Why Biden won't drop out

Look at it from his perspective!

Note: This post is not an endorsement of any candidate, or about whether Biden should drop out. It is about whether he will drop out, or not.

As the creator of ElectionBettingOdds.com, I almost always defer to the betting markets. They’re the single best predictor.

But just as with the stock market, they aren’t perfect. People do make money by having insights that markets miss.

I think the markets are wrong when they say it’s a coin toss that Biden will drop out:

Chance of being the Democratic nominee, morning of Saturday, July 13, 2024

My personal view is that the odds should be 85%+ that Biden will be the nominee.

I have no respect for pundits blathering without putting money on the line, so rest assured that I’ve bet as much as I can conscionably bet on this. It’s also my only bet so far in the 2024 cycle, because I generally think the markets are right.

Here’s why I’m confident Biden will stay:

Biden’s incentives: the race is very winnable for him

So much analysis about whether Biden will drop out focuses on:

• A) whether it’d be good for Democrats and

• B) whether prominent Democrats want Biden to drop out

I’ve seen very little analysis about whether it’d be good for Biden for Biden to drop out. But that’s by far the most important question, because it’s Biden’s choice whether he drop out — Democrats can’t force him to.¹

So, what would be good for Biden? What are his chances of becoming President? Here are the “conditional odds” from my site, which I agree with:

Chance of winning *IF* nominated, morning of Saturday July 13, 2024

As you can see, Biden is indeed the least-electable candidate.

So Democrats, and their supporters in the media, are not crazy to lead a charge to switch horses.

It’s also worth noting that the ordering in those odds has been quite stable since the debate, as you can see from the chart. Bettors are confident that Newsom would be more electable than Harris, who also tends to be ~10 points more electable than Biden.

If you’re a voter in a Democratic primary, that is an excellent reason to vote against Biden as your nominee.

But now imagine that you’re Joe Biden, and you already won the delegates required for your party’s nomination.

Now a bunch of pundits and swing-seat Democrats are asking you to step down, which almost certainly would mean Harris gets the nomination, which would make your party a mere ~10 percentage points more likely to win.

So Biden is supposed to trade a 34 percent chance of being the next President, to give his party a mere 10 percentage point gain in their chances against Trump?

Come on, man.

Politicians are self-interested.

Biden did not really run to “stop Trump”, contrary to his talking points. That’s a fig leaf. You can tell that from the fact that he ran not just in 2020, but also in 1988 and 2008. Biden has always been an ambitious guy whose life dream is being President. He wouldn’t have the job if it weren’t.

The above is the rational, market analysis. But of course, Biden probably isn’t checking ElectionBettingOdds.com (though I’ve heard that Vivek Ramaswamy and Marco Rubio have visited it.)

Biden instead looks at polls:

Polling shows an even weaker case for Biden dropping out

Here’s the current RCP polling, which consists entirely of polls taken after the debate:

Yes, Biden is down, but 2.9 points is hardly a historic disadvantage.²

Before the debate, Trump led by 1.5 points:

So that’s a mere 1.4 point shift. That’s small!³

How much better does Harris perform? Hardly at all:

So Biden is supposed to look at those numbers and say “well my Vice President now does 0.7% better in the polls against Trump, guess I’ll pass the mantle.”

It’s ridicule-worthy from his perspective, honestly.

Admittedly, Biden does worse in the electoral college than in the popular vote, so the picture is a bit bleaker for him than the above polling suggests. The average for Pennsylvania, the most likely pivotal state, currently has Trump up 5, which is substantial. But it’s not obvious Harris would do better. The latest poll that asked about her in Pennsylvania was in February, by The Hill/Emerson, and it found Trump beating her by 9, and beating Biden by 2.

Also, considering things from Biden’s perspective, the same pundits who are freaking out now are the same ones who underestimated his chances in both 2020, and 2022, and probably in 2016 (there’s no way to know sure for if Biden would have won if he’d ignored advice from partly elders and run against Clinton and then Trump — but he likely would have.) He clearly has a disdain for his own party’s pundits and politicos, and I don’t blame him.

The calls to drop out are mostly about surprise and panic among Democratic insiders

As both the polls and betting above show, the fear among Democratic politicians and journalists is far less reflective of the fundamentals of the race, than it is about their own mindsets.

Specifically, many of them believed⁴ the partisan spin in the New York Times and elsewhere that Biden was “sharp as tack” and which condemned (real) viral videos of Biden gaffes as “cheap fakes.”

The debate disabused them of that spin, and suddenly they realized they were running an increasingly-senile candidate in what many think is the most critical election to preserve our democracy (I don’t think that, for the record.)

Perhaps partly because of the sudden nature of their realization, many Democrats have now overcorrected and are too negative about Biden’s ability to win.

Biden is getting senile, but is more cogent than current media coverage would make one think

Biden has had declining verbal abilities throughout his entire term, and it’s been a slow decline. Based on that, I predict: he’s not going to be a “vegetable” by November, as some fear.

Furthermore, while Republicans might not like to hear this part, I think Biden’s logical thinking ability, and sense of himself, is still functional.

His verbal ability has long been on the fritz, and he misuses words, slurs his speech, and constantly loses his train of thought. But I haven’t yet seen an example of his logic being impaired.

For example, the other day, Biden said “Vice President Trump” instead of “Vice President Harris.” Embarrassing! But it was also clear from the context of his sentence that he didn’t actually momentarily think Trump was his Vice President. He didn’t start wondering if maybe his orange VP could mortgage some properties to top up the campaign war chest. Instead, it was just a disconnect between his brain and his mouth.

That’s not an endorsement of Biden, and verbal reliability is obviously useful for a President, but I think it is worth trying to separate those two aspects of cognition, when listening to Biden.

Additionally, I see no indication that he’s losing the drive, or his mentality that got him into the most powerful job in the world.

What about his legacy? He’ll go down in history as the candidate who lost to Trump!

The main point I’ve seen pundits make that touches on Biden’s own interests goes like this:

• If he drops out now, he’ll be seen by Democrats as a George Washington -like figure, putting his ego aside to retire to his metaphorical farm, and saving the country in the process.

• If he persists, he’ll be seen as the doddering old fool whose vanity ushered in an orange tyrant, destroying American democracy.

But there are a lot of assumptions built into that framing, and while they are shared among the Democrats’ core base, I see little indication that Biden shares them.

First, in terms of legacy — does it actually look so great to drop out after one bad debate? That’s kind of embarrassing, too. And what if Kamala Harris loses to Trump, which is also likely? Then Biden will not only be a quitter who admitted senility and dropped out in the middle of a campaign for the first time in US history, but he and others would probably wonder if he could have done better than Harris in the election, and whether he failed the country that way.

People at Biden’s level also just generally don’t quit while they have a chance. If people at that level had personalities like the rest of us, they wouldn’t be President. You can see that in the President’s mindset. From his NATO presser this week (no teleprompter):

Well, look, I’m not in this for my legacy.  I’m in this to complete the job I started.

Also from the NATO presser, a glimpse of his mindset:

I always have an — an in- — inclination, whether I was playing sports or doing politics, just to keep going, not stop. 

A lot of the pundits also show their neuroticism when they fear “oh, you’ll be seen as the person who made Trump win!” They forget the running for office, against Trump or not, is inherently risky. Politicians by definition have to be okay with a lot of personal career risk. Such people don’t frame things as “is there a chance I’ll lose?” Instead, their mindset is, “is there a chance I’ll win?”

Biden made that very clear in his NATO presser:

Q:   If your team came back and showed you data that [Harris] would fare better against former President Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race?

THE PRESIDENT:  No, unless they came back and said, “There’s no way you can win.”  … No one is saying that.  No poll says that. 

Steelmanning the “drop out” camp

Let’s consider a couple of points raised by those who think Biden will drop out (for example, Nate Silver is a smart guy who has predicted that Biden will drop out.)

One point Silver raises that hasn’t already been addressed above:

I don’t think there are actually that many Democrats who have an incentive to keep this going … if you read the smoke-signals carefully, so are some of the elder statesmen in the party, like James Clyburn and Barack Obama. No, they’re not saying this explicitly — but that Obama failed to refute a Washington Post story that suggested he has private doubts about Biden is what we poker players call a “tell”.

I’ll add that Pelosi also had a similar “tell” recently when she said:

“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run … We’re all encouraging him to to make that decision. Because time is running short.”

When she said that, Biden had already loudly, forcefully, scornfully, repeatedly, said that was definitely running and not leaving the race. So Pelosi’s “I hope he’ll decide soon” was a veiled “you didn’t really mean to choose that, did you? Decide again please.”

I just don’t think it matters.

Silver has a post titled, “Biden has a weak hand.” I see the opposite. I think Biden has all the cards, because he already won the delegates, and because the Democratic establishment (donors, politicians, etc) have literally nobody else to support if he insists on staying in (who would they support? RFK Jr.? Jill Stein? Cornell West? Nope.)

Additionally, Biden’s view is that Democrats calling for him to resign are largely playing self-interested politics. From Biden’s NATO presser:

I served in the Senate a long time.  I understand the impetus of candidates running for local office and whether they think the top — if they can help them or not. 

In my state of Delaware, which was a very — at least a purp- — it wa- — it was a red state when I started in terms of where you now talk “red and blue.” [My fact-check: 52 years ago in 1972, the year Biden first won his Senate seat in Delaware, Republican Richard Nixon won the state by 20 points. In general it seems to have been a swing state at the time.]

I — I don’t recall most of the Democratic presidents winning my state when I was a candidate.  The truth of the matter is I understand the self-interest of a candidate.  If they think that, you know, running with Biden at the top of the ticket is going to hurt them, then they’re going to run away.  I get it. 

So, Biden is inclined to discount the congressional calls for him to leave.

Another Silver argument is that Democrats are polling just fine in Senate races, and therefore, if Democrats can just run a more generic Democratic for President, they can win.

I think that somewhat overstates the value of a generic Democrat running because local candidates have local advantages⁵ but it’s also true that Democrats would likely win with a generic candidate — the conditional odds discussed at the start of the post suggest California governor Gavin Newsom has ~60% chance of beating Trump, compared to Biden’s ~34% chance.

Even if Biden knew that and believed that, I doubt he’d drop out and endorse Newsom.

Furthermore, getting him to believe it is nearly impossible, because current polls show Newsom doing even worse than Biden:

I think Nate Silver, and the bettors, are right that IF Newsom (or similar) were the nominee, his silver tongue and comparatively youthful demeanor would win him more support, and he’d win in November.

But because most Americans barely know who Newsom is, he lags in the polls. And good luck making that counterfactual case to Biden. “Yes, you out-poll Newsom, Joe, but he’s such a good campaigner that if you give him the chance, he’d actually beat Trump, where you’d fail!”

If I’m wrong …

I think there’s ~15% chance that I’m wrong and Biden does drop out. If he does, I think the reason will be:

1. There’s an incident (fainting at a podium, a McConnell-like 30 second brain freeze, or something similar) that is just so bad that everyone he respects, from Barack Obama to Charles Schumer, calls him and begs him to drop out. It’ll have to be pretty bad; remember that he survived having a bleeding eye in the 2020 debates.

2. Biden’s campaign team sees he’s actually much worse than the rest of us can see, and a huge number quit.

I used to think maybe Biden might himself decide that the trouble of campaigning just isn’t worth it at his age, but after watching him more, I see no signs at all of that kind of mentality, even though the typical person would feel that way at age 82.

Biden in his own words

I’ll end with a couple lines from Biden’s NATO presser, in which he gave a clear window into his thinking and mindset.

And:

I think I’m the most qualified person to run for president.  I beat him once, and I will beat him again…

there were at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents who had lower numbers than I have now... 

And:

… my schedule has been full bore. 

I’ve done … roughly 20 major events, some of them with thousands of people showing up.

And so, I just think it’s better.  I always have an — an in- — inclination, whether I was playing sports or doing politics, just to keep going, not stop. 

Conclusion

I think political pundits and reporters (and bettors, for once) are totally out of touch with Biden’s thinking on this, and Biden’s thinking is what matters most.

I suspect that many are led astray by motivated reasoning — Democrats WANT Biden to drop out, because other Democrats do have slightly better prospects.

I also think there’s a failure here to try to really get into Biden’s head. Instead people assume he has similar priorities to themselves (typically, stopping Trump.) But actually actually Biden is just very ambitious, not a quitter at all, and proud of his record.

I could be wrong! It’s very possible that you should just listen to the markets, and ignore me. But I feel sure enough about this take that I decided to write it up.

1. No, the 25th Amendment is not going to happen (and the WSJ editorial board makes a strong case that it shouldn’t be used.) It takes 2/3rds of both houses of Congress, plus a majority of the cabinet, and the VP, to use it. It was designed for cases where a President was truly delusional and causing imminent danger to the country, not just slurring his speech and losing his train of thought.

2. For historical comparison, on election day in 2020, Trump trailed Biden by 7.2 points in the average. In 2016, he trailed Clinton by 3.2 points.

3. The post-debate polling shift was so small, that a play-money market on Manifold titled Will the first presidential debate "matter"? resolved “no” — because “mattering” was defined as a polling shift of 3 points or more:

4. Matt Yglesias has a very honest article on how he believed Biden was alright, and how the debate changed his mind and made him feel awful.

5. Silver says:

Democrats are narrowly ahead on the generic Congressional ballot. And their Senate candidates are generally polling quite well — almost always much better than Biden is in the same polls …

But I suspect the huge polling difference between Biden and Dem Senate candidate is a function of local candidates playing to their constituencies. Races are often very local. For example, Trump is going to win Montana by double-digits (he won it by 16 points in 2020) but Montana Senate candidate Jon Tester has a 34% chance of winning. That’s not because Tester is inherently a better candidate than Biden, it’s because Montanans know him well, he’s tailored his rhetoric to Montana, and some people there feel he’s done a good job of bringing federal money to the state. A national candidate won’t have any of those things helping him or her.