The Democratic Party coalition is a complicated one to say the least. A growing number of Democrats have called on President Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election in recent weeks. Those encouraging him to step aside have cited concerns about his fitness for office and ability to win reelection. Jamelle Bouie is a New York Times opinion columnist and is a co-host of the Unclear and Present Danger podcast. He joins WITHpod to discuss the lack of mechanisms to force an incumbent president to withdraw from the race, the mostly unprecedented set of circumstances surrounding all of this, the case for and against Vice President Kamala Harris as a replacement Democratic nominee.
Note that this conversation was recorded on Friday, July 12th before the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign event in Pennsylvania and before President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection.
Jamelle Bouie: The thing I keep coming to is that maybe really it’s just as simple as people want someone younger on the ballot. That’s it. And if you put someone younger on the ballot, they’ll be like, I want to vote for that person because they seem younger. And if that is the situation we’re in, then like, I kind of think the case for just Biden stepping down is a pretty strong one.
And to my mind, it’s easy to imagine the thing Joe Biden could say, right? Sort of like, the reason I got back into politics in a real way was just to keep Donald Trump away from power. And I did it four years. I’m not sure I can do it for another four years. I think my vice president can.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. So, I am speaking to you on Monday, July 15th, mid-afternoon, which is one day before this episode should hit your podcast feeds. And the reason I’m starting with that time marker is because we tried to do something last week that we basically never do, which was a sort of on the news cycle WITHpod.
You know, WITHpod tends to be a podcast that’s sort of a step removed from the news cycle intentionally. Obviously, I have a nightly TV show on MSNBC at 8:00 p.m., where we’re relentlessly on the news cycle, but WITHpod allows a step back and we could do topics that are esoteric or even topics that are sort of on what’s in the news, like the campaign, but with a sort of step removed to look and say the policy records of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in immigration.
Anyway, long way of saying, last week, I was like, let’s just do something about this conversation happening about the Democratic Party and who its nominee should be and whether that should be Joe Biden, who, of course, won the primary going away, or he should step down and endorse Kamala Harris or someone else at an open convention. This was a conversation that had sort of enveloped and consumed the large coalition of the Democratic Party in the wake of the debate performance.
And so on Friday, Jamelle Bouie, who’s one of my favorite columnists, writers, thinkers, one of the wisest people, I think, writing and thinking about politics, one of the most deeply read, got together for a conversation on that topic and more or less like, well, who should be the nominee, more about the sort of nature of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party coalition and why it was in the position it found itself in. So that was on Friday, July 12th.
Of course, one day later, on Saturday, July 13th, during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, an assassin attempted to kill former President Trump about six minutes into his remarks there. The former president was, it appears, grazed by a bullet that hasn’t been hard confirmed yet, seen bleeding from his ear. Secret Service shot the shooter, the 20-year-old, and several other people were injured. One man was killed, 50-year-old former firefighter Corey Compatore. There were several others who were injured. We’re hoping to get status checks on them.
Obviously, a completely and utterly horrifying event sent, I think, everyone I know into a kind of spinning black circle just because it’s just about the worst thing that can happen in politics. It’s the thing that you don’t want at all. It’s a refutation of the sort of shared civic enterprise of democracy, the nonviolent resolution of social conflict through the processes we have. It’s a repudiation of that. It’s also toxic and morally repugnant and also just upsetting.
So that happened on Saturday. I’m speaking to you now on Monday, July 15th, and we have two things that have happened today. J.D. Vance, a senator from Ohio who’s been senator less than two years, was just named as the vice presidential nominee on the Republican ticket by Donald Trump on the first day of the RNC.
Aileen Cannon, who’s the federal judge appointed by Donald Trump in a lame duck session in 2020 while he was trying to overturn the results of the November election, she has dismissed the case against Donald Trump in her court on the secret documents case, saying that Jack Smith’s appointment does not fit with the appointments clause and he was sort of improperly appointed and therefore the case has to be dismissed. This is a totally shocking ruling, I think, largely out of completely out of line with precedent and largely lawless. But we’ll see what happens, whether it gets overturned or not.
All this to say the last three days have been a wildly intense news cycle. And so I say all that because, first of all, I think the conversation Jamelle and I had is still relevant because it’s really descriptively about the nature of the Democratic Party and why it’s a complicated coalition, what it means to talk about the Democratic Party, who is the they when you say they and the Democratic Party. And also, I don’t necessarily think this conversation is completely died down. I think it’s died down considerably since Friday.
But there’s new polling out today by “The New York Times” that shows Vice President Harris polling ahead of President Biden in Virginia and Pennsylvania by a few points. But there and we’ve seen polling look like that. There’s reporting today that Nancy Pelosi continues to make calls behind the scenes, trying to figure out a way to marshal enough people to try to get President Biden to announce that he’s stepping down. So all of this relevant.
Obviously, I want to just acknowledge all the things that have happened since we recorded this conversation. But I do think it’s a good conversation. I learned a lot from it. And so it was really great to have an opportunity to have Jamelle Bouie on the program.
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Chris Hayes: Jamelle, welcome to the program.
Jamelle Bouie: Thank you for having me.
Chris Hayes: Okay, to start out, you had a conversation with Ezra like a week ago, but that was before the George Stephanopoulos interview and the president’s press conference, which happened last night. And I’m talking to you the day after that press conference. By the time our listeners are hearing this, the interview with the president and NBC’s Lester Holt has aired. Have the developments of the past week changed how you think about this at all?
Jamelle Bouie: So, my initial thought about all of this was that I’m not sure that any of this pressure is going to make a huge difference because the decision is ultimately up to Biden. And there’s just not very many mechanisms to force an incumbent president to not run for reelection. And to the extent that that could happen, I always thought that he’d have to really kind of, you know, repeat the performance of the debate again and again and again in these various forums.
And there’d also have to be definitive evidence that some other candidate would be more viable in the general election. And I guess fortunately for Joe Biden, unfortunately for those who want to remove Joe Biden, his subsequent performances have not been so bad as to, you know, push people to demand him to get off the ticket even more than they already have. And the polling has been kind of like inconclusive.
Like it’s not been good for Biden, but it’s not like a slam dunk for anyone else either. So I think I still am where I’ve always been, which is that like, it’s just unclear what could happen and it’s unclear whether or not this is like dispositive for the election.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I agree with basically all that. I think the polling, as I read it, got really bad about a week out and then has sort of now plateaued a little bit again. But at a level where Joe Biden was behind, I think going into the debate, I think that his own people recognize that and part of the gamble of having this early debate in June was to kind of reset the structural forces underneath the election to get people to pay attention, to understand that Donald Trump was running again.
I want to stay with something that you said that I think is a very important part of this that is both central to what’s happening and also maddening, which is what is the Democratic Party?
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I think there is some sense, and you see this even in pretty like informed political reporters about like some they, there’s a they there.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: And at some level there is. Jamie Harrison, who I talked to last night, is the chairperson of the National Democratic Committee. But functionally, the way politics works in my lifetime is when a party holds the White House, the president is the head of the party.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: You know, it’s like that’s the way it works. And so part of the issue here is the fact that that is the reality, just as an almost institutional, organizational and political level that you have to figure out. You basically have to bootstrap some new set of processes, forms of coordination outside of the institutional nature of the party precisely because that party is kind of de facto run by the president.
Jamelle Bouie: I think that’s exactly right. This is something that I have found really interesting to observe, which is, as you say, that the sense that there must be some day (ph), that there is an institutional Democratic Party that looks something like it did maybe in like 1950, right? There are the party bosses and high level, you know, strategist and maybe some elected officials who they get together and they decide what the Democratic Party does.
And if they decide the Democratic Party doesn’t want Joe Biden as a nominee, then all you have to do is pressure those people in some way. And they can tell Joe Biden to like, you know, take a hike, retire early, enjoy the rest of your life. But that’s just not how American political parties are and have not been for quite some time. And they kind of the fact of the matter is that in the modern era of American political parties, which generally refers to the party system after the McGovern Frazier reforms of 1970, 1972 —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: — which basically got rid of the old conventions, got rid of kind of a lot of the backroom dealing and democratized the party system a bit more, made it more open to outside actors. But like one consequence of that, right, is that first, it’s no longer party elders or bosses or machines or anyone determining who the candidates going to be. You know, in the 1924 Democratic National Convention, it was like literal bosses from like, you know, representing various cities across the country getting together in like a convention hall and saying, you know, I can deliver these votes, you can deliver those votes. My guy, you know, does well with these. That’s how it went.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: But now, right, it’s very candidate centered. The candidate decides they’re going to run. The candidate builds up a campaign and they don’t appeal to institutional actors. I mean, they do to an extent they have to get endorsements and such, but they appeal as much to a voting public and a voting public that ultimately gives legitimacy to whoever is going to be the nominee. And that critical element of like the legitimacy obtained by winning primaries is what makes it so difficult to dislodge an incumbent president from a re-election campaign because they got the prize as it was defined, right? They had the legitimacy that no one else does.
And so, as you said, in order to even begin to think of a situation in which you do get rid of an incumbent president running for re-election, you kind of have to create an entirely new structure for how parties make these sorts of decisions.
Chris Hayes: Well, certainly when you’re outside the primary system, like when you’re in the primary system, it’s like, you know, there are models there, all of which have been unsuccessful. So in 1980, Ted Kennedy challenged incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter unsuccessfully. In 1992, Pat Buchanan challenged the incumbent president, George H.W. Bush, again, unsuccessfully. Scored some victories, definitely like wounded him. And in ‘68, of course, famously, LBJ was challenged and then he announced he would not run after New Hampshire. But first of all, none of those were successful.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: And second of all, these were in the primary process. What you’re talking about doing now is just at an organizational, institutional level, utterly unprecedented in the modern age and hasn’t really been done in a real way since like 1924, and even that was more orderly because it wasn’t a person four months before saying, I’m not going to be the nominee.
Jamelle Bouie: Right, exactly. I mean, it’s actually hard to think of a precedent. I mean, again, in the modern era, there is none. And even in the, you know, throughout the 20th century, you’d have to really go back to like the 19th century when it was a little more common, right, for incumbent presidents to be challenged for the nomination at the convention. That is a thing that used to happen.
But again, the conventions, there was no presumption of like a nominee needed democratic legitimacy of any kind. It really was the party decides the people representing the party will decide if the nominee is going to be. And in our moment, you know, the convention isn’t set up to do that. The people who attend the conventions, like the delegates, they don’t represent constituencies in that way like it’s —
Chris Hayes: Right. They’re not going there with the like either institutional knowledge and practice of like, okay, I run this machine in Columbus, Ohio.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: And like I’m really connected to like the Irish dock workers, you know, in the New York Harbor. That’s not what we’re dealing with when we’re talking about the delegates. I mean, the delegates are connected politicians and political entities and, you know, donors, volunteers, like they are sort of the fabric of the party, but it’s just a very different thing.
You said the party decides, which I think it’s worth laying around a little political science here. That’s the title of a fairly famous book that came out —
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: — after the 2008 primary by four different political scientists, which basically makes the argument that the broad contrary to the argument was, even though these reforms happened in the ‘70s to change it from this sort of party centric system to the ostensibly democratic institution of primaries, it was still the case the party retained a kind of veto and these informal mechanisms through donors and through coordination to will who the party wanted to be the nominee. And one of the things I think we’ve seen is the breakdown of that.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, 2016 is a big test of the party decides thesis for the Republicans and for the Democrats to a certain extent. I mean, you know, it is true in 2020 would look like Bernie Sanders was going to be the nominee. There was a coordinated action by high level Democrats to stop him from being the nominee.
So when you don’t have the incumbent presidency, I think, it’s a little easier to coordinate. And they definitely did coordinate in an effective way. But ultimately, they coordinate effective way. And then that vote was ratified by the voters, you know, in Super Tuesday in the states afterwards.
Jamelle Bouie: Right, right.
Chris Hayes: Right. So first, you’re just dealing at an institutional level with like, how would this even work? The muscles aren’t there. The process is under there. But then the other sort of political science thing I keep thinking about is this idea of sort of strong polarization, weak parties as a defining attribute of our current politics. There’s a book called “The Hollow Parties” by Danny Schultzman and Sam Rosenfeld who sort of writes about this.
And I remember back in 2016, I would go around when everyone was like Trump can’t win and I would be at a party or I’d be at a bar or something, people like, can Trump win? I say, yeah, of course, he can win. And what I would say to them is, if you, the person I’m talking to, were the nominee for a major party, you’d be sitting at 42, 43 percent of the vote.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes: You like you’d have maybe not exactly a coin flip, but like you’d have a shot like no one’s winning 49 states. We don’t have the structural conditions for that. So you just take someone, anyone off the street, my interlocutor, person at a bar, you put them on the ticket. They’re hovering at 40, 41, 42. It’s going to be a battle over those last four or five points, particularly in the swing states.
And you might get your clock cleaned in a narrow sense, like the 2008 election, but the polarization is so strong. So when you combine that with weak parties, I feel like we really saw that in 2016 with Trump and we’re seeing a different version. It’s not symmetrical with the Democrats right now of strong polarization, weak parties.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. I mean, the Democratic Party, in this political science, it’s a weak party. And I think what we’re witnessing now is the extent to which the weakness of the institutional party, the weakness of these informal mechanisms to try to coerce an incumbent off the ballot and the extent to which the party does emanate from whoever can claim leadership at the top. In this case, it’s Biden. For the Republicans, it’s Trump, right?
Kind of the other side of this, I mean, I would say very much like a similar situation is although there was a primary to try to choose a new Republican nominee. From the jump, it was clear that this wasn’t going to be particularly competitive, that by virtue of Trump refusing to let go of his claim to leadership over the Republican Party, which itself was unusual, usually a defeated incumbent president.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, man. They’re like, get lost.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah, that’s a get out of here. You’re done. Jimmy Carter went to go, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: — you know, go do his thing. George H.W. Bush went to go do his thing. It doesn’t happen. Even right like a two term president, once they’re out, they’re out. You choose a new leader. So Trump deciding not to leave to hold on to his claim to power, which is very unusual, it was path dependency from there.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: That more or less said that he was going to be the nominee, that he still was a leader of the party. And in the absence of any kind of strong institution that can, you know, push that kind of personalist figure away, you’re left with, you know, they are at the top. And likewise, Biden, he’s the president. He won that primary four years ago. And in the absence of any kind of institutional configuration that can push him aside, he is going to be the nominee unless he decides not to be.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, the question is, can that choice be forced? And you are seeing like a kind of ad hoc attempt to do that, right.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: Today, you know, you’ve got George Clooney’s op ed. You’ve got Nancy Pelosi on “Morning Joe” saying very pointedly he has to decide. You have a stream of members of Congress coming out and saying they think that he should step aside. You’ve got $90 million in super PAC donations being held. I mean, all these different parts of the sort of higher echelons of the party are attempting right now to do this.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: There’s really a question of, you know, whether they can. I think it’s a very volatile situation. I don’t know what’s going to happen, honestly.
Jamelle Bouie: No, I think it’s very hard to say. You know, it’s interesting, you know, donors, elected officials, and I think this underscores the point we’ve been making that the response, I mean, this is Biden’s response, right. That’s sort of like, well, they didn’t elect me, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jamelle Bouie: The voters elected me. And that gets to this this reality that the currency of the realm is where is like a democratic legitimacy. And that’s why I think it’s also why, as people begin to actually think seriously about what this would look like, because one of the other parts of this is that, you know, there’s been this push to get Biden to resign. But then there’s also, I think, been a lot of like fantasizing about how you would choose new nominee.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, like a parlor game. Like I’m feeling Whitmer-Shapiro.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: No, no. I’m like in Newsom, you know, whatever. It’s like, yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: But the reality is that like there’s only one other person who has any legitimate claim to that kind of democratic legitimacy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: And it’s Kamala Harris —
Chris Hayes: Vice President of the United States, yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So here’s a metaphor I’ve been using and we haven’t even gotten to like whether he should or not, which I do want to sort of engage in that normative question. But I actually think some of the descriptive features are important here because the conversation is so taken up with this normative question about like what to do. But like understanding actually the dynamics of play to me are pretty interesting.
And the way I’ve been describing this is people’s like and I don’t know if you’re a baseball fan, but, you know, you name your starter for the seventh game of the World Series. He pitches a good game and he’s at 120 pitches, which if you don’t pay attention, baseball is like very high, like pitchers at a certain point their arm gives out. There’s only so many pitches the body can throw because it puts an incredible strain on an arm.
Jamelle Bouie: I’ve seen it “For the Love of the Game.”
Chris Hayes: Yeah, great. So at 120 pitches and there’s four outs to go and he’s just loaded the bases, so it’s not looking good. And what happens in that moment in a baseball game is the manager comes and gets the starter and takes him out and replaces him with a new pitcher. Now, when that happens, the starter hates it always. In fact, you could watch videos on YouTube of them cursing out the manager into their glove or like shaking their head or be like, don’t come and get me.
And they’re not doing that because they’re like pigheaded idiots necessarily. They’re doing it because the nature of the psychology that gets someone to the position in which they’re starting a World Series game seven is a psychology that says I can get the last four outs. I can do it.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: I can will myself through. That it is almost definitionally the case to have like the level of confidence and steel you have to get yourself in that position. And so every time the manager comes out in that situation, the guy on the mound is pissed. But there’s a manager to make the call.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: And what is the situation here is there is no manager. So it’s like he’s on the mound. People are watching him throw these pitches and being like he is not throwing as hard as he was before. And the other aspect of this sort of extended analogy is that when the manager makes a call, sometimes a relief pitcher comes in and gives up a homer and everyone calls in the sports radio the next day and says, why’d you pull him? Which is totally possible here.
Like the same sense of like an uncertain future outcome, the same sense in which when you pull the starter, you’re often pulling them for someone who is an inferior pitcher almost by definition because the starters in there because they’re the better pitcher. They’re not in the pen. Like all of those features are present here to me in this conversation, but there’s no manager to come make the call, which is why the whole thing is so angst ridden.
Jamelle Bouie: Right, right. And it’s why it’s so angst ridden. It’s why the pressure from, you know, from a variety of sources, from politicians, from the media seems to be almost like repetitive at this point. Sort of like everyone’s kind of saying the same thing again and again out of, I think, a belief that if we just say it enough, we can kind of become the manager. We can become the captain here, but that’s just not —
Chris Hayes: No, he’s the manager. He has to take himself out of the game.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: You have to convince him to take himself out of the game.
Jamelle Bouie: Right, right. And this is a point I made before I wrote last year, maybe when there was lots of dread over a Trump-Biden rematch. And I said, you know, listen, there are there basically structural reasons why Trump’s to be the nominee again. But there are psychological reasons why Biden’s going to run again and be the nominee. And that’s like to your point, Chris. The kind of human being who doesn’t just like become president, but devotes their entire adult life to trying to be president, it’s not the kind of person who’s going to like hang it up, like he’s not.
Chris Hayes: You know what, you’re right. You’re right. No, I mean, that’s true. So let’s talk a little bit about, I think it’s useful in this conversation to separate out two things, which is a question about who is best positioned to defeat Trump, which I think three or four months ago, I thought it was Biden. And now, I don’t necessarily think that, like particularly the binary choice of Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, which I agree with you is the most likely path forward, although, again, we’re in sort of uncertain and volatile times.
So the question of who is best to make this sort of to run the homestretch of this campaign in this incredibly high stakes election. And then the substantive question of like, should this man, Joe Biden, the man that you’ve seen and the man who clearly has aged, you know, I think considerably in the last four years. Again, it’s the most stressful job in the world and he came in at 77. The job ages everyone who enters into it. We’ve all seen the pictures of Barack Obama before and after, Abraham Lincoln before and after, Bill Clinton before and after, like we know this. It’s almost a cliche.
So the substantive question, independent of who’s best to take the fight to Trump and to win over persuadable voters so as to forestall a Donald Trump second term is like, should this guy be president when he’s 85? Like, should the man that you saw last night, for instance, where I thought he did fairly well, should that man have the world’s most stressful job at the age of 85? And I got to say that when I put it in those terms, like the answer is just clear as day.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re right.
Chris Hayes: And when you ask people, there was an ABC/Washington Post poll. Do you think he’s too old to serve out a second term? Eighty five percent of people say yes. And I can’t tell those people like there are things that poll where I’m like, well, the majority is just wrong. There’s all sorts of things where I disagree with the majority people’s perception of the economy I’ve been banging on about. On that question, it’s like, I can’t, no, yes, correct, like I do not think not for anything, any character flaw, not for any reason other than the demands of the job and the reality of this mortal coil, that that man should be the president when he’s 85.
Jamelle Bouie: I think that’s right. Yes. So, I myself go back and forth on are there more viable people to actually win an election than Joe Biden? I go back and forth on this, but that was my takeaway from the debate, just like irrespective of sort of like electoral considerations. I don’t think I would feel comfortable with like 84-year-old Joe Biden as president of the United States when there could be crises. And the thing about the job, right, is that it fundamentally is a crisis management job.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: That’s how we typically judge presidents. We’re not really judging one former president on the basis of its ability to handle a crisis. But generally speaking, we judge presidents based on their ability to handle crises because that’s what the job is, right? In John Dickerson’s great book, “The Hardest Job in the World,” about just the presidency, he shares Dwight Eisenhower’s kind of like matrix for decision making.
And basically there’s like four boxes. One is like urgent and important, like a crisis. The other is important, but not urgent. The other is not important, not urgent. The other is urgent and not important. And most of the job of being president is kind of deciding what goes in what box.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: That’s the job. And I don’t know if I think an 84-year-old, any 84-year-old, not even Joe Biden, any 84-year-old —
Chris Hayes: Correct. Yes. Yeah. I just want to interject when you said like the other guy is going to be 82 or 83 in the fourth —
Jamelle Bouie: Exactly. Exactly.
Chris Hayes: And obviously I don’t think that guy should be within a thousand feet of the White House from the time he was 30 on. But also just on the question of age, it’s 100 percent as relevant with the other choice, just to be clear on this.
Jamelle Bouie: Right, right.
Chris Hayes: Like I thought he did a catastrophic job managing a crisis in 2020. The thought of, you know, China invading Taiwan with Donald Trump sitting in the White House at age 82 is like just absolutely horrifying to me.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. Right. I don’t think any 84-year-old would be appropriate in that kind of job, both because of the physical demands and the mental demands, but also because I do think that the job requires a certain amount of nimbleness and flexibility. And at that age, those are also qualities that are like diminishing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: Like it’s hard to intellectually budge yourself off of an approach you’ve decided on that’s like served you well for decades when a situation might demand it.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: One of the things that I’ve been so pleasantly surprised by on the first three years, particularly of Joe Biden’s administration, was his flexibility, was his supplements, was the fact that he seemed open and reacting in real time. Like, I really think he did an amazing job in many ways, particularly on domestic legislative accomplishments and domestic economic management, where I think he was able to kind of reassess his priors and he was able to like, and that was to me one of the great sort of pleasant surprises of the Biden presidency so far.
But I also agree with you that that ability diminishes. The other thing I keep thinking about is that people say, well, right, but there’s a vice president for a reason if something happens, and that’s true. But there’s also a huge gray area between the president dying and the president declining.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: And the closest we’ve come, I think, to managing that was the end of Reagan, which, again, wasn’t great. Like once you read all the accounts of it afterwards. But given how difficult this is now and how anguishing, and again, people say, well, that can happen to anyone. You can have a stroke at 65. Totally true. But there’s an actuarial logic here that I think we’re all up against.
And the last thing I’ll say is, I think ultimately there’s a connection between the substance and the politics, which is this. If I understand why people are like, I don’t think that guy should be president at 85, then I understand why it’s a little bit of an uphill battle to win over persuadable voters —
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — when most of them think that because you can say, well, look, you still got the coalition, all this stuff, but you’re still pushing that rock up the hill. It doesn’t mean he can’t win, but like when I go through this a million times, I just sort of keep coming back to that home base, which is like, I don’t think the objections are unreasonable. I do think they’re unreasonable in the sense that the choice is stark and obviously I would personally prefer to have Donald Trump not be president than Joe Biden at any age, basically. But you’re talking about some set of people that don’t feel that way. Otherwise, they’d be decided.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah. And really, I mean, there’s some recent polling from “The Washington Post,” and it showed Biden, you know, tied with Trump, 46, 46. And then it showed Harris like 49, 47 with Trump. And the thing I keep coming to is that maybe really it’s just as simple as people want someone younger on the ballot. That’s it. And if you put someone younger on the ballot, they’ll be like, I want to vote for that person because they seem younger.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: And if that is the situation we’re in, then like, I kind of think the case for just Biden stepping down is a pretty strong one. And to my mind, you know, it’s easy to imagine the thing Joe Biden could say, right? Sort of like —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jamelle Bouie: — you know, my priority, the reason I got back into politics in a real way was just to keep Donald Trump away from power. And I did it four years. I’m not sure I can do it for another four years. I think my vice president can.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: I care about American democracy so much —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: — that I’m going to set aside my personal ambition. I’m going to be a Cincinnatus and move on.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, which brings us to the next part of this conversation, which I think is actually an important one, which is there’s a bunch of different ways that race is shot through this whole thing on a few different levels. So one of them is Kamala Harris is a black woman. I think polling suggests that people perceive her as further to the left than she is substantively. And I think that has to do with the way that race and gender are coded. That might be a political liability in terms of winning over people who, by definition, are not particularly, you know, ideologically orthodox.
Also, you know, she’s a black woman. There’s going to be racism and sexism directed at her. There already has been. So that’s part of the conversation to me and what those sort of liabilities are. And there’s always something sort of like dicey and gross about the slide between some descriptive anticipation of a penalty a candidate will play for being a black woman and then being like, oh, we shouldn’t go with the black woman, which is always like a really dangerous part of this conversation. So that’s one part of it.
The other part of it, which I want to do first before we get to Kamala Harris and those dynamics, is just the dynamics of race within the Democratic coalition now. And one of the things I think that has been fairly obvious is an attempt, given the fact that James Clyburn’s endorsement in 2020 in South Carolina and Joe Biden’s convincing win in South Carolina in a primary electorate dominated by black voters, was the kind of turning point in his 2020 campaign, a sort of attempt to shore up what is the kind of base of the Democratic Party, which is black voters.
And you’ve seen this in a few things they’ve done. One, the two of the interviews he gave after the debate were to black radio stations. Subsequently, it was revealed that they had sent them questions in advance, which they had selected. When that got out, both hosts were fired by their stations and also subsequently got out that they had called back to get them to edit parts out of the interview, including at one point, I think Biden saying, I have more blacks in my administration than anyone else, which is like it’s just like, well, that’s of course the way he talks.
I mean, again, it’s like if you’re a staffer for Biden and you’re cringing like I don’t know what to tell you, man, like that is that’s the way an 81-year-old white guy talks like —
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes: I too find it like not great, not at all the language I would use, but also like that kind of is what it is at this point, can’t protect him from that. But I did find something. I’m curious what you think about this, because I’m speaking about this as a white guy watching this. I actually found something kind of offensive and condescending about that whole episode of like going to black radio and then like giving them the questions and like it gave me a really bad feeling.
Of all the things that have happened in the debate, that’s the thing that I’ve been most like, I don’t like that at all.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah, it’s just sort of like, oh, of course you’re going to give me an easy time.
Chris Hayes: Right. Exactly.
Jamelle Bouie: It’s a version of taking those people —
Chris Hayes: For granted.
Jamelle Bouie: — for granted.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jamelle Bouie: — which I kind of think is an undercurrent of like so much fizz (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I know.
Jamelle Bouie: — across the board.
Chris Hayes: Say more.
Jamelle Bouie: So it’s a clear undercurrent of like the Biden team’s immediate response. I’m going to go black radio and they’ll treat us well. And it’s like that’s kind of offensive to like the professional integrity of these people, of the radio host of these stations. But also in the conversations about, oh, if you could replace Biden, who would it be?
I mean, there have been some voices were like, yeah, Harris should be considered, but there have been quite a few that sort of kind of on their face no Harris, kind of dismissing Harris, immediately jumping to, you know, can we find the blandest seeming Midwestern whites to lead the ticket and everyone else will fall in line? And it’s like, will they, though? Like —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: — you know, because again, there’s this Democratic legitimacy question, as you know, like Biden became the nominee on the support of black voters. So it really seems like you want to listen to what they think to an extent before you begin, like, you know, wish casting who you think ought to be the nominee.
And just the extent to which it seems on both ends, the assumption is, well, black voters will just like fall in line. It’s not great. And it’s the kind of assumption that may play into sort of, you know, among younger black voters, it’s like it’s a real discontent with the Democratic Party —
Chris Hayes: Yes. Showing up in polling.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. It’s showing up in polling. It may not necessarily translate to support for Republicans, but it will translate to like certainly less solid support for Democrats and like just voters being up for grabs in the way that they weren’t before.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And this is one of those places, again, where like it’s so hard to predict because it would be so unprecedented. Like let’s say Joe Biden were to announce and he gave a Cincinnati speech and I think he would endorse Kamala Harris, you know, but then the actual bylaws of the DNC are that they’re not really transferable delegates as far as I understand them.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And so she would have to win, win those delegates over in which maybe there’s just sort of a rush of acclimation, but maybe there’s not. Maybe other people proclaim and then you have like a genuinely open convention. And I mean, again, this is all out past the frontier of what we’ve dealt with. And in terms of what the fallout from that would be, I think also hard to predict, though your point, I think, is important one. But to me, the point you made before about democratic legitimacy is actually pretty important.
Like she is the Vice President of the United States. She was chosen by the guy that won the primary the last time. She has served. She was on the ticket this time that, again, did win a primary. You can say, well, it wasn’t a real primary, which, yeah, it wasn’t, but that is the process we have, you know. I mean, like —
Jamelle Bouie: Right, right. And if this were January, we’re talking about an open primary, totally different situation.
Chris Hayes: Oh, totally, yeah. I mean —
Jamelle Bouie: Of course, the vice president competes with everyone else.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: But in this weird situation —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jamelle Bouie: — you got to you know, it’s not so straightforward.
Chris Hayes: It’s not so straightforward, yeah. And again, I’ve come to think that the best of all worlds would be him giving that speech in 2023 and saying, I’ve looked hard at this and I just don’t, you know, we don’t know what the future holds. I feel great in the job right now, but I just can’t definitively say I’m going to be able to do it for more years. And there’s an open primary. There’s a contested primary, blah, blah, blah. That didn’t happen.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We can’t linger on that. But yes, in that circumstance, the vice president competes along with everyone else. And this is just a very different circumstance. And again, this sort of question of there is a little bit of like, you know, underpants gnome reasoning dot, dot, dot, then X happens.
The other thing I will say to go back to where we started is and I did this on the show the other night where we looked at the polling average on July 9th, whatever the date was, you know, going back. And there’s never been in the time I’m covering politics professionally, a Republican leading in the polling average in July 9th, which is stark, but also, as I said in that program, like John Kerry was up and Hillary Clinton were up and like everyone remembers President Hillary Clinton and President John Kerry, right?
Jamelle Bouie: Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like things do change. And last night when Biden was asked at the press conference, he basically said, look, we haven’t even started the campaign and people don’t start paying attention till after Labor Day. And I do think that that’s sort of the best answer they have. I don’t think it’s particularly satisfying about how they overcome the deficit they’re in. But all of which to say one thing I’ve learned not to do is to too radically draw a line from the present to the future.
Jamelle Bouie: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Because there’s been a bunch of moments from the aftermath of “Access Hollywood” to Donald Trump getting COVID when it was like Donald Trump was down by 10 points when he had COVID and the Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate. Now, he did lose that race, but the polling during that moment was not at all reflective of what happened in the end. And I think it just is also important reminder that like polling under conditions of volatility and the necessary fact that things change mean that like just because something’s happening now doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same in four months.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah, I think that’s right. So, first of all, I find this election cycle incredibly strange. And, you know, one of my big takeaways from 2016 was just to sort of like relieve myself of like any certainty about like what could possibly happen. And that lesson should be applied to any election. It’s this, it’s this one, both because of the unusual circumstance of having, you know, an incumbent and a former incumbent on the ballot together, the unusual circumstance of Trump being Trump, Biden’s age.
The extent to which like the media environment is like fractured in a way that it’s like it’s hard to know what actually breaks through to ordinary people. Like one example, last year, maybe earlier this year, I know I wrote about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. I know I did. And when I wrote about it, I was like, oh, this is this thing that probably no one’s going to pay attention to, but it’s like it’s very significant. It’s like this plan for the next Republican executive branch. Pay attention to it.
And I would have never anticipated whatsoever that I could go on TikTok and flip through 20 consecutive videos —
Chris Hayes: It’s wild.
Jamelle Bouie: — of just like total normal people talking about Project 2025. And I don’t know what explains that. Is it just that it sounds sinister? Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know what explains what’s happening there. But it’s clear that something is happening that’s significant enough that sort of the Republican presumptive nominee has to basically give a statement saying, oh, I’ve never heard about it.
Chris Hayes: Which is obviously a lie, just to be clear.
Jamelle Bouie: Obviously a lie. But like it’s significant.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Oh, hugely significant.
Jamelle Bouie: That he feels the need to lie about it. And so that to me is just an example of how we actually do not know what is significant to ordinary people. What is going to be salient to ordinary people? How voters are going to make their decisions. And at this moment, the polling does strongly suggest that voters are saying Biden’s too old and I guess we’re going to support Trump at least in swing states. But I honestly don’t know what to make of that beyond it being a snapshot of the moment.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I agree with you. I had you on the program the other night with Dave Roberts, one of the things that’s been driving me crazy about this debate is the certainty that people seem to have in both directions. I mean, it’s all very uncertain. I mean, and again, a huge part of life in high stakes situations is making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. So you got to do the best you can. But yes, I think it’s important to just constantly be taking that humble pill about what is and isn’t going to happen and what’s going to be relevant.
I agree with you on Project ‘25. I was riding my bike to work. I was pulled over at the intersection in the Lower East Side. This couple saw me. This guy kind of recognized me. He’s like, are you on YouTube? And I was like, no. He’s like, where I know you from? I’m like, I actually have a news show. He’s like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then he goes, I haven’t checked out politics for like four or five years. What’s been going on?
I was like, oh, man. Well, at this red light, I can’t. And then he said, he said that pause. I was like, well, I got to get to work. And then he goes, what’s this Project 2025 I keep hearing about? And I was like, of all the things.
Jamelle Bouie: Right, right.
Chris Hayes: I’ve been checked out of politics for five years. I was like, oh, my God. Talk about penetration.
Jamelle Bouie: Right, right. And again, that’s just sort of Biden being old, clearly is like a thing that people talk about as well.
Chris Hayes: It as a thing. It is a meme, yes.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. But I just can’t figure out what the significance of it all is going to be like, I just don’t know. And you’re right that like the part of high stakes politics, this is making part of our job, right —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: — is to try to, if not provide certainty, to grapple with uncertainty and try to make some sort of analysis, offer some kind of thing that people can better help understand their world.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: So just kind of grapple with it. Nonetheless, I think the overlapping unprecedented —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jamelle Bouie: — that we’re experiencing just makes that task all the more difficult.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: One last thing I want to talk to you about Kamala Harris we didn’t quite touch on, you know, in addition to what would be the fallout for the Democratic Coalition, were she to be somehow sidelined in succeeding Joe Biden, were he to choose to not be the nominee slash how she would fare as a political candidate. There is one thing like you’re already seeing it and I’m going to have a commentary about this tonight, linking together Kamala Harris and this utterly despicable lawsuit against Northwestern University Law School, where, you know, this sort of anti-DEI crusade, I think, has been motivated from the beginning by a desire to purge black people from institutions of elite institutions and power in American life. Quite clearly, I think.
Now, I think some people who have been along for the ride on that don’t want that. They view it as a sort of meritocratic situation. There’s interesting polling on affirmative action across racial groups. There’s even a significant number of black and brown folks who don’t like affirmative action. So I don’t want to say that all the people that have this view or have the support feel that way. But the vanguard of the right wing that is pursuing it as their project, I think it’s clear that’s what they want.
Jamelle Bouie: I mean, just on that Northwestern lawsuit —
Chris Hayes: It’s so disgusting.
Jamelle Bouie: — the clear implication of that lawsuit is just that, like, there is no such thing as a qualified black person that could hold the job.
Chris Hayes: Correct.
Jamelle Bouie: Like, it’s a fact, though.
Chris Hayes: Here are the black faculty. And by definition, because they are black, they are not qualified is essentially the argument.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: Despite the fact that these are brilliant women and faculty. Anyway, what I do think Kamala as a presidential candidate would unleash a truly despicable avalanche of ugliness, which I don’t wish on anyone. But I also do think could backfire just when we’re thinking through the political implications of what it would mean, like the sort of embedded sexism and racism in, you know, American civic culture where that’s been the case for a long time. We’ve never had a woman president. We’ve had one black president. But I also do think, like, there is a real risk for that in how ugly they will get about Kamala Harris.
Jamelle Bouie: I very much agree with this. One of the most formative political science books I read when I was in college was a book called “The Race Card” by scholar Tali Mendelberg. And it’s about the 1988 election and it’s about the Willie Horton —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jamelle Bouie: — ad campaign. It’s about all that. And one of the observations made is that to the extent that that was neutralized among the public, it was only when it was confronted directly. It’s only when you said, this is what they’re doing. This is why they’re doing what they’re doing. And that neutralized it for a public, which once they heard that countervailing message, was like, I don’t want to be associated with that, right. This is 1988, which is much less enlightened —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: — along a lot of ways than we are today. And the other thing I have in my head, and this is just sort of just like counterfactual. But the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election was like fought on this like CRT, you know, parent’s rights ground. And the current governor, then candidate Glenn Youngkin, they leaned into the CRT stuff. And I always thought it would have been interesting to see in the Democratic primary, Tara McAuliffe, the former governor, is running. And then his nearest competitor was a Petersburg, Virginia based legislator, Jennifer Carroll Foy, who is African-American. And I always thought it would have been interesting, at least to see how a black woman —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jamelle Bouie: — nominee would have handled the CRT stuff, because my intuition is that it actually would have been much less effective because it would have been too explicit. Right.
Chris Hayes: That’s very interesting.
Jamelle Bouie: It’s maybe an easier play to run —
Chris Hayes: Against a white against a white man, yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: — against a white man. And in the same way, I do wonder if, you know, as you suggested, we’ve already kind of seen it like the “New York Post” ran was a guy, you know —
Chris Hayes: Charles Gasparino.
Jamelle Bouie: — like op-ed or something.
Chris Hayes: Referred to as a DEI presidential candidate.
Jamelle Bouie: A DEI president. I do wonder if that would be for Republicans, whether that would be the absolutely wrong tact to take with Harris, right. That actually gives her an opportunity to directly deflect it, to make the stakes of the election even more clear, right. To sort of like pull this out in the open and it would be effective. It’s how race and racism interacts in American elections is like much more complicated —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jamelle Bouie: — than I think people recognize.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jamelle Bouie: And there’s often a tension among the voting public between whatever latent prejudices they have and their internal conception of who they imagine themselves to be and what issues are just salient in the world.
Chris Hayes: Absolutely. Yup.
Jamelle Bouie: And kind of the trick of the 2016 campaign, Trump’s 2016 campaign was kind of by virtue of his own celebrity persona, he’s kind of able to negotiate all those things. Like you could plausibly say if you were like one of these Obama to Trump voters, like, oh, it’s nothing about race for me, even if it’s clear that like the explicitness of the racial message did like influence your vote. But it’s a tough line to walk.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: And it becomes all the more tougher when the candidate themselves is of like the —
Chris Hayes: Is a raving racist.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, like to every last cell in his body, I mean.
Jamelle Bouie: And against a non-white candidate. I mean, I honestly do keep thinking of like other races in American history. I mean, there haven’t been a ton of like black candidates running like statewide or whatever. But like you’ll see that it’s tricky to deploy that stuff directly.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Great point.
Jamelle Bouie: Like even one of the most infamously prejudiced political ads in like recent memory and recent history, which is the hand ad —
Chris Hayes: Hands, hands ad.
Jamelle Bouie: — from the 1990 Jesse Helms, Harvey Gantt, North Carolina Senate race. Like it’s explicit —
Chris Hayes: But it’s actually weirdly deft, which is why it’s called the hands ad —
Jamelle Bouie: Right. Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: — because they never actually say it. You see one shot of the guy who got the job and not you. And all you see is his hands. And it’s clearly a black man.
Jamelle Bouie: Right. Right. And that race was still very close.
Chris Hayes: It was close.
Jamelle Bouie: That race was still very close.
Chris Hayes: Very close in again, decades ago in the South.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, yeah, exactly. That’s a great point. And I think, again, I don’t really wish that on anyone or on the civic culture. You know, I mean, but I do think like I know who Donald Trump is. I know the people around him and like he really is. He doesn’t believe in a lot of things. But like racism, like genuine racism and sort of racial hierarchy, not liking democracy and thinking some form of authoritarian is like better. And like Donald Trump is the best are, I think, basically the three core ideological commitments he has and are genuinely held, like genuinely held. Like none of those are an act like the fact that he likes autocrats is not some performative thing. Like he really, truly thinks democracy sucks, I think that’s a better system. And he really, truly thinks that like there’s a hierarchy of races like he does not believe in human equality.
Jamelle Bouie: And yeah, if Kamala Harris were the nominee, they would just lose their minds. I mean, I think it’d be very explicit and very ugly. But like you like you suggested, Chris, at the beginning of this, I’m not sure that that would be particularly electorally successful, both in terms of how they turn off people —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jamelle Bouie: — who don’t imagine themselves that way. And one last point on this, people don’t imagine themselves this way. If you’re not plugged into it, it may be hard to see. But there’s like an entire like infrastructure designed to get evangelical white people to be able to vote for Donald Trump without jeopardizing their self-conception of themselves.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Yes.
Jamelle Bouie: Like it’s a whole edifice that exists.
Chris Hayes: Yes. It’s enormous. I mean, we’ve done a podcast on precisely that edifice by a guy who tries to chip away at it, but it’s yes.
Jamelle Bouie: And so I don’t think one should underestimate the effect that explicitness may have on how people make that kind of calculation.
Chris Hayes: This is, to me, one of the most undercover voting groups in American politics is just the partisan Republican, because we cover the MAGA base, right? Like the people that go to the rallies and people who wear Trump hat.
And then we cover like the never Trumpers and the people. But like a huge chunk of the coalition are just partisan Republicans who vote for him because he’s a Republican nominee and like —
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: And there was a poll yesterday, I think about something like 35% of Trump voters want him to drop out. It’s like they’re going to vote for him. I don’t think those 35 are necessarily swing voters, but there’s just a bunch of people that are just going to vote for the Republican in the ticket and Donald Trump’s Republican, and in some ways the question of which of those are pryable or gettable, I mean, I think not a ton of them are, some of them might be. But to your point about that edifice that’s been built, you know, we’re talking about such a narrow band of voters that are going to decide this election.
Jamelle Bouie: Right.
Chris Hayes: That who knows? I will also note, because we’re recording this on this Friday, like by the time this is in your podcast feed, like Lord knows what’s happened. It’s like a very quick moving story. But Jamelle Bouie is, I think, one of the sort of sharpest, wisest, levelheaded, most like rigorously historically informed political thinkers and writers that we have in America today. He’s like, really, for me, just one of those people that I just, I want to know what he has to say about things, about everything. And so, Jamelle, it’s great to have you in the program.
Jamelle Bouie: Thank you so much for the kind words. It’s a real pleasure to be on the show.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Jamelle Bouie. You can e-mail us with withpod@gmail.com, get in touch with us using the hashtag #withpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for #withpod. You can also follow me on Threads @chrislhayes and on Bluesky @chrislhayes and on what used to be called Twitter @chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson and Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?