Democrats for pushing Joe Biden out after voters had their say, lawmakers who helped show the president the door are casting the top-down maneuver as an example of effective party administration — drawing a contrast with Republicans’ long struggle to rid themselves of Donald Trump.

“What we’re showing is that we’re still a party and not a cult, and we actually came together and reevaluated our situation and decided that we need to move in a different path,” Representative Brittany Pettersen (D., Colo.), who called on Biden to step aside on July 12, told NR in the U.S. Capitol earlier this week. “I think that that shows the strength of the party, and I don’t think that that’s going to alienate swing voters.”

“If anything, they’re relieved that we’re listening,” Pettersen said on Monday, two days before a new poll released by CNN showed that Biden’s decision to drop out was indeed met with 87 percent approval from registered voters across the political spectrum.

The Democratic Party may have succeeded in pressuring Biden to exit the race. But it’s taking a huge gamble in uniting behind Harris, an extremely unpopular vice president who spent the entire 2020 presidential primary tacking to the left. 

What could’ve been a contested nomination fight quickly became a coronation for Harris, who immediately secured support from Democratic delegates, party leaders, and would-be rivals in the wake of Biden’s decision to bow out.

While Biden’s unfitness immediately became clear to all those who watched the debate, the Democrats leading the pressure campaign quickly ran into the question of how exactly a new nominee would be selected without input from voters. 

Biden surrogates took to the airwaves to claim it would be undemocratic to oust the president at this late stage and, even after Biden’s withdrawal, some progressives are sticking to that line: Black Lives Matter issued a statement Tuesday blasting the party for “anointing” Harris without the consent of the voters.

“We do not live in a dictatorship. Delegates are not oligarchs,” the group declared. “Any attempt to evade or override the will of voters in our primary system—no matter how historic the candidate—must be condemned.”

Biden’s eleventh-hour withdrawal has left many Democrats, and Americans of all political stripes, asking why it didn’t happen sooner. But even this week, Democrats who rarely see the president in person insist they were taken aback by his catastrophic June 27 debate performance.

“Most of us don’t really see President Biden very often except on TV, just like the rest of you,” Representative Zoe Lofgren (D., Calif.) said in a brief interview with NR on Monday. She said the calculus behind calling on Biden to drop out was simple. “It was the data I was seeing, in terms of his possibility of winning,” she said. “If you want to have your policies in place, you have to win the election.”

The logical political jump for Republicans working to elect Trump? Run ads that accuse Harris of being complicit in a conspiracy to hide his infirmities from the public. “She’s going to have to answer: Why should Joe Biden stay in office and not resign?” says Alex Pfeiffer, spokesman for the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. “Joe is not going anywhere, and he’s going to keep having these moments that make it obvious to everyone that this person should not be in charge of our nuclear codes.”

Democrats have settled on a new response to the cover-up argument: Turn the conversation back to Trump. 

“This, to me, is such a specious argument being put forward by Republicans and the Right, because they are covering up for somebody who is clearly unfit for office,” Representative Mark Takano (D., Calif.) said in an interview with NR on Monday. He referenced Ohio senator J. D. Vance, the former Trump critic who was tapped last week to serve as Trump’s 2024 running mate. 

“The Republicans are the epitome of get on board or shut up. And they’ve all shut up,” Takano added. “The ones who have spoken up, they’ve been marginalized. And I mean, it’s laughable that they’re trying to put this on Democrats, like there was some sort of cover up.” 

As Democrats tell it, they identified a problem and quickly fixed it in what they say demonstrates a remarkable show of party unity and discipline. “We made the right decision that the Republicans never could make,” says Representative Adam Smith (D., Wash.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. “So if anyone has an institutional trust crisis” it’s Republicans, he said. “After January 6, Republicans all rallied around Trump even as 80 percent of them behind closed doors were saying he was crazy.”

It’s difficult to start a presidential campaign “from scratch” weeks before a convention, adds Smith, one of few Democrats to express skepticism during the 2022 midterm cycle about whether Biden should run for reelection. “Harris was the only one who’s been out there running a campaign,” he said. “And also, we like her. She’s smart, she’s talented. There’s a reason she was the vice president and there’s a reason she’s done the job she’s done.”

But behind closed doors, some of the very same Democrats who were maneuvering to push Biden out were also saying Harris couldn’t be his replacement, according to Representative Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas). “There are some people that I know who were not on her side and all of a sudden they love her—so yeah, I was surprised, but it was the right thing,” Crockett, who quickly announced her support for Harris, told the Wall Street Journal. 

When Harris ran her first bid for president in 2020, her poor polling in the crowded Democratic primary prompted her to end her campaign before the Iowa caucuses. Fast forward to 2024: Trump leads Harris by an average of 1.5 percentage points, according to a Washington Post analysis of surveys conducted by eleven different pollsters before Biden officially dropped out of the race. Biden, by comparison, was 1.9 percentage points behind Trump. Yet ahead of Biden’s debate disaster, he typically outperformed Harris in match-ups against Trump. 

Harris’s emergence as the all-but-certain party nominee has energized Democrats on the fundraising front. The campaign says it pulled in more than $100 million in donations between Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. Now, the great hope for Democrats is that Harris can win over the swing voters who were already souring on the Biden-Harris administration but have similar reservations about sending Trump back to the White House.

Representative Earl Blumenaur (D., Ore.), who called on Biden to step aside two weeks ago, told NR on Monday that the incumbent’s decision to bow out of the race will allow him to “concentrate on being president for the remainder of his term, which we need.”

Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office Wednesday night but failed to explain exactly why he stepped aside, saying only that he felt it was time to “pass the torch.” The remarks were cheered by the very same Democrats who were privately terrified only days ago that he wouldn’t cave to intra-party pressure on him to bow out.

Pettersen, the Colorado House Democrat, says she “cried for a long time” over her decision to call on Biden to step aside. “Even if I was asking him to pass the torch, I was still going through mourning because I love Joe Biden,” she told NR. “I’m sure that he had a difficult time coming to that decision. And so he probably didn’t want to do it on video. It’s an incredibly emotional thing to go through.”

“I just felt that after watching the debate, we had a president with a tremendous record who was unable to really communicate past the prevarications and lies of Donald Trump and I felt that this wasn’t going to be an issue that could easily be dispensed with,” Takano added. “The president is a decent man, and his decency has elevated him to greatness.”

But a new problem for Democrats is that they may have an institutional trust crisis on their hands. After last month’s debate, many Americans were shocked to see their president struggle to string sentences together and inspire confidence that he is up for the job of running for reelection, let alone continuing to serve out the rest of his term. 

Around NR 

• Now that he has ended his reelection bid, Joe Biden should go one step further and resign the presidency, NR’s editors argue: 

Biden should take the next logical step and resign the presidency. It’s possible to imagine a president not being able to campaign but still being capable of carrying out his official duties — say, if he had a serious physical impairment. And it is even possible to imagine a president who could serve for another six months but not another four and a half years. But such scenarios do not apply to Biden.

• The Left falsely believes it’s getting an anti-Israel radical in Kamala Harris, Noah Rothman writes:

An NBC News report published late last night promulgated the notion favored by the Biden White House that, even if Harris’s instincts incline her toward a more confrontational posture vis-à-vis Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the vice president will continue to support Israel. Indeed, the views of her foremost adviser on national-security matters, Philip Gordon, “are believed to be broadly in sync with those of moderate, left-of-center foreign policy experts.”

• On reports that Arizona senator Mark Kelly is on Harris’s short-list of potential running mates, Jack Butler says the purple-state senator could bring some “obvious advantages” to the ticket, but argues that nothing will make people forget they are voting for Harris:

Kamala Harris is a superior political talent to . . . basically nobody. Harris did not even make it to Iowa when she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. She last had a competitive election against a Republican in 2010. She is unpopular. She will have to sink or swim on her own merits.

• Republican operatives see endless opportunities for attacks against Harris, Audrey Fahlberg reports: 

The opportunity to poke fun at her political skills, off-putting cackle, and yearslong reliance on vacuous phrases — “what can be, unburdened by what has been” — is just the cherry on top of what Republican strategists are saying is a mismatched campaign fight against an opponent who is weaker in many ways than Joe Biden.

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