Inside the 2024 soul-searching that’s happening in every corner of the Democratic Party — except the White House. gdebenedetti reports
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Toward the end of the event, phones buzzed with an alert: A memo from Bernie Sanders’s last campaign manager had been leaked to the Washington Post. “In the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Sanders has not ruled out another run for president,” Faiz Shakir wrote to the senator’s aides and surrogates. It was the first acknowledgment that the two-time candidate is still considering his options. “So we advise that you answer any questions about 2024 with that in mind.
There is no substantial precedent for the volume of questions about Biden’s future. His inner circle’s insistence that his doldrums will pass, that there’s no cause for concern, is of little reassurance even to some close allies in the party.
This untenable state of affairs — in which Biden insists he wants the job until he’s 86 but much of his party won’t listen — is only partially a by-product of his not yet officially declaring his candidacy. It’s partly because of Biden’s own occasional hedges: With family tragedies and two brain aneurysms in his past, he has always allowed that he might step aside if his health declined or if “fate intervened.
Harris has a rapport with Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, with whom she confers regularly, but Biden has let their regular lunch meetings slip from weekly to biweekly to just twice this year. The two get along, but when Harris tested positive for COVID in late April, the administration was put in the awkward position of admitting that she was not technically one of the president’s “close contacts.
Harris has never let anyone doubt that she expects Biden to seek a second term, and she has made no moves to set up a contingency campaign. She has effectively ceased to have contact with many of the highest-ranking advisers to her own 2020 bid. Yet if Biden did step aside, Harris would start the succession contest as the clear front-runner. A Politico newsletter recently pointed out that 27 surveys have tested the prospect of a Biden-free primary in the past year, and Harris has led 21 of them.
The short-term migraine was averted, but that wasn’t the whole story. Buttigieg has kept in sporadic touch with some major donors from his campaign and has indicated to them that he is aware of the brutal dynamics pummeling the president. He is always careful to avoid even the appearance of wanting to discuss his own political future on these calls, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Without Sanders in the picture, Khanna still would not be a consensus choice on the left. Many close to the Vermont senator would prefer to convince Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to consider running, but they concede that her youth makes it unlikely.
They should have known this was coming. In 2015, when Biden was agonizing over the wisdom of a run after the death of his son Beau, his counselor Steve Ricchetti occasionally floated the question of whether they should consider a one-term pledge, as it might appeal to voters concerned about Biden’s age. Biden always dismissed the gimmick quickly, refusing to engage even when some of his family members brought it up.
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