Sorry, James Carville, but Joe Biden is the best bet to beat Trump

Famed Democratic political strategist James Carville believes that Democrats would have a better chance of defeating Donald Trump with a nominee other than President Biden. He is not alone in this view.

Democrats suggesting that Biden should step aside (or be shoved aside) for some unnamed savior only fuel Republican falsehoods about Biden no longer being up to the job. Such critics ignore the historical evidence that Democrats’ best bet is with an incumbent president.

Indeed, no Democratic presidential nominee in the two-party era has ever won the White House while a fellow Democrat sat in the Oval Office. Vice Presidents Hubert Humphrey and Al Gore couldn’t do it. Neither could Hillary Clinton. 

Republicans won seven of the 10 presidential contests during the Cold War Era (1952-1988), and Democrats won two of their three victories in that period (1960 and 1976) by extremely narrow margins. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been eight presidential elections. Only two GOP candidates have been elected. Both lost the popular vote yet won an Electoral College majority. Only President George W. Bush, successfully seeking reelection in 2004, managed to win a popular vote majority.

In this same period, Democrats Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden collectively carried the popular vote seven out of eight times. No previous period in American history has seen five different Democratic nominees win the popular vote over a roughly 30-year span.

The fall of the Soviet Union, in other words, pancaked the GOP’s winning message. They’re still struggling to find a replacement capable of winning the popular vote. 

When it comes to presidential elections, Republicans are now the minority party. Trump, who has already lost the popular twice in a row, will be rejected by a popular majority again in 2024. These three consecutive losses will make him the weakest GOP candidate, in terms of popular vote percentages, since the party’s founding in 1854. Yet he still might become president again.

The Electoral College math is admittedly a challenge for Biden. But there is no evidence any other Democrat could do better.

There are 25 states that Trump won in both 2016 and 2020. He will likely win them all again in 2024 — including North Carolina and Florida, which he won narrowly both times — combining for 235 electoral votes. We will assume that any other Democratic candidate would very likely lose all of these states as well.

Trump thus needs to add 35 additional electoral votes to that total to regain the White House.

This brings us to Georgia, with its 16 electoral votes, and Arizona with its 11. Trump barely lost both states in 2020, despite winning them four years earlier. These are the two states Trump must win back from Biden this November. And there is little evidence that any other Democrat would have a better chance than Biden in keeping them out of the Trump column.

Trump leads (albeit narrowly) in all recent polls of those two states. So adding Georgia and Arizona to Trump’s column for the sake of argument gives him 262 electoral votes. Trump then needs only to win either Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin — three states he carried in 2016 — to be the next president of the United States.

There is increasing evidence that Trump may flip Nevada from the 2020 Biden column due to local issues. Nevada, however, only has five electoral votes. Flipping Nevada only matters if Trump takes the one electoral vote from Maine’s CD-2, as expected, and then also flips Nebraska CD-2 (Biden +6 in 2020), resulting in a 269-269 tie — and a likely Trump win via the House of Representatives.

The 2024 presidential election is going to come down to this: Republican attempts to suppress the vote of Americans in the key swing states who they know will not support Trump. He and his allies are going to do everything possible to scare off these people from voting.

This is why Biden has one great advantage Carville and others have failed to appreciate: Only Biden fully knows what a president can do to prevent what Trump has in mind. 

Biden is going to have a clearer focus and a greater drive to stop Trump if he’s the nominee, as opposed to being a lame duck in the White House. That might not be true in a perfect world, but it’s the truth in our world. An incumbent running for reelection is going to do everything within his power to defeat his opponent. Especially this one. 

Presidential elections are now dominated by the politics of personal destruction, perfected by campaign professionals in both parties. The idea of nominating a new face at this stage defies reality; Carville knows what our internet era will do to that person. The Biden-Harris team, in contrast, is a known political commodity.

Carville’s candor is his most redeeming quality. But he is wrong about Biden.

Mark J. Rozell is dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Paul Goldman is a Richmond, Va. attorney and former chair of the Democratic Party of Virginia.