Joe Biden winning the 2020 nomination was probably suboptimal, but it was not an elite conspiracy

As part of his endless promotional tour, Jake Tapper repeats the very commonly repeated fiction that Joe Biden was imposed on an unwilling party by a backdoor elite conspiracy:

[Ezra:] I think we have quite irresponsible political elites in this country, but we also have quite weak ones. And I think those two things exist in relation to each other.

Elite failures are most obvious when elite power is most degraded. I don’t think elites were some grand class of hypercompetent guardians of the public trust in the 1950s or the 1940s or the 1930s. But among other things, they had more privacy and they had more power.

[Tapper:] The closest we got to that in the last few decades was in 2020, when the elites got involved because they feared a Bernie Sanders nomination and rallied around Joe Biden. And they didn’t do it because they liked Joe Biden. They did it because they thought Joe Biden could beat Bernie and then Trump.

And that was just strictly on the numbers: Who can win college-educated white voters in the suburbs of Philly and also Black voters in South Carolina? There was only one person running who could do that, and it was Biden.

We’ll never know, probably, the extent to which Barack Obama and others called Buttigieg and Klobuchar and Booker and Warren and all the others, and encouraged them to drop out and get behind Biden. But it did happen, and that’s the closest we’ve gotten to a smoke-filled room in my lifetime.

The idea that a nefarious “smoke filled room” caused viable campaigns to drop out against their will and resulted in Biden winning against the will of the party’s voters is a very common one online. It is also transparently silly and ahistorical. Including Cory Booker — who I like, and think is underrated, and IMO would have been a fine candidate, and dropped out in January after not even polling well enough to qualify for the most recent debate — is the real tell here.

Anyway, it is very clear that Joe Biden was not shoved down the throats of the party’s elites, and was not even the kind of consensus choice Hillary Clinton for better or worse was in 2016. As Sides et al. observe, many candidates had more money than Biden, and many Democratic officeholders were playing wait and see rather than making endorsements:

Below: money spent by candidates

Above: total number of endorsements by elected officeholders

I don’t doubt that there was some coordination behind Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out on March 2, but to cite this as the reason Biden won is getting cause and effect backwards. The two between them got 11.3% of the vote in South Carolina and 3.3% of the vote in Alabama. Obama and other party leaders convinced them to drop out because Biden’s win had become inevitable, and Buttigieg and Klobuchar were easy to convince because they had no money and had stopped getting a significant number of votes. The story here is “party elites wanted Biden’s inevitable win to happen as quickly as possible,” not “elites forced Biden on the party although voters didn’t want him.”

A few more points:

• It is very important going forward for the left of the party to understand this. No matter how savvy pundits like Tapper might think it was, Bernie’s strategy of hoping that a bunch of hopeless campaigns would stay in and split the vote so that he didn’t need to broaden his appeal beyond the 30% or so of the party that strongly preferred him was extremely stupid. Candidates dropping out when they run out of money and voters is just what happens, and primary fields narrow very quickly. Nefarious party elites didn’t force Bernie to put Nina Turner in charge of his South Carolina campaign, which effectively ended the race when he failed to even be competitive. We don’t have to speculate about who Dem primary voters preferred. Bernie wasn’t forced out of the race; he got a head-to-head matchup with Biden and lost decisively.
• There’s an additional paradox here that pundits like Tapper repeatedly fail to confront. It is true that if asked voters after the first year of Biden’s presidency thought he was too old and shouldn’t run again. The problem is that while voters might like younger candidates in theory, they often don’t actually vote that way. As I’ve said before, candidates would would turn 80 before their first term expired got 84.8% of the 2020 Democratic primary vote, even though there were plenty of talented and potentially attractive younger candidates.
• Given that Tapper’s ostensible issue with Biden is his age, it’s also worth noting that the only other viable Democratic candidate in 2020 was even older than Biden and suffered a heart attack during the primaries. It is true that as of now Bernie is significantly more vigorous than Biden, but it’s far from certain that this would be true or true to the same extent if Bernie had actually become president. Tapper’s own book makes it clear that many people who ultimately wanted Biden to drop out — including George Clooney — thought Biden had declined precipitously in the last year before the debate. It’s not news that the presidency is a very stressful job, especially if you take it more seriously than Donald Trump. I agree that it’s a bad gamble to put an octogenarian in the White House, but what Tapper cannot ID is significantly younger candidate who could have actually won in 2020.
• And as David French observed recently, this isn’t just an issue with the 2020 and 2024 Dem primaries. Democratic primary voters continued to return Dianne Feinstein’s replacement-level stylings to the Senate well after she was capable of executing her duties properly, even when the top-two primary produced two Democratic candidates in the general. We rely on people like Souter knowing when to quit in part because so many legislators essentially have the same tenure as Article III judges, because voters like them.

I didn’t think nominating Joe Biden in 2020 was a very good idea and obviously I haven’t changed my mind given how things played out. But he was the clear choice of Democratic voters, not the product of some kind of top-down back-room conspiracy, and any analysis that denies this fact is ahistorical looking back and unhelpful going forward. Ezra’s framing is correct: 2020 was the product of weak elites and weak parties.