Next!

It feels like the dam has burst.

It started with virtually every liberal and center-left pundit minutes after the debate ended. Then it spread to major donors and then to a handful of low-profile House members. Then polling showed a modest widening lead for Donald Trump. Now the call for Joe Biden to step aside is growing within the Democratic Party. It’s fair to say that virtually all but the most staunch Biden loyalists are thinking it, even if few are saying it publicly yet.

After Biden’s debate debacle Trump’s lead nudged up to eight points among registered voters and six points among likely voters. And keep in mind that, in order to win in the Electoral College, Biden almost certainly has to win the national popular vote by a significant margin. If he’s losing the popular vote, even with the huge margins he’ll get in California and New York and Illinois, he’ll probably lose in the Electoral College.

Biden’s tossing some Hail Mary’s this weekend with a flurry of campaign stops, including one in Wisconsin today, and an interview with George Stephanopoulos this evening. It’ll be too little too late. Even perfect performances for Biden always include a stiffness and halting manner that will only reinforce the overwhelming public opinion that he’s too old for the job. He effectively ended his campaign in the first few minutes of the debate on June 27th.

So now the question becomes: how does the party move forward with a new ticket? Rep. Jim Clyburn has suggested the party can come up with a “mini-primary” system that “is fair to everybody.”

Yikes. At this point I do not care if the system is fair. I’m not excited about some sort of speed dating primary system that rewards activists and their agendas that have nothing to do with winning in November.

The objective should be stripped down to its essence: Defeat Donald Trump. And then the question becomes a simple one to ask, though admittedly a harder one to answer: Which pair of candidates has the best chance to beat Trump?

What we need is a process that produces the ticket with the best chance of winning. Forget everything else and focus, people.

So the party should spend some money on intense polling and focus groups, especially in swing states. Potential candidates should be vetted ruthlessly. And then all that data should be sifted by some group of cold, bloodless pols who care about nothing but winning. The question really comes down to: who has the best chance of winning in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?

This process would be about one-third hard data and two-thirds judgement based on experience. Included in that group of vetters should be people like James Carville and David Axelrod plus local political pros in the key states, like Ben Wikler from Wisconsin, and other practical political pros who get outside of DC and California now and then.

Most importantly for a Democratic Party whose elites are obsessed with race and gender, identity should be ignored unless it plays a role in winning and losing. If being a Black woman makes it easier to win, great, nominate the Black woman. If it hurts more than it helps then don’t nominate her.

A list of those to be vetted would probably include Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Governors Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear and J.B. Pritzker.

And here’s a crazy idea. What if we picked a Republican for the second slot to form a unity ticket? Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Larry Hogan and Condoleezza Rice all come to mind. (Actually, I like Rice very much. She exudes competence, is a foreign policy expert and, as a diplomat, has not had to take positions on a lot of hot button domestic issues.)

We’re in this position because Joe Biden put us here. He should never have run for a second term to begin with. But that’s water under the bridge and maybe it’s even for the best. The primary system may well have produced a candidate little stronger than Biden. A tightly focussed process based solely on winning could produce a decent chance of stopping Trump.