There were plenty of people in the news media, most notably Post columnist David Ignatius and longtime Democratic campaign strategist David Axelrod, who suggested last year that Biden was a weak candidate and shouldn’t run for a second term. But Ignatius focuses on national security and Biden allies suggested that Axelrod just didn’t like the president personally.
So it was different when people perceived to be both Biden-friendly and experts on elections started loudly objecting to his candidacy. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein produced a podcast in February that praised Biden’s policy record but laid out a path for him to be replaced: Powerful Democrats such as former president Barack Obama and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) would persuade Biden not to run, and Democrats would install a new candidate at the party’s August convention. (That’s basically what is happening.)
Klein’s take was shared by a writer who became prominent in the Obama years: data expert Nate Silver. Both before and particularly after the June 27 debate, Silver repeatedly warned that Democrats were depending on polls showing a close race, when in fact Biden was a clear underdog to Trump.
The debate itself inspired Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor, the former Obama aides who host the podcast “Pod Save America,” to start telling their audience that Biden probably couldn’t win.
Klein, Silver, Favreau, Lovett, Pfeiffer and Vietor are not a representative sample of the Democratic Party. They are all White men in the 40s. But having people with big audiences in liberal circles and close ties to the Democratic Party establishment all saying that the president’s candidacy was doomed created a real intellectual foundation for the effort to get a new candidate.
But ultimately, the movement would need people with real power, such as …
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