At a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, last Friday, Joe Biden said: “Some folks … are trying to push me out of the race.”
To whom was the president referring?
Certainly not to Donald Trump or the Republicans, who have been uncharacteristically silent about the whole question of whether Biden should drop out. They couldn’t push him out of the Democratic race anyway.
Nor was he referring to Democrats in Congress. Almost all have been publicly supportive of Biden. Only eight House Democrats out of 213 have called for him to drop out, and just one Senate Democrat has gone that far.
Was Biden referring to the leaders of the Democratic party? Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Senate majority leader and House Democratic leader, respectively, have been supportive of Biden, at least in public.
He couldn’t have been talking about the Democratic National Committee. Not a single DNC member has called for Biden to exit from the race.
Was Biden talking about the elite punditry on cable TV and on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post – almost all of who have called for Biden to drop out?
Doubtful. The chattering class has little or no influence on the preferences of average voters. How many people at that Wisconsin rally avidly read opinion pieces in the New York Times?
Did Biden have in mind some collection of gray-bearded leaders of America – a group of unofficial elder statesmen, perhaps including Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, whose counsel carries extraordinary influence behind the scenes?
There is no longer any such group. (I recall a time decades ago when a bipartisan cabal of old hands held significant sway behind the scenes of official Washington – people like Lloyd Cutler, George Shultz and Jim Baker. But in the hyper-partisanship of today’s Washington, no such group exists.)
The fact is, only one small group of people in the US has the power to push Joe Biden out of the race. Who are they? The major donors to the Democratic party.
They’re the ones Biden is angry with.
On Monday morning, Biden called into MSNBC’s Morning Joe and railed against the big-ticket donors who have been pushing him to withdraw.
“I’m getting so frustrated with the elites … the elites of the party,” he said on the air. “I don’t care what the millionaires think.”
Bingo. It was the first time any modern president has admitted that the elites of the party are the millionaires (and billionaires) who fund it, which gives them extraordinary political power – perhaps enough to push Biden out of the race.
In truth, the Democratic party is little more than a national fundraising machine, as is the Republican party.
I’m not blaming Biden. He’s simply stating the truth. America’s donor class has become extraordinarily powerful in both parties.
Biden and his top aides aren’t hiding this reality. To the contrary, they’re actively portraying the effort to remove him as driven by the party’s wealthy elite.
This may be an exaggeration. The polling data I’ve seen suggests that concerns about Biden’s age and evident decline worry a wide swathe of the public.
But Biden continues to court the party’s major donors. Soon after Biden shared with the hosts of Morning Joe his frustrations with the moneyed elite of the party, he held a video conference call with that very same elite.
In that call, according to the New York Times, he told them he was staying in the race. He also told them that they had to shift the focus of the campaign away from him and on to Trump.
Telling them to shift their focus seemed to offer further evidence that the party’s biggest donors were responsible for focusing on Biden’s age and his stumbles since the debate. And it was they who must shift their focus to Trump.
Over the last week and a half, I’ve been immersed in countless discussions about whether Biden should drop out of the race. I expect you have as well.
But those discussions are irrelevant. You and I aren’t going to persuade Biden to stay in or drop out of the race.
Only one group is going to persuade him – the Democratic party’s biggest donors. If they decide to stop funding the Biden campaign, Biden has no chance of winning.
It’s rapidly becoming a game of chicken. If the biggest donors stop funding Biden and Biden stays in the race notwithstanding, he clearly loses. Yet so do we all.
Biden’s efforts over the last few days confirm much of what I’ve increasingly observed over the years. The real political power in the US, regardless of party, lies in the hands of big money.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
This article was amended on 11 July 2024 to update the number of members of Congress who have called for Biden to drop out
