A Washington Post analysis by Dan Balz last Friday argues that “there’s been little that has given Democrats the confidence that their nomination process will produce a challenger strong enough, appealing enough and politically skilled enough to withstand what will be a brutal general election against a weakened and vulnerable president,” and that the Democrats should be worried that no clear front runner has emerged in the race at a time when Trump is both reeling and loaded with campaign cash to pummel his potential rivals. But while Balz is not wrong in the abstract that most Democrats would feel some relief if they had already settled on their nominee, a state of tension and even anxiety while debates are had, minds made up, and votes are taken is a feature, not a bug, of this thing we call democracy. A variety of gargantuan moving political parts form the whirring existential stage of the Democratic primary, including a debate over the relative liberalism of the party and the prioritization of a candidate who can beat Donald Trump. But these political puzzles needs to be resolved by discussion and consideration, not by diktat from a non-existent authority on high. For Balz to be sounding the alarm when we are still months away from the first primary feels extreme.
It does absolutely suck that Trump and the GOP are able to hit Biden, Warren, and others while Democrats hash out their differences and settle on a nominee, but this is the nature of the game under any primary campaign where a president is up for re-election. At the same time, one could argue that as Trump besets our democracy with the threat of authoritarianism, the Democrats are providing a powerful lesson to the country through their deliberate, open, and yes, sometimes agonizing, nomination process. Practicing democracy in the face of its enemies is always a show of strength, not weakness.
By the same token, the settled race on the GOP side is a sign of the degraded state of the Republican Party, in which no significant challenger has had the guts to challenge the authoritarian monster in their midst. That the Republican Party and base is united behind Trump so solidly at this point may be a strength versus the Democrats, but it’s equally a sign of the very political bankruptcy on the part of the GOP — a bankruptcy rooted in white identity politics, authoritarianism, and corruption — that the Democrats must diagnose for the public and defeat in 2020, up and down the ballot.
Balz’s logic that the Democrats’ alleged disarray is somehow accentuated by how weak the president appears right now is also peculiar; as Balz puts it, everything that happened last week, i.e. Trump’s stumbles and revelations of lawlessness, “was grounds for optimism for Democrats,” before he turns to the Democratic debate as an example of something that is NOT grounds for optimism. Yet Balz’s framing of a corrupt and authoritarian president as somehow a net win for Democrats isn’t entirely logical. Donald Trump has shown an escalating strategy of holding himself above the law, willing to collude with foreign powers to sway the 2020 election and incite violence against those oppose him. These are reasons the Democrats need to defeat Trump, and reasons people should vote for them, but you can hardly call them grounds for optimism, except in the most superficial sense, in the same way that a burning house is grounds for optimism that citizens will vote for a tax hike to fund their fire department next year.
Balz’s closing observation pushes his attempt to frame this as a normal election to the breaking point. “Trump might look like a weakened candidate, but he will be a tenacious campaigner, willing to do anything he can to demonize and defeat his challenger. Democrats have many choices but are anxiously wondering which one of them will get the party to the White House in 2021.” “A tenacious campaigner” who will “do anything he can to demonize and defeat his challenger” is an awfully polite way to describe someone who has literally committed high crimes and misdemeanors in a corrupt scheme to subvert American democracy. Attempting to handicap the race, Balz provides a description of the president’s election strategy that downplays the actual crisis we’re all in. There’s not a credible Democratic candidate for president who doesn’t realize the unique circumstances of this race, which is the first in American history when the survival of our democracy is on the ballot. The reality is that there is no single person who, as a presidential candidate, would be able to defeat a president who considers himself beyond the rule of law. Beating Trump will take a movement, a tidal wave of democracy in which the right candidate is necessary but hardly sufficient in and of itself.