This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Joe Biden caved to insurmountable pressure on Sunday as he withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to challenge Donald Trump in the highly-anticipated November election. The selfless act has been hailed by Democratic politicians, who now have a job on their hands to secure a new nominee for president at the Democratic National Convention in precisely one month. Failure to coalesce around one candidate could leave the party bitterly divided in the face of a Republican Party that has never looked more united, which doesn’t tend to bode well.
Biden’s decision to step aside was undeniably the right one. Had he stayed the course, his legacy would have been losing to one of the most divisive political figures in the Western world. Now, people are taking another look at his record. His administration has been one of the most successful in modern American politics based on most typical indicators. Millions of new jobs, more dollars in paychecks, a record-low number of Americans without health insurance and a historic reduction in child poverty. He has also been instrumental in organising the West to push back against Vladimir Putin on the international front and became the architect of a new plan to contain China while also bolstering NATO after his predecessor did his utmost to dismantle it.
But the one battle he was destined to lose was the battle against time. As George Clooney pointed out in his seminal New York Times op-ed, it is the one fight no one can win. “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010”, Clooney opined. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate”, the American actor noted, in which he rambled, stumbled over words, and was, at times, nonsensical. At one point, after Biden responded to a question from moderators, Trump quipped, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he did, either.”
Biden’s downfall should serve as a lesson to political parties on this side of the pond, too, where the Conservatives will soon have to face up to a battle that they simply cannot win. According to The Times’s data editor Tom Calver, one in six Tory voters are likely to die before the next election in an analysis that showcases the scale of demographic challenges facing the party as it picks its new leader. Despite urges to shift further to the right, more than a fifth of the party’s youngest supporters – under 34 years old – back Labour, which could hand Sir Keir Starmer’s party a further 29 seats at the next election. More than a million Tory votes are likely to be lost by 2029 purely as a result of demography, while Labour will add nearly 300,000 as younger people, who are more likely to back the party, become eligible to vote.
Soon, the unstoppable marching of time could become a very British problem for the country’s oldest political party. And as Biden found out, it’s best to face up to the facts sooner rather than later.
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