"And You May Ask Yourself, How Did We Get Here?"

Exactly how does an incumbent president go from total political domination of his party to unprecedented collapse? The picture is still murky.

Less than a month ago, President Joe Biden performed terribly in a one-on-one debate with Donald Trump that he, Biden, had eagerly sought out. “Make my day, pal,” he said in a campaign video challenging Trump to the encounter. Barely over three weeks later, this past Sunday, he gave up his re-election campaign, becoming only the second modern incumbent president to abdicate from running for a second term. Since then, nearly everyone’s attention has shifted to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has swiftly been endorsed by nearly the whole spectrum of Democratic office-holders, state party leaders, and advocacy organizations. She is now benefiting from a titanic burst of grassroots enthusiasm best evidenced by the more than 44,000 Black women who swarmed onto a conference call Sunday night in support of her candidacy and more than $100 million donated from more than 1.1 million donors, nearly two-thirds of them new givers.

Rather than add to the avalanche of prose about Harris and her prospects for beating Trump, or all the speculation about who she should pick as her VP nominee, I’m devoting this week’s Connector to a different topic: What the hell just happened? How did the most powerful man in America go from so thoroughly dominating his party’s nomination process that no serious challenger ever emerged to collapsing in just a few days like a house of cards? Historians and political scientists will likely be debating this question for years and we may not ever get a clear answer. But it’s still worth asking, especially for what partial answers may tell us about how power works in what political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld refer to in their new book, The Hollow Parties, as “the party blob”—the amorphous array of donors, elected officials, interest groups, consultants, media commentators, and local power brokers that identify as part of the Democratic ecosystem.

It turns out that Biden’s implosion can be understood quite well within the terms of Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s analysis. You have to admit that we live in strange times, when many voters (especially the more activist ones) are hyperpartisan in their identities but only weakly connected to actual party structures. Why are today’s major parties so bad at setting the terms of our politics, Schlozman and Rosenfled ask? The answer, they say, is they’ve become hollow shells:

“Hollow parties are parties that, for all their array of activities, demonstrate fundamental incapacities in organizing democracy. This distinctive combination of activity and incapacity manifests itself across multiple dimensions. As a civic presence in an era of nationalized politics, hollow parties are unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day lives. Organizationally, they tilt toward national entities at the expense of state and local ones. Swarming networks of unattached paraparty groups, without popular accountability, overshadow formal party organizations at all levels….Today’s parties are distinctive for the presence of so many figures entwined with and buzzing around but not organizationally part of formal party organizations themselves.”

Schlozman and Rosenfeld call that that buzzing, disorderly swarm “the party blob,” and they argue that with the rise of the second Gilded Age of today’s hyper-rich along with small-dollar online fundraising, the party blobs now overshadow the formal parties. That description feels 100% right. But while this may help illuminate who took out Biden or why his base of support was so hollow (more on that in a moment), Schlozman and Rosenfeld may overstate the blob’s sloppiness. They write, “for many of these paraparty organizations, neither electoral success nor policy achievements serve as the front-and-center goal or metric of success and accountability. That leaves the core tasks of a political party—to corral allies and build electoral coalitions sufficient to take control of government and implement an agenda—paradoxically underserved. With outside groups dominating political life, the formal parties serve as punching bags for ideological activists and candidate operations more than as conscious stewards of a political enterprise.”

We shall see, in the coming months, then, if that is the case. But right now, it appears that the party blob somehow managed to coalesce around two unifying goals: to get Biden to step down and to anoint Harris as swiftly and cleanly as possible as his successor. Electoral success, or at least a shared agreement about a common enemy and what it will take to defeat him, seems to be on the top of every Democrat’s mind.

Who’s in charge of the Democratic blob?

Back to my main question: how did we get here? From what we know now, Biden’s support didn’t disappear because national Democratic leaders chose to abandon him. In the first days after the debate, top party leaders and governors, including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and governors like Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Phil Murphy all made public and private statements of support. National party leaders had to be pushed, from somewhere, to change their minds. Nor did Biden’s base among progressives, advocacy organizations, labor unions or key constituencies like Black women show any signs of weakening in the first two weeks after the debate. It wasn’t until late last week that those dams started publicly breaking.

It's possible that Biden chose to give up simply because his health is declining faster than we now know. The same people who successfully hid his weakening condition from public view these last few years—his family and top aides—may still be keeping such information private. It’s also possible that Biden made his own strategic calculation and decided that the price he would exact for stepping aside was insisting that everyone fall in line behind his vice president—in effect ensuring that Democrats would continue to stand behind the accomplishments of his term. (Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times makes this argument here.) If there was any such explicit or implicit deal, we’ll probably have to wait for the memoirs to be written (the same way the machinations of Gerald Ford’s tacit offer of a pardon to Richard Nixon in order to speed his resignation were not known until many years later).

But lacking such knowledge, I think we must provisionally conclude that what made Brandon go dark were two forces that, arguably, amounted to the same thing: a successful “capital strike” by major Democratic donors and money aggregators, plus a “silent strike” by House Democrats—led by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The murky, post-Citizens United world of big money politics makes the first part of this theory hard to pin down. In the first days after the debate, big Democratic donors were reportedly of two minds about what to do: some called for a “DEMbargo” on donations to any Democrat until Biden stepped aside, while others stayed neutral or remained supportive. The New York Times reported that the Democracy Alliance board voted to stick with Biden, while more than 70% of the respondents to a query among members of the progressive Way to Win network said they were ready to pursue “Plan B.” So did the business group Leadership Now, which called for him to pass the torch. Reid Hoffman, the Silicon Valley billionaire who has long backed Democratic causes and campaigns, told Wired magazine that he hadn’t given up on Biden. Netflix founder Reed Hastings, another Democratic fatcat, publicly argued the opposite.

When Capital Goes on Strike

But further behind the scenes, a big pile of money was being organized as leverage against Biden’s continuing in the race. According to the New York Times’ Nicholas Confessore and Theodore Schleifer, at least $90 million in planned donations to Future Forward, the main independent PAC supporting the Biden campaign with paid media in swing states, were put on hold by donors demanding he pass the torch. “The frozen contributions include[d] multiple eight-figure commitments,” they reported. At the same time, Biden campaign insiders were telling reporters that they were expected a big decline in small-dollar giving in July. The so-called “Blue MAGA” tendency, of grassroots Democrats blaming the media for Biden’s troubles and insisting that he tough it out, was apparently not offsetting this fundraising gap. The same day that Times story ran, the progressive Movement Voter Project, which bundled more than $100 million to grassroots voter mobilization groups in 2020, effectively joined the strike, posting a public letter explaining why it was asking Biden to “pass the baton.” But the most telling aspect of capital strike theory of the case is this: On Monday, the day after Biden abdicated, Future Forward said it now had more than $150 million in newly pledged contributions, $60 million more than the amount that had been reportedly withheld.

Do Democratic donors have this much direct leverage over sitting presidents? It’s certainly true that as Biden’s poll numbers started to sag not just in the battleground states, his campaign managers must have recognized that they’d need even more money to compete effectively in more states. One of the effects of living in the age of “hollow parties” is that every four years the parties’ presidential candidates have to raise huge sums to create a temporary infrastructure of paid staff and media to mobilize voters that in a healthier party system would already be in place, built and supported by local party structures. So if Biden’s bad debate had the effect of expanding the playing field into states that were “normally” solid Blue, a cash gap of a hundred million dollars or more would loom larger as well.

It would be good to know more about who these mega-donors are, what industries they come from and if they have stated political preferences. Any group with the ability to break a president is going to have substantial influence going forward—and given how much conspiratorial thinking rises when the real flows of power are hidden, the worse it will be if these donors insist on remaining shrouded.

One less-remarked aspect of the donor strike was how it also affected other incumbent Democrats. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the Squad member who very visibly stood by Biden as other House members started calling on him to step aside, made reference to this in passing during an hour-long post she shared with her huge Instagram audience last week explaining her concerns about the drive to push him out. When she talked to her House colleagues, she said, “I'm hearing ‘my donor this, my donor that’ not ‘my voters this, my voters that.’” For Ocasio-Cortez, that suggested that oligarchs—her class enemy—were driving the conversation, and it helps explain why she and other progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders backed Biden in his last days (and even hoped they’d get him emphasize progressive appeals to working-class Americans as a result).

Why Did Brandon Go Dark?

Still, I don’t think we should underestimate how much private opinion inside Congress and especially among House Democrats was flowing against the president, whether or not they were hearing from their big donors. One senior-level House staffer told me in early July that 70-90% of Democratic members wanted Biden to quit, especially in light of internal polling predicting the loss of 20 or more seats. “We’d all been told we were coming back into the majority,” this person said, describing the mood among Members as funereal. Still, as of last Tuesday, in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, this source also said that people on the Hill were resigned to Biden not budging. Nor were calls from grassroots Democrats to their elected representatives sending a clear message, this person said. Indeed, only 15,000 signed the “Past the Torch Joe” petition circulated by the best-organized grassroots group, for example.

So who or what was the main engine of Biden’s demise? This past Thursday, this Hill source said the tide had completely shifted and Biden would be out soon. Why? “Pelosi is twisting arms. She’s incredible.” John Heileman of Puck made the same point (gift link) somewhat more colorfully:

“Amid all the coverage and commentary, one angle currently receiving less attention than it might—and that history will surely note and long remember—is how Biden’s decision offered an implicit reaffirmation of one the oldest, most reliable, indeed arguably inviolate rules in Democratic politics: Never bet against Nancy Pelosi. To say that Speaker Emerita Pelosi personally drove Biden out of the race overstates what took place in the past three weeks—but not by much. Based on my reporting, a more precise and accurate formulation is this: If not for Pelosi, Biden wouldn’t have been driven from the race today, and might have been able to run out the clock (as was his and his team’s strategy) until his renomination was formalized at the Democratic convention in Chicago in mid-August.

“It was Pelosi who spearheaded the effort first to persuade and then to pressure Biden to step aside. Though she had indispensable allies in marshaling this effort—including, crucially, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Barack Obama—Pelosi’s role was singular in its execution and effect. Starting with her seminal doubt-casting appearance on Morning Joe on July 3, Pelosi conducted a masterclass in power politics as sophisticated as any I have seen in 35 years of covering this stuff. She carefully and sure-handedly balanced an extraordinary number of psychic variables, emotional equities, and personal histories and agendas, all the while methodically and relentlessly (some would say ruthlessly) turning the screws on Biden—making it abundantly clear that the campaign to push him off the ticket wasn’t going to abate and, in fact, was destined to become more public, direct, and voluble (and thus more embarrassing to him). Indeed, more than one Democratic congressperson told me that Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, and others were prepared, if need be, to go on camera this week and call on Biden to drop out because he no longer had the support of his party.”

That’s helpful, but this is still the view from afar. We’re hearing that Pelosi did something masterful, but not how. Was she in cahoots with major Democratic donors or did these two tracks operate independently? My guess is the former, given Pelosi’s prodigious history as one of the Democratic party’s biggest fundraisers. So we’re left with the same question: who pulls the strings that can unravel a sitting president?

Right now we are in a post-Biden era of good feeling, so I apologize if writing about the seamier side of politics is harshing your high about Kamala. It would be amazing if the current Democratic unity around her candidacy persists. And whether or not we each stay in love with her doesn’t matter, given the stakes of November. But let’s at least be adults about what happened this week—Biden didn’t just give up the job of his dreams out of the goodness of his heart. He was pushed; specific people and interests did the pushing; and we still only know part of the story.

A historical footnote

This isn’t the first time Biden has lost Washington’s power game. Back in 2015, as the second Obama term was ending, a shadow war opened up between the then-Vice President and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the upcoming presidential election. Recall that Clinton launched her campaign in early spring, but by summer was running into strong headwinds (some self-created, some whipped up by the media). And that’s when Biden made a real push towards running, only to be rebuffed by the blob around Clinton. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we can pore over some of the entrails of that battle. Here are a few choice examples:

—On August 25, 2015, Frank White Jr., one of Obama’s top individual fundraisers, wrote this email to senior Clinton aide Huma Abedin and John Podesta, then chair of the Hillary for America campaign. It read:

“I read today's WaPo story about Biden's push for prominent Obama supporters and anticipate a number of follow-on stories from other reporters. If it helps, I am happy to go on-the-record with any reporters asking about Obama bundlers breaking ranks from the Clinton campaign to join Biden. As very early and prominent Obama bundlers, Sylvia and I are firmly in Hillary's corner and are happy to help communicate how passionate Obama bundlers like us are about making sure Hillary is President in 2016.”

Abedin wrote back, “Frank, this means a lot to HRC. Thank you for making the offer and please know we will definitely take you up on it!”

—On September 26, 2015, Podesta wrote this email to Clinton herself about Robert Wolf, a banker and fundraiser who was very close to Obama, warning her about Biden’s efforts to rope him in:

“I think you may be seeing him today and wanted to let you know where his head is at. I spent an hour with him on Tuesday. I saw him a few days earlier at David Brock's book party and had heard he was cranky so asked if I could come see him. He wasn't so much cranky as trying to figure out where, if anywhere, he fits in the campaign. He has a super close relationship with Obama. Obama asks his advice on all sorts of economic matters. He's not expecting that, but hoping that he could have some direct relationship with you and that the campaign would seek his views on economic issues. He raises money, but hopes that he isn't just connected to the campaign only as a fundraiser and only through Dennis. Finally, I think he feels like he's at the end of a long line of Wall Street people you've known for a long time. He's on business oriented TV a lot and is pretty good at it, so he can be an asset and validator beyond whatever he can do financially.

Most importantly, Biden is courting him hard. He has told Biden he is with you, but Biden has pushed him to reconsider if he gets in or at least stay open to that possibility. Because Robert is known as an Obama confidante, he would probably be seen as a bellwether of Obama's preference and there is no question that Biden would market it that way if he were to defect. He's not just one more Obama fundraiser. I think he believes you would be the better President so I think he's solid, but not rock solid. Letting him know you are interested in his substantive views and want a channel (maybe an occasional call or email) to get them directly would lock him down, I think. All these guys are kind of pains in the ass in their own ways, but I find Robert pretty nice, pretty easy, and pretty smart. Hope that's helpful.”

—For old time’s sake, though, this email from Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, to Podesta, Marc Elias (the campaign’s top lawyer) and other colleagues, about whether Biden would be able to access the Obama campaign email list, tops the cake.

Mook is responding to a thread started by Wolf, and addressed initially just to Clinton and Podesta, titled “Recall our conversation that I surprised you with this as it was a key step to VP running (you were going to check into)”. Wolf had opined that, according to recent CNN story, “Biden would have full access to the vaunted Obama campaign email list, since he is effectively a part owner since he was on the ticket in 2008 and 2012.” (In a later response, Elias gets into the legal weeds on who owns the list here.)

“I thought our latest view was we can block him from using it,” Mook writes on October 15, 2015.

Five days later, Biden decided not to run for president.

End Times

I miss George Carlin, as relevant as ever.