Is the Biden Bubble Bursting?

Can the Democratic Party break out of the bubble it has created and sustained for so long? Or will it double down on the denial?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Warnings Ignored

Even casual observers of American politics have long known that Trump-supporting conservatives are trapped in an information silo of their own making. But last week, it became clear that the Democrats are also in desperate need of a reality check.

In the Democrats’ epistemic bubble, wish-casting prevailed, the evidence in front of their own eyes was ignored, and critics were shut down. Although the Joe Biden bubble comes nowhere near the cultist post-truth bubble that surrounds Donald Trump, the parallels are still troubling: As in the MAGA bubble, truth and facts came second to a longer-term strategic goal. As Mark Leibovich wrote in The Atlantic last night, it turns out that “Republicans are not the only party whose putative leaders have a toxic lemming mindset and are willing to lead American democracy off a cliff.”

Again and again, establishment Democrats brushed off warnings of a problem. Polls consistently found that huge majorities of the electorate were worried about Biden’s age. Even inside the White House, Politico reports, Biden’s “growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate.” One apparent sign of worry in Biden’s camp, according to some analysts: He skipped the traditional Super Bowl interview and seemed reluctant to sit down with reporters. He has held the fewest press conferences of any president in the past three decades. There was also the nagging visual evidence—clips of him in public appearances that seemed to show a president in decline.

Journalists and strategists such as Leibovich, Ezra Klein, David Axelrod, and James Carville warned repeatedly that Biden’s age was an issue. In June 2022, Leibovich wrote in The Atlantic that “the age issue will only get worse if Biden runs again. The ‘whispers’ are becoming shouts. It has become thoroughly exhausting—for Biden and his party and, to some extent, the country itself.” In retrospect, these warnings feel like notes smuggled out from behind the barbed-wired wall of denial that Team Biden and its allies built.

Were the Democrats being duped? It’s possible that some establishment Democrats and even members of Biden’s staff were shielded from the president’s condition—the Politico report suggests that Biden surrounds himself with a small circle of aides and advisers, although the White House has rejected the characterization of the president as isolated. Still, this offers at best a partial explanation for the Biden bubble, because lots of people both in and out of politics and the media knew or suspected that the president was showing signs of cognitive impairment. For the most part, though, they chose not to talk about what they were seeing, and the pressure not to break with the groupthink was intense. “There was a collective-action problem,” Klein explained last week. “Any individual politician or Joe Biden staffer or adviser or confidant who stepped out of line and said privately or publicly that Joe Biden shouldn’t run faced real career risk. Whereas saying nothing did not pose a risk.”

Another factor is what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News Fallacy,” the idea that if a right-leaning outlet such as Fox News “criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often.” The louder and more vicious the right’s attack on Biden’s age, the deeper Democrats dug in. There was furious pushback to news reports about Biden’s alleged frailty, and critiques of “cheap fake” videos that tried to make him look senile. Some of those reports and misleading edits were, indeed, dishonest. But in reacting to them, Democrats and journalists with glaring blind spots drew the circle even tighter around their denialism.

Of course, some of the Democratic defense of Biden can also be understood as simple realpolitik,because (as we are told daily) there is simply no reasonable alternative to Biden, no plan B that would be more likely to succeed. The threat of Donald Trump’s restoration was so urgent that questions about Biden’s capacity needed to be suppressed. Biden himself is notoriously stubborn, and his circle is fiercely loyal and protective.

Then came last Thursday night. Millions of Democrats were genuinely shocked: They were confronted with the massive disconnect between what they had been telling themselves and what they saw with their own eyes. And the public’s response is hard to ignore: A new New York Times/Siena poll found that Trump is leading Biden by six points among likely voters—Trump’s largest lead in this poll since 2015. Seventy-four percent of voters view Biden as too old for the job. The question now is: Can the party break out of the bubble it has created and sustained for so long? Or will it double down on the denial?

Things are moving quickly, but as of this writing, the indicators are mixed. Biden’s inner circle is reportedly hardening its resolve to stay in the race, lashing out at “bedwetters,” pundits, and “self-important podcasters” who are sounding the alarm. Biden-friendly social-media influencers are exhorting the public not to air inconvenient truths if those truths undermine the party or the president.

But cracks are starting to show in the Democrats’ long-established narrative. The mainstream media are flooded, in a way that they haven’t yet been during Biden’s presidency, with stories about his worrisome lapses and pointed questions about his cognitive health. And, as his poll numbers sink, there is growing pressure on Biden from major donors and elected Democrats to step aside.

On Friday, Biden will sit down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for his first extended interview since the debate. He is holding a crisis meeting with Democratic governors and making campaign stops in key swing states. The New York Times reported today that, according to a “key ally,” Biden is aware that these next few events need to go well.

Biden’s press secretary said today that the president is “absolutely not” considering dropping out of the race—a statement his team is all but required to make until he actually decides to step down, of course. But, as Biden seems to understand, his margin for error is now vanishingly small. Meanwhile, the stakes grow higher: On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. presidents have immunity for all official acts, a decision that makes the prospect of a Trump 2.0 presidency more dangerous than ever before.

Democrats claim to understand that a second Trump presidency would be an existential threat to democracy. We’ll soon find out whether they are willing to risk it all by sticking with a candidate who three-quarters of Americans think is too old for the job.

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Watch. The second season of We Are Lady Parts (streaming on Peacock) tells the story of an all-female Muslim punk band.

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“At 90 most of her is thinning, / her mind a sheet of paper / with perforations.”

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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