Why Democratic Candidates Should Challenge Biden – By Sam Kahn (Persuasion) / May 22, 2023
The case against party unity.
One thing I discovered, when I was working in New Hampshire on a campaign in 2008, is that people there have long memories. I was fresh out of college and thought everybody would be as excited as I was about Obama. But far more often than I would have expected, the conversation turned to… Jimmy Carter. In particular, what rankled was Teddy Kennedy’s primary challenge to Carter in 1980. “That tore us apart,” I remember one veteran operative telling me. At least within the collective consciousness of Democratic New Hampshire, the primary was held responsible for Carter’s humiliating loss to Ronald Reagan.
Fear of a divisive primary clearly ran very deep within the Democratic establishment. What seemed to have been forgotten, however, was the somewhat thornier reality. Carter was struggling before Kennedy’s challenge: his approval rating dipped as low as 28% during 1979. Likely, anyone whom the Democrats nominated would have lost to Reagan. In that situation, there was much to gain and little to lose from a contested primary; the Democrats’ misfortune was not that Teddy Kennedy ran but that Chappaquiddick and a rambling performance in a television interview made him a weaker candidate than expected, leaving Democrats without a strong alternative to Carter.
The Democrats face an analogous situation heading into the 2024 election. The conventional wisdom—which seems to have been internalized by potential challengers to Joe Biden—is that a contested primary would disastrously weaken the party in advance of the general election. But I’m not so convinced. Biden’s current approval rating is 37%. For reference, the average for a sitting president at this stage of a first term is 53%. A new poll shows Biden trailing Trump by six points, and DeSantis by five, in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. And Democratic voters, while approving of Biden’s performance as president, also express an unmistakable desire for anybody else to be the nominee, with 58% opting for an alternative in a recent poll.
