Politicians and pundits have offered a host of reasons why President Joe Biden decided on Sunday not to seek another term.
They claim it’s the economy, or it’s media pressure, or it’s social media, or it’s some shadowy group of elites. But in reality, it’s all about the math…political math, that is.
Democratic Senate candidates are beating their rivals in swing states, while Biden was trailing Trump by a few points in these same states. Biden stepped down for the good of the party.
NBC News reported that in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Biden trails Trump by a few points, often within the margin of error. Yet Democratic Senate candidates in these states lead their Republican rivals by numbers well outside the margin of error.
I decided to test this hypothesis by looking at a myriad of polls from the right-leaning RealClearPolitics. Sure enough, Trump is leading Biden in general election polls and is ahead in several swing states like Florida by decent margins. But it’s a different story for Democratic Senate incumbents in these contests, who are comfortably leading their opponents.
Virginia Senator Tim Kaine is well ahead of Hung Cao, while Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey Jr. is outpointing David McCormick in Pennsylvania by double-digits. Nevada Senator Jackie Rosen is several points ahead of Sam Brown in Nevada, while Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, another Democratic Senator, is outpointing her GOP opponent Eric Hovde. And Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown is beating Bernie Moreno even in Republican-commissioned polls.
But it’s not just incumbents doing well. In the open seat in Arizona, Representative Ruben Gallego leads frequent candidate Kari Lake of the GOP by seven points. Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin for the Democrats is doing nine percentage points better than former Rep. Michael Rogers. Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff is also beating the Republican candidate, former baseball star Steve Garvey, by a two-to-one margin in that open Senate seat.
Republicans could claim that Trump was leading Biden because he’s a popular candidate. If so, then Trump would be over 50 percent of the polls in these surveys. I could only find him above 49 percent in two general election polls out of the whole stack of surveys on Real Clear Politics for this month.
The GOP could also claim that the economy put Trump ahead of Biden. But Market Watch’s research disputed the claim that Trump’s economy was so much better than Biden’s (unless you believe Biden was our president in 2020). Moreover, if the economy was bad, and voters blamed Democrats, their incumbents and open-seat challengers would presumably be losing handily.
It comes down to Biden’s debate performance, and subsequent appearances at summits and news conferences, show that he’s not as spry as he used to be, even just a few months earlier at the State of the Union Address. He could get through the rest of the year, but four more years of stress might be too much, especially as we face geopolitical threats from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and the Houthis; all of them seem to be working together (something the pro-Russia wing of the GOP really needs to understand).
Biden stepped down to help the Democratic Party. The party needs to understand why their Senate nominees are doing so much better than the Republicans if they are to win in 2024.
John A. Tures is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Political Science Program at LaGrange College, in LaGrange, Georgia.