Do you hear that? That’s the sound of hundreds of thousands of voters groaning at once after, on Thursday night, Democrats across the country realized that Biden can barely get through a debate, let alone beat Trump in the upcoming election.
In the resulting days, instead of party elders realizing that something is horribly amiss and taking responsibility and action, voters have mostly been admonished that Biden is still their best shot to beat Trump and that every vote that doesn’t break for Biden is, plainly, a vote cast for Trump. It’s been a shocking pile-on of total dismissal of what voters think and feel—and, frankly, it shouldn’t be a surprise this year. People sympathetic to the ongoing carnage in Palestine have been getting this response since at least October, waiting for the Democratic Party to show any sign of a good-faith effort to win back those 700,000 voters.
Instead, these Muslims and Arabs are repeatedly lectured about how they don’t understand the threat Trump poses to their community. It should go without saying that Muslim and Arab voters know exactly who Donald Trump is. But the condescension, and the effort to blame the constituency who is trying to raise what it feels are valid concerns in service of helping the Democratic Party beat Trump, has been astonishing to behold. And Democrats newly concerned about the 81-year-old president are being treated the same way—being told that their fears are unfounded. They’re hearing that Biden “had a bad night, but he’s had a great four years,” and that they must not “hand this election to Trump,” and that the “stakes are too high to do anything less.”
It’s all too familiar to anyone who voted “Uncommitted” months ago in the primaries instead of casting a vote in favor of Biden, as part of the effort to flag just how serious this constituency was about what was going on in Gaza and how unsatisfied it was by the Democrats’ response.
It’s worth realizing that the bar was already incredibly low going into last week’s debate. Biden knew that all he needed was to appear cogent on the debate stage. Instead, he began with a raspy, weakened voice, and things only got worse from there. The moment when the moderator hit him with the brutal “Thank you,” after his thoughts trailed off to an absolute lack of conclusion, was particularly excruciating. The response was resounding. The New York Times’ editorial board published a forceful call for Biden to withdraw from the election, as did the largest newspaper in crucial swing state Georgia.
But rather than take those calls seriously, Biden and his supporters have pressed ahead. His campaign blamed the poor debate performance on a cold. He did look noticeably better at a campaign event in North Carolina the following day, but it’s hard not to feel as if we’ve crossed a point of no return. Nevertheless, Biden remains insistent that he is “not dropping out,” while party stalwarts who have previously called for course change are now warning that it already “may truly be too late” to swap out another Democratic candidate.
But it’s not too late to take seriously the damage done to Biden’s reputation by that debate performance. And the Democrats should have started to realize earlier that aggressive dismissal of concerns serve only to turn the voters against them—that’s what they’ve done so far to the pro-Palestine constituency.
It is understandable that the campaign feels it need to be careful about the next steps. But not addressing the reality that Biden appears way too old to take on the most difficult job in the world will backfire. Trump and the Republican Party have been hammering Biden on his age for as long as they’ve been campaigning. Biden was unable to dispel those concerns on the debate stage, and that performance will worry the very people he needs to actually win this thing. Not addressing these concerns will further alienate these voters.
But this has been the routine so far this election cycle. The Democrats’ neglect of Arab and Muslim voters hasn’t been just a miscalculation; it’s a glaring oversight that could cost the party the election. Before the debate, members of this voting bloc have been increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction, not just with Biden’s recent performances but with the broader party’s approach to their concerns. They’ve winced each time Biden downplayed the Palestinian civilian death toll and repeated false claims about the conflict. When Trump called him a weak “Palestinian” as a slur, Biden asserted he was “providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them.” Ouch.
Now the Biden campaign seems to be on track to do the same thing to the much larger number of voters who have serious and entirely warranted concerns about his age after seeing him stumble through a 90-minute debate. There’s a sense of entitlement, a belief that these votes are guaranteed because Trump is on the ballot, an assumption that leads to complacency. This election cycle, that complacency could prove fatal. The party must recognize that every vote is earned, not owed, and start treating these voters with the respect they deserve. It means acknowledging their concerns in a genuine way and making a genuine effort to build trust. It means not paying lip service to the idea of unity but actually demonstrating it through meaningful, inclusive actions.
Ezra Klein wrote back in February that Biden’s age was a problem and he ought to step aside. In a column this weekend, he reports that what the Democrats are doing amounts to “giving the American people an option they do not want and then threatening them with the end of democracy if they do not take it.” He continues:
Democrats like to say that democracy is on the ballot. But it isn’t. Biden is on the ballot. There are plenty of voters who might want to vote for democracy but do not want to vote for Biden.
The clock is indeed ticking. Biden’s campaign and the Democratic Party at large already had a narrow window to win the election. It is they who argue that democracy is on the line. If they want to keep Biden on the ticket, they must show that they are capable of building a coalition around him that includes the people who are now skeptical that he can do his job—as well as the people who are horrified by the deaths of tens of thousands of women and children in Palestine. They must be willing to fight for every vote, rather than expecting them given who the opponent is. The stakes are indeed high, and it’s time the Democratic Party at least pretend to care about its voters, or otherwise face the very real possibility of defeat.
