Left-wing Media to Democrats: ‘Stop Moaning’ About Biden-Harris Ticket

Left-wing media outlets that support the Democratic Party have a message to worried activists: stop complaining, because you’re stuck with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

Democrats are worried, given a trend in recent polls that show former President Donald Trump defeating the incumbent president in a rematch of their 2020 contest. The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, an influential columnist who helped amplify claims of “Russian collusion” in 2017, wrote last week that Biden should drop out.

But left-wing outlets are pushing back, telling Democratic Party voters that they are stuck with what they’ve got.

“The Cake Is Baked. Deal With It,” said Slate.com’s David Faris in an article Monday with the subheadline: “Stop moaning about replacing Biden and Harris. This is the 2024 Democratic ticket, whether you like it or not.”

Faris focused on the question of whether Biden, the default Democratic nominee, should replace his running mate:

A slow late-summer news cycle has brought us fresh pontification about how President Biden, still battling gruesome polling and growing concerns about his age and appeal, should inject new life into his campaign by picking a new running mate for 2024. Like most recommendations brought to us by op-ed columnists with too much time on their hands, casting Kamala Harris aside is a dreadful idea—not only because it has almost zero chance of actually happening, but because it would clearly cause more problems than it would solve.

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If Democrats could wave a magic wand and replace Harris with someone like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz suggests, without the ensuing backlash and “Democrats in disarray” news cycles, would that be a good idea? Possibly. (Not so much for Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ bananas idea to swap in Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who was for a time the least popular governor in America.) But there are no magic wands in politics—only unappealing options and constraints imposed by choices made in the past, what social scientists call “path dependence.” The moment Biden selected Harris as his partner in 2020, he all but ensured that she would be more or less irreplaceable.

MSNBC, once a left-wing outlet but now essentially a Democratic Party organ, published an op-ed titled: “What’s behind the nonsensical campaign to replace Biden-Harris in 2024.” The subheadline read: “No candidate is perfect, but dumping an incumbent is generally a terrible idea.” Author Michael Cohen went on to mock the very notion:

Biden announced his candidacy for re-election earlier this year. He’s already raised $77 million as of July, and has no serious primary challenge. He remains broadly popular among Democratic voters, even if he clearly has work to do in order to reassure wayward party members. When Lyndon Johnson abandoned re-election in March 1968, he had spent months dragging his feet on launching a campaign. When he almost lost the New Hampshire Democratic primary to Sen. Eugene McCarthy, his name wasn’t even on the ballot (voters had to write it in). None of that is happening with Biden. He has given every imaginable signal that he is running and that his heart is in it. Barring some unforeseen health event, he’s not dropping out. It simply isn’t going to happen.