Success in American politics isn’t about winning. Sometimes, it’s just about being there, and Joe Biden has been there longer than anyone else. That’s why he’s president. And that’s why he might have a 20% chance of becoming president again.
As I will explain later in the article, the Democratic Party elites have immense unilateral power. The elites can manipulate the outcomes of elections in a way that Republican elites cannot do or — at least — choose not to do for whatever reason. In our purportedly democratic system, the Democrats can essentially play God in a way that Republicans do not. Just as Dr. Frankenstein did in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, the Democrats have achieved the awesome power to create life, except in a political context.
The Democratic elites can create candidates out of nothing just as Dr. Frankenstein created his monster, but they can metaphorically kill candidates too if the candidates start to act too unfavorably. This power of the Democrats can reap great rewards. It leads the Democratic elites to oftentimes cull unelectable candidates in primary races so that the party can maximize its chances of defeating the eventual Republican opponent, but — once the Democrats reach the level of the presidency — they must act cautiously.
For presidential races, Democrats can still create life as Dr. Frankenstein did and manufacture the “correct” candidate in a lab, but the presidency has orders of magnitude more power than any other office. Once the elites decide to exalt a preferred candidate to presidential status, they no longer have much power anymore because the president is the most powerful man in the world. He can get money on his own. He has a brand name that transcends the party. He has dozens and dozens of high-level staffers who have pledged loyalty to him. In effect, the Democratic Frankenstein lab has created a monster. They chose to do so with Joe Biden in 2020, and he now might be turning around to kill them in 2024.
How Did the Democrats Even Get to This Point?
For the average, perhaps persuadable voters who watched the debate, a few questions may have emerged in their minds:
How are the Democrats running Joe Biden?
Are they going to switch him out?
If not, why not?
Long before the debate, many people doubted Biden’s mental fitness to run for president again. When people would confront me with this assertion, I strongly said that the Democrats would remain with Biden. If you are a political layperson who follows elections once every four years, then this position may seem preposterous to you. Out of all the people in the country, they pick him??? But Biden’s status as president and Democratic nominee did not occur out of nowhere. It took 50 years for the Democrats and Joe Biden to get to this point. It did not happen all at once.
No Trumps Allowed at the DNC:
Biden is an extremely interesting case because he demonstrates one of the largest differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, especially, in juxtaposition with Trump. The Democratic Party rewards you with being there, and you must also gain favor with the establishment. Meanwhile, Trump amassed power because of the impotent Republican Party. I do not say that as an insult to the Republican Party. In 2016, they decided to be impotent. They did not want to tip the scales in favor of Marco Rubio over Donald Trump. They let the Republican primary voters participate in democracy, and they chose Trump as the nominee despite all the issues that he may have had.
A Trump-like figure likely could not have ever emerged in the Democratic Party. Forget policy or personal issues. When I say “Trump figure”, I am talking about a Democratic presidential candidate who goes against all the desires of the establishment yet wins anyway. Democratic elites will do whatever they can to squash such candidates, and I would argue that the Democratic Party has already had a Trump figure: Bernie Sanders in 2020. The 2020 Democratic presidential primaries showed what the Republicans could have done against Trump in 2016 if they wanted to stop him, but they did not do so.
In 2016, the Republicans could have rigged the system in favor of more establishment-friendly candidates, such as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. In 2020, the Democrats actually did it. Who did they crown? It was Joe Biden. Why did they pick him? Because he was there.
President Peter Sellers
Summary of Being There:
I want to first reference the 1979 film Being There, starring Peter Sellers as Chance the Gardener. Chance was a man of mediocre intelligence in his middle-aged years and had lived his entire life at the mansion of a wealthy man in Washington, D.C. The aptly named Chance had just ended up always living at this house because he always tended to the gardens at the mansion, and he never left. Chance never caused an issue, so nobody ever thought to ask him to leave.
The wealthy man eventually dies, and his lawyers order that Chance leaves. For the first time in his life, Chance was no longer doing the only thing that he had ever known: tending to the garden at a rich man’s mansion. Luckily, by chance, the protagonist Chance gets hit by a limousine driving the younger wife of another old man. She asks Chance to move to her mansion and help to tend to her moribund wealthy husband named Ben Rand.
Chance gets very close to Ben, who coincidentally has a close relationship with the fictional president of the United States in the film. Because of this mutual link, Chance himself becomes close to the president and an unsolicited advisor. The president misinterprets sayings by Chance into sage advice. He misperceives Chance’s comments on gardening as a metaphor for the American economy. Elite members of Washington society begin growing intrigued with Chance and the advice that he had given the president.
By the end of the film, Ben dies, and the president and his advisors begin wondering who could succeed the president after his term ends. People begin looking toward Chance, but the film ends before we can see what ultimately happens with Chance. Nevertheless, Chance rose to influence from being there.
Joe Biden = Chance the Gardener
Joe Biden’s ascent in the Democratic Party and American politics overall mirrors that of Chance’s ascent in Being There. He was the youngest senator elected in American history at age 29, and now, he is the oldest president in history. Just as Chance hangs around the garden in Washington, Joe hung around Washington overall since 1972, the year that Delaware elected him to the United States Senate. Since then, Biden would just hang around and appear at certain places in Washington. Biden’s biggest skill in D.C. was being there.
Biden’s Senate run in 1972: Because of the unique nature of the U.S. Senate giving two seats to every state regardless of population, it is much easier to win a seat in certain states. Some states — like California and Texas — have massive populations and massive media markets that span over hundreds of miles while some states are very small in both population and land area. Biden luckily lived in the latter. In 1972, Delaware was 5th least populous state in the country, and it is the second smallest state by land area only behind Rhode Island. Therefore, due to this American quirk, Biden could attain a Senate seat. I am not questioning the validity of the Senate. I am just pointing out a fact in the difference between California/Texas and Delaware.
Biden’s presidential run in 1988: Once Biden took office, he started being there. He would pop up on the national stage every so often. After 14 years in office, he ended up running in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1988. Unfortunately, he had to drop out after a scandal regarding the plagiarism of a speech by Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock in the United Kingdom.
Clarence Thomas hearing in 1991: After 1988, the Senate got used to Biden still being there. He hung around for a few years, and — when a Senate Democrat hangs around for a few years — he might become the chair of important committees just to reward him for being there. This happened to Joe Biden, and he became the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and oversaw the controversial Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas in 1991. Thomas infamously referred to Biden’s handling of the hearings as a “high-tech lynching”.
Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing probably ranks as the most controversial in American history, only rivaled by Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing 27 years later in 2018. The Thomas hearing perfectly demonstrates Biden’s tendency for being there. The hearing might be one of the most memorable moments of American politics during the cable news age, yet many people probably have no idea that Biden ran the whole show. Yes, Biden just lurks in the shadows and appears in crucial moments in American history not much differently from Forrest Gump in the eponymous 1994 film. The characters of Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) and Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers) are really not that different. They are men of lower IQ who passively bumble around while history happens around them. Gump becomes a wealthy restaurant mogul while Sellers might become president.
Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign: Twenty years passed from Biden’s first presidential run, and he decided to run again in 2008 to succeed the term-limited George W. Bush. Biden’s 2008 campaign might show why delusional politicians should always just listen to themselves and run for president. Besides, it had been 20 years. Who was going to remember who Neil Kinnock was?
In 2008, Biden did what did best: be there. He found himself in a heap of many also-rans with the headline showdown of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the top, but Joe Biden was there. Biden never attacked anyone really. He was nice. He made you laugh unlike Clinton. He dropped out after a terrible showing in the Iowa caucuses, earning only 0.9% of the state delegate equivalents, but it didn’t matter. He was there. In the weeks after, Obama and Clinton had a knockdown drag-out fight while Biden could just watch.
Once Clinton conceded the nomination to Obama in June 2008, Obama now needed to consider his vice presidential pick. Many people viewed Obama’s ethnicity as his biggest electoral liability. Although it could animate younger voters and Black voters, many people thought that it could hurt him with older, whiter swing voters. Furthermore, Obama had very little experience. He had only represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate for 3.5 years. In the strategy of “balancing the ticket”, Obama ultimately chose Biden, who offset both of these perceived weaknesses of Obama.
Biden had served Delaware in the Senate for 35 years, which Obama thought bolstered the ticket’s credibility, and Biden was an old, uncontroversial white man. Biden could assuage skeptical white swing voters, especially, in the Midwest — which Biden claimed as his second home via Scranton, Pennsylvania. Lastly, the public had seen Biden as a moderate. A young, inexperienced presidential candidate can intimidate voters because he could enact untested, radical ideas. Some people saw this risk in Obama, but Biden mitigated that risk.
In essence, why did Obama pick Biden? Obama and his advisors were rewarding Biden for being there just as Sellers’s character became the gardener for a politically powerful, wealthy elderly man. Biden had hung around Obama on the debate stages in 2007 ahead of the Iowa caucuses. He was nice and uncontroversial. Why not pick Biden?
Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign: In 2016, people speculated if Biden would run to succeed Obama, but Biden did not end up running. Obama likely persuaded Biden not to run because Clinton needed her chance. After knowing that Clinton would lose against Trump in 2016, I wonder what would have happened if the Democratic Party had nominated Biden instead. Perhaps Trump would have never become president.
I believe that this thought ate away at Biden between Trump’s win in 2016 and Biden’s eventual campaign launch in 2019. What would happen if Biden had stood his ground against Obama and Clinton? Likewise, I believe that Bernie Sanders thought that — if he had beaten Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries — he would have beaten Donald Trump in November.
Nonetheless, this moment in Biden’s career embodies everything about him being there. The Democrats handpicked him to be president because of him being there.
Biden’s Triumph in the 2020 Democratic Primaries
Amid the chaos that unfolded later in the year 2020, I think that many people forget the chaos that the Democratic presidential primaries had. The 2020 primaries presented us with perhaps the closest point that we have ever gotten to a brokered convention in the modern era.
The screenshot above shows the primary forecast from FiveThirtyEight in 2020 on February 27, five days before Biden’s decisive victories on Super Tuesday on March 3. This moment in time encapsulates the utter chaos in February 2020 for the Democrats. According to this forecast, only Sanders and Biden had realistic chances at winning the nomination, but the ominous “no one” towered above both of them at a 51% probability.
The outcome of “no one” would entail a situation whereby no Democratic candidate had earned the majority of delegates necessary to clinch the nomination before the convention. In theory, the Democratic Party elites could have embroiled themselves into a brokered convention, but — in any scenario — they probably would have done something to avoid hitting that iceberg.
Targeting Buttigieg and Klobuchar
At this moment, the “something” was to pressure Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar into dropping out of the race. During those five days between the date of this screenshot and the date of Biden’s decisive victories on Super Tuesday, Biden did not just magically surpass Sanders in the polls. Instead, the aforementioned Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out on February 29 and March 3, respectively. They subsequently endorsed Joe Biden. Obama likely played a hand in this outcome, and we know that at least one of them received a carrot because Buttigieg currently serves in Biden’s cabinet as secretary of transportation. I personally believe that Biden tentatively offered Klobuchar the vice presidential slot at that point in March before the racial tensions arose in her home state of Minnesota, but that theory is for a different time.
This sequence of events perfectly demonstrates the precise coordination in which Democratic elites can successfully engage in their favor. It is a major difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. At least — to the same extent — Republican elites do not coordinate to conspire in favor of preferred candidates or in opposition to unsatisfactory candidates. If they did, then Donald Trump would have never won the nomination. Jeb Bush would have won it instead. The clapping could have worked!
The Democratic elites needed to execute the perfect plan without any room for error. They did not want Sanders to win the nomination because of a conventional wisdom that his radical socialist policies could not take down Trump. I personally conjecture that many wealthy Democrats secretly would have actually preferred Trump to Sanders due to Sanders’s tax and economic policies. At a broader level, Sanders just threatened the traditional party order and power structure too much. It is better to have a president from the opposing party win than have an insurgent from within your party tear everything up.
By February 29, Sanders had achieved a large amount of momentum from three consecutive wins in Iowa1, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Meanwhile, Biden had terrible showings: fourth place in Iowa and fifth place in New Hampshire. Sure, Biden earned second place in Nevada, but Sanders more than doubled Biden’s vote share there. In Nevada, Sanders won 46.8% of the vote while Biden only won 20.2%, but Biden caught a huge break on February 29, when he won South Carolina with 48.6% of the vote. Sanders came in second place with a measly 19.8% percent of the vote.
Biden’s victory in South Carolina largely came from an earlier establishment decision. Prominent South Carolina Democrat Jim Clyburn gave his endorsement to Joe Biden ahead of the crucial primary. Clyburn has represented South Carolina’s 6th district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1993, and — at the time of the 2020 primary — he served as the House majority whip under Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The victory in South Carolina singlehandedly resurrected Biden’s hopes of winning the nomination, but Sanders still had the best chance of winning it although Sanders even still trailed the outcome of “no one”. The fateful day of Super Tuesday was coming on March 3, and — to defeat Sanders — somebody else would have to have a dominant showing.
The Democrats had 34.1% of their available delegates awarded on Super Tuesday in 14 states. If the results of the day were fractured and nobody earned a thumping win, then the Democrats would have cemented the outcome of a brokered convention or, at least, a situation messier than anything seen since the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Only Sanders and Biden had any chance of earning the nomination at that point, but a few other candidates had large enough shares of the popular vote in these states that they could spoil a desired outcome:
Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
To look at it through a rudimentary lens, the Democratic elites’ biggest problem was that three candidates split the purportedly “moderate” wing — Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar — while the “progressive” wing only split between two candidates — Sanders and Warren. One could probably argue that Sanders, despite his ideological similarities, still had a very unique brand from Warren while Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar were much closer together. At a specific state level, Minnesota was voting on Super Tuesday, and Klobuchar was enough of a “favorite daughter” that she could eat up a bunch of those delegates and further deprive Biden of an opportunity to eclipse Sanders in a state where Biden could otherwise have done well without the cannabilization from Klobuchar.
Why were these people even staying in the race if they could not win? Most significantly, they held massive leverage in case Biden wanted to get them to drop. Less likely, but still considerable, staying in meant that — in the bizarre circumstance of a brokered convention — they could stay in the running. Perhaps Buttigieg never would have won a plurality of delegates, but perhaps the Democratic elites would have preferred him to Sanders. This is another example of the rewards of being there. He obviously got something because he ended up in Biden’s cabinet.
Therefore, to fix this issue, the elites would need to, specifically, target Buttigieg and Klobuchar to consolidate the “moderate” wing and not push out Warren. Keeping Warren had the larger effect of splintering the progressives, but she had a more targeted effect of splintering the delegates in the New England states voting on Super Tuesday: Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Sanders hailed from Vermont while Warren hailed from Massachusetts, and Sanders was still getting a decent chunk of the vote in Massachusetts due to its proximity to Vermont. By keeping Warren in the race, the Democratic elites could deprive Sanders of a large number of delegates from Massachusetts and Maine.
Super Tuesday Comes
The elites, likely spearheaded by Obama and Clinton, ultimately chose to crown Biden and push out Klobuchar and Buttigieg, who agreed with the plan. On February 29, Buttigieg dropped. On March 3, Klobuchar dropped, thereby paving the way for a Biden triumph on Super Tuesday. Consequently, Biden dominated Sanders and got a large enough lead that Sanders likely could not have offset the losses on Super Tuesday. Biden won 10 states2 with 726 delegates while Sanders only won 4 states3 with 505 delegates.
The plan of the elites prevailed. They had used their God-like powers to imbue the corpse of Joe Biden with life. They had created their Frankenstein’s monster. I do not want to recapitulate what happened in the general election, but we know that Biden defeated Trump and won the presidency. By all accounts, the plan of the elites in 2020 worked as well as it ever could have. Trump lost, and he lost to Biden — not Sanders. No tax hikes!
Frankenstein’s Monster in the White House
The problem here is that the Democrats created a Frankenstein’s monster. They had no control over Biden anymore. He was the president now. Not only did he have more power than the Democratic Party, but he also had more power than anyone else in the world. With the U.S.’s massive nuclear arsenal, he could destroy Earth many times over. Tom Perez was no match anymore. The Democrats had focused all of their energy on defeating Trump in November 2020. They succeeded, but they did not really think to 2024.
But who cared about 2024? That was 4 years away! Who cares if Biden will be 81? We’ll deal with that later. We beat Trump! Yay! The Wicked Witch is dead!
Unfortunately, the Wicked Witch was not dead, and four years later, we have arrived at the same match-up as we had in 2020. The difference is that Trump is trouncing Biden in the polls. Biden is four years older, and — as 50 million Americans saw on June 27 during the debate — the age is rapidly wearing him down.
As we all know, the Democrats have been panicking for the past week. Many elites now want Biden to drop. This situation is completely the reverse of what happened in 2020, when they crowned him at the cost of other people dropping. The problem is that they don’t have more power than the president. If he does not want to leave, he does not have to do so.
Having the power of Dr. Frankenstein is great if you can fully trust the creation to obey you, and Biden is not obeying. He wants to be president, and he seemingly digs his heels in even more whenever The New York Times and other media elites make any additional critiques. For the first time in a while, we are seeing a schism in the goals of the center-left media and the Democratic president. The center-left media wants to beat Trump, but Biden does not care about beating Trump. Biden just wants to be president, and it doesn’t matter to Biden if Trump loses if it is not Biden who beats him. Who cares if Newsom holds all the power?
Biden hates the people telling him to leave, and he always has. With that in mind, perhaps the Democratic elites should have crowned someone much more controllable, such as Buttigieg or Klobuchar, but they calculated that Biden had a much better shot at defeating Trump. Obviously, Biden won, and we cannot know how Buttigieg or Klobuchar would have done.
Although Biden is a Washington swamp creature who has been around for over five decades, he defies the Washington power structures in many ways. He grew up middle class. He did not go to the boarding schools. He still is only our second Catholic president in history. Joe Biden is the first president since Ronald Reagan not to have graduated from an Ivy League school, and he is the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to hold that distinction.
Furthermore, he is the first president since Gerald Ford to have graduated from a state university4. Biden graduated from University of Delaware, and Gerald Ford graduated from University of Michigan. Even Ford bolstered his public school background with a degree from Yale Law School. Harry Truman was our last president to not graduate from college at all, and the last president to graduate from a state college without the bolstering of a fancy Ivy League degree was Benjamin Harrison, who attended Miami University of Ohio.
For context, Harrison left office in 1893. Ironically, Harrison is also the last president to have lost re-election to the incumbent president that he defeated in the prior election. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison defeated incumbent President Grover Cleveland, but Cleveland came back in 1892 to defeat Harrison and earn a second non-consecutive term. Trump would obviously like to repeat the success of Cleveland while Biden would like to avoid becoming the next Harrison.
Biden comes from a different era and different world than the political elite in the Democratic Party today. They loved him in 2020 because of his folksy “Uncle Joe from Scranton” persona, but they only liked that because it helped them with winning the White House and defeating Donald Trump. At a macroscopic level, the Uncle Joe from Scranton persona goes against everything that Democratic elites desire.
I am not trying to make some “populist” point that Democrats hate the working and middle classes in places like Scranton, Pennsylvania. That is not the threat. The threat is that Biden comes from such a different world. He does not value the same things that the college-educated members of the Democratic elite value. Joe Biden does not care what the eggheads Nate Cohn and Nate Silver say. Despite what Thomas Friedman claims, Joe Biden does not care what Thomas Friedman says. Joe Biden definitely does not care what the editorial board from The New York Times says. These are the types of people who doubted him his whole career, and he thinks that he can prove them wrong one final time.
In all honesty, I can’t blame him. I would probably have a chip on my shoulder and would hate the smug Ivy League elites from New York and Washington. The problem is that Biden is operating on a completely antiquated view of politics. He does not believe in the science of polling. Despite what you think of polling, Trump’s lead of 6 points nationally in the NYT/Siena poll from July 3 is catastrophic.
Coincidentally, the United Kingdom is holding its general election, which will most likely lead to the first Labour majority government in 14 years and the first Tory general election loss in 27 years. Earlier in the article, I referenced Joe Biden’s plagiarism of the old Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Even though Biden wanted to be Kinnock back in the 1988 election, he is lucky that he is in American politics and not British politics. If Biden were the U.K. prime minister and led the Labour Party instead of the Democratic Party in the U.S., then the MPs of the Labour Party would likely hold a vote of no confidence against him and install a new prime minister. In the U.K., the majority government has massive power, but the prime minister himself does not.
The MPs of his party can ditch him at any time, and unpopular prime ministers will often preempt a vote of no confidence and resign before the party can hold such an embarrassing vote for the prime minister. We can see the weakness of the U.K. prime minister with the three Tory prime ministers that the U.K. has had in two years. The Tories abandoned Boris Johnson, who left on September 6, 2022. His successor Liz Truss notoriously only lasted 50 days. If Joe Biden were a U.K. prime minister, he would have been voted out by the party the day after the debate on June 27, and the party would have replaced him with Kamala Harris.
The two major parties in the United Kingdom — the Labour Party and the Conservative Party — do have the God-like powers of catapulting people to power, but the British parties can also kill the monsters that they create. Look at the demises of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, and Johnson brought great electoral victories for their parties, but their parties eventually jettisoned them.
On the other hand, the Democratic Party in the U.S. takes a much bigger risk when they create monsters. They cannot kill them. Biden must kill his candidacy on his own, and he very well might. As I type this, Polymarket gives Biden a 44% chance of earning the Democratic nomination, and Harris is at 37%. However, he has not done so yet, and the media is seemingly not stopping their drumbeat against Biden. Just look at the current articles on The New York Times despite the fact that Democratic governors met with Biden last night at the White House and doubled down their support for him. If this was happening in the U.K., the media speculation would have already ended because the Democratic Party would have already ditched Biden.
Biden acting as a Frankenstein’s monster shows the risk of empowering the elites so much in a party. There are advantages, especially, in state-level races and congressional races, but when the elites ignore voters’ desires and rig primary elections, we get a stand-off as the Democrats are experiencing now. The elites’ massive power earned a Democratic victory in 2020, but it looks like it will lead to a Democratic downfall in 2024.
It is ambiguous whether Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg won Iowa in 2020, but — for the sake of this argument — I will give it to Sanders since he won the popular vote in Iowa.
Biden won Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
Sanders won California, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont (his home state).
Carter attended Georgia Tech initially but, ultimately, graduated from the United States Naval Academy.