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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... allot.html
On Monday night, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet told CNN that the White House “has done nothing to really demonstrate that they have a plan to win this election” and that Republicans could win the election in a “landslide.” Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday that Biden should “reexamine” his decision to run. A group of center-left House Democrats met Wednesday with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to convey their fears about Biden’s ability to campaign and win.
They aren’t just worried about Trump winning a second term. They fear that a sinking Biden candidacy might doom the party to minority status in both chambers of Congress, and in many cases, sink their individual campaigns. These are not idle fears. Current polling suggests that the Democrats’ position in the battle for Congress has deteriorated since Biden’s debate fiasco, and recent history does not provide much comfort down-ballot. Anything can happen, but if Biden goes down, a lot of House and Senate Democrats are highly likely to go down with him.
That winning presidential candidates have a positive effect on other races is hardly controversial. It is known as the “coattail effect,” and while it isn’t the most studied question in political science, the research that’s out there is fairly clear: Congressional candidates tend to rise or fall in conjunction with the top of the ticket. Political scientist Robert Erikson found in 2016 that for “every percentage point that a presidential candidate gains in the two-party vote, their party’s down-ballot candidates gain almost half a point themselves.” A 1990 study by James E. Campbell and Joe A. Sumners found that for every 10 points that a presidential candidate gains in a state, it boosts that party’s Senate contender by 2 points, and its House hopefuls by 4. This basic logic is a large part of why the past five presidents brought congressional majorities into office with them when they were elected to their first term.
Democrats can also ill afford a visibly aging void at the top of the ticket because the party’s quest for congressional majorities started off this cycle at a major disadvantage to begin with. Democrats are defending 23 Senate seats (counting independents who caucus with them) to the GOP’s 10. Many of these endangered seats are in states Trump has won twice, including Montana and Ohio, or once, as in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona. Because Sen. Joe Manchin’s retirement means that West Virginia is all but lost, Democrats would either have to run the table in the races they are defending or offset losses with flips elsewhere on the map. The problem is that no one seriously believes that any Republican-held Senate seats are in play this cycle. The House also likely maintains a modest Republican bias—especially after North Carolina Republicans aggressively gerrymandered their state’s map—meaning that Democrats would likely need to win 51 percent or more of the total House vote to emerge with a majority. At the moment, both the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics polling averages show an extremely tight race in the “generic ballot” question: whether voters want Republicans or Democrats in Congress.
It gets worse. Let’s say that Biden ultimately emerges with less than 40 percent of the vote on Election Day, as the RealClearPolitics average currently suggests. (FiveThirtyEight has him a hair over that number as of Thursday afternoon.) What happened to the political parties of the last major-party candidates to do that badly? No major-party nominee has dipped below that bleak threshold since George H.W. Bush’s 1992 campaign, when he won 37.4 percent. Republicans that year won 176 seats in the House and 43 seats in the Senate. Yes, they gained a few seats in the House over their 1990 numbers—but they didn’t get anywhere near a majority.
Would a new nominee at the top of the ticket change this grim reality? Those of us convinced that Biden needs to exit this race pronto have to acknowledge that there is not a ton of hard evidence that swapping out the nominee at this stage would help. A FiveThirtyEight analysis suggested that putting Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket would only improve the odds of winning the Electoral College by 3 percent. Polls testing lesser-known candidates like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer look even worse on the surface but are likely the result of many respondents not knowing who she is. A CNN poll that showed Harris doing marginally better than Biden also had so-called “double haters”—those who dislike both Trump and Biden—breaking heavily for any conceivable Democratic replacement for Biden. And on Thursday, an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found Harris beating Trump 49 percent to 47 percent—a net 3 points better than Biden’s standing in the poll. For the first time, Harris now does better in the RealClearPolitics head-to-head average against Trump than the president does.
It is also possible that Democrats’ struggles in congressional races are simply baked in at this point, because a new presidential nominee might also be blamed for inflation and housing woes, bear the brunt of the public’s dissatisfaction with immigration policy, inherit outrage over the Gaza war, and become a vessel for the public’s generally dyspeptic disposition. But there are two pieces of evidence suggesting that Biden is a unique drag on the party’s fortunes: A number of battleground state Democratic Senate candidates are running way ahead of Biden, including Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey. And that’s not just the value of strong incumbents. Democratic candidates Ruben Gallego in Arizona and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan are also polling well in front of the president. And a November New York Times/Siena College swing-state poll also found Biden losing to Trump by 4 but a “generic Democrat” beating him by 8. That all suggests someone else would likely do better. At the least, having a national nominee capable of making a forceful case for the Democratic vision would be an improvement over what the party has now.
There is no public polling testing congressional races with different presidential nominees atop the ticket. So exactly what a new nominee would accomplish down-ballot is, ultimately, anyone’s guess. But the fact that many Democrats are hoping that Biden steps aside—especially the most vulnerable candidates like Montana Sen. Jon Tester—indicates that they feel like they’d have a better shot with someone else up there. They believe, with reason, that they are almost certainly holding a losing hand. Why wouldn’t they want to trade in some cards for new ones even if it carries some risk of making their hand worse?