The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, Biden is Democrats best hope in 2024

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

2023 is here, and with it come new year's resolutions, a new congress, and the unofficial start date for 2024 primary campaigning.  Joe Biden’s first two years in office have certainly been a bit of a mixed bag.  He has passed some monumental, bipartisan legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Bill, and COVID aid.  But he’s also had quite a few bobbles.  Afghanistan, Student Debt Relief, and a bleak economic landscape.  All of this begs the question, is Biden really the best person to lead Democrats into the 2024 election? Some beltway insiders and political pundits argue that in spite of Biden’s weaknesses, he has a track record to point to that will appeal to voters. His record of bipartisan accomplishments will help hold together the coalition that delivered him the White House in 2020, including moderate suburban and independent swing voters.  And the results of the midterms show, the democrats are in the driver’s seat.  Why fix something that isn’t broken? But others argue it’s time for Biden to pass the baton and bow out of the race.  Biden is too old to run let alone govern, and his approval rating is marred in the low 40s.  There is a new crop of democratic talent that has emerged since 2020, and given Biden’s political baggage, each of them has a better chance of securing the presidency in 2024. Arguing for the motion is Allan Lichtman, Former chair and distinguished professor in History at American University in Washington, DC.  He is the author of several award winning books on American and presidential history, and his prediction system, the Keys to the White House, has correctly predicted the outcomes of all US presidential elections since 1984. Arguing against the motion is Ross Barkan, an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and New York Magazine. Speaker Quotes  Allan Lichtman: “Substantively and politically, he should run again. The unheralded Joe Biden has achieved the greatest record of domestic accomplishments since the 1960s”. Ross Barkan:  Joe Biden is going to be the nominee if he runs. No one is going to challenge Joe Biden. The party has coalesced around Biden, but parties don't always make the right decision”. The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Jacob Lewis Editor: Adam Karch   Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Biden is the Democrats' best hope in 2024. Our intention is to run again.

That's been our intention. We begin in Washington. More documents. Mark classified were found at President Biden's private residence in Wilmington, Delaware, then officially acknowledged. There was a cloud of doubt already over the president's possible 2024 run. Some Democrats even saying, we don't want them in there. Does this increase that cloud of doubt?

I mean, will it impact that 2024 race for the Democrats? There is no way this man is running again. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Well, 2023 is here. And with it comes New Year resolutions, a new Congress, and the unofficial start of the 24 U.S. primary campaign season. Joe Biden's first two years in office have certainly been a mixed bag. He's passed some monumental bipartisan legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill, an extensive COVID age. But he's also had quite a few wobbles and

bibles from Afghanistan to debate over student debt relief to an increasingly challenging economic landscape. All of this begs the question, is Biden really the best person to lead the Democrats into the 2024 U.S. presidential election? Some Beltway insiders say an emphatic yes, that he has historic accomplishments that will appeal to voters, and he still straddles that moderate middle that American politics is so desperately looking for. In short, why fix something that isn't broken. Joe Biden must run again if the Democrats are going to have any chance of winning in 2024. Others argue it's time for Biden to pass the torch and bow out of the 2024 presidential race. Biden is simply too old to run, let alone govern. He is, after all, in his 80s, and his approval

rating has really struggled over the course of his presidency to get out of the low 40 percent banned. There's also a new crop of Democratic talent, especially at the state governor level that has emerged since 2022. Given Biden's political baggage and age, there are many other candidates there who have a better chance of keeping the White House for the Democratic Party in 2024. On this installment of the Monk debates, we dig into it all with the resolution, be it resolved, Biden is the Democrats' best hope in 24. Arguing for the motion is Alan Lichten, former chair and distinguished professor of history at the American University in Washington, D.C. He's the author of several award-winning books on American and presidential history and his prediction system. The keys to the White House has correctly predict the

outcomes of all U.S. presidential elections since 1984. Arguing against the motion is Ross Barkin, an independent journalist whose work has appeared everywhere from the Guardian to the Washington Post to the New Yorker to the New York Times to New York Magazine. Alan Ross, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to this very timely debate on our resolution today, be it resolved. Biden is the Democrats' best hope in 2024. Alan, you're speaking in favor of the motion, so let's put two minutes on the show clock and get your opening statement, please. 2004 is one of the most pivotal elections in American history, both for the American people and for the Democratic Party. Whether the Republican nominee is Trump or DeSantis, democracy will be on the ballot in this election.

I'm not going to comment on Joe Biden's health or age. I'm not a medical expert, but I will say substantively and politically, he should run again. The unheralded Joe Biden has achieved the greatest record of domestic accomplishments since the 1960s. A few examples, the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that may have saved the American economy, the billion dollar infrastructure bill, the first gun control legislation since the 1990s, and of course the tax and climate change bill, the bill protecting a same-sex marriage, the bill revising the obsolete electoral count act that almost toppled our democracy. Joe Biden has also used his executive powers to reverse some of the worst executive orders of the Trump years. In foreign policy, it was Biden who first recognized the

Russian threat to Ukraine and who pulled together this extraordinary coalition of the West that likely save the sovereignty of Ukraine. In hard politics, I would turn to my prediction system the 13 keys to the White House that has correctly forecast the outcomes of presidential elections since 1984. And the way it works, if six or more of the keys go against the White House Party, the Democrats, they lose. If Biden doesn't run again, they lose two keys off the top, the sitting president key and the internal party fight key. If he does run again, they win those keys and they're in a much better position for the Democrats to win this historically pivotal election. Thank you, Alan. Excellent opening statement. Okay, Ross, your opportunity here to put

two minutes on the show clock and have you open up this debate for us. You're speaking against our motion today, be it resolved. Joe Biden is. is the Democrats' best hope in 2024. Yes, and let me start by saying that I agree with Professor Dr. Lickman that Joe Biden is an incredibly accomplished president, that in one term he has certainly done more than most presidents. But let's be honest here, if domestic accomplishments were a barometer alone, Lyndon Johnson would have made an excellent candidate in 1968. Why shouldn't Biden run again?

Well, even within his own party, most actual rank and file voters don't want him to. As recently, it's December, 57% of Democrats said they don't want Biden to run. His approval ratings have been getting better, but he's still underwater. And part of that boost has really been because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which gave Democrats stronger than expected midterm showing. While Biden is pro-choice, he's never been comfortable speaking forcefully for abortion. rights like other Democrats, and truthfully, he's not the best Democrat to marshal that degree of fear and rage in the electorate. But I think we can't do what Dr. Lickman asked and dismiss

health and age. That is impossible. Joe Biden will turn 82 in 2024. If he wins re-election, he will turn 86 at the time he leaves office. Ronald Reagan, of course, was 70, at the time of the end of his second term. And this contrast may not matter if Joe Biden is up against Donald Trump, who himself will be getting toward 80 years old by the time of the next election. But what if Joe Biden is not up against Donald Trump? What if the nominee is Ron DeSantis, who's not yet 50? What if it's someone else?

The contrast, therefore, Democrats will be quite disconcerting. And truthfully, while yes, incumbents have an advantage, we are in uncharted territory with an incumbent who, A, isn't terribly popular, and B is quite old. The Democrats have a very strong bench. This was not as true in 2020 or even 2016. You have a number of governors and senators who are under 60 years old, like Gretchen Whitmer, Raphael Warnock, Jared Polish, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker and others who would make excellent candidates. And finally, you can't ignore the proverbial elephant in the room, which is the latest scandal over Biden's handling of classified documents.

I'm going to speak less to the substance of that, more to the fact that it neutralizes one of the strongest lines of attack that Biden would have against Trump, which is that Trump is corrupt for this very reason, and it also threatens to destabilize his 2024 candidacy, much in the way Hillary Clinton's email scandal in 2016 destabilized hers. And again, I'm not speaking to the substance. I'm speaking to the politics that undoubtedly months. and months of news coverage, of revelations hurt Clinton's ability to prosecute the case against Trump. And I think it's possible that this newest probe and this newest scandal could undercut

Joe Biden come 2024. Thank you, Ross. Another great opening statement. Loving how this debate's coming together, let's, Alan, go to you for a rebuttal, two minutes for you to weigh in on what you've just heard from Ross. First of all, let's look at approval rate. Approval ratings are a terrible predictor of presidential election results. Based on approval ratings, a year before the election year, you would have thought both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama would go down to defeat. They averaged in the 40s, Obama hit as low as 40, Ronald Reagan hit as low as below 40. And yet Reagan won on a landslide and Barack Obama won comfortably. Punditry sounds good, but it has no predictive value.

Ross said both Obama and Trump won in open primaries. The problem with that punditry is they were the challengers, not the incumbents. There have been eight open seat incumbent elections from 1920 to the present. You know how many the incumbent party won, won 1980. George H.W. Bush. Similarly, there have been seven contests for the presidential nomination for the party holding the White House. They lost them all. So you've got to distinguish between the party holding the White House and the challenging party. You know, none of this punditry has any predictive value. They said Ronald Reagan was too old. Similar argument they made.

You're making now for Joe Biden. Maybe Reagan was younger, but the same argument was being made at a much earlier time. And, of course, Reagan won in the landslide. They also said, oh, my God, the Iran-Contra scandal is going to sink the Reagan administration. A much more serious scandal, I believe, than anything that's going to come out of the classified documents, which I think will be forgotten. and yet the Iran-Contra scandal did not sink the Reagan administration, and George H.W. Bush went on to succeed Reagan in this extraordinary open-seat election for the party holding the White House.

Let's go back to my 13 keys to the White House. They are based upon a solid theory, not punditry, that presidential elections are turned on the strength and performance of the White House Party. They have been successful since I first predicted Ronald Reagan's reelection in April, 1982, when his approval ratings were lower than Joe Biden's are right now. And as I mentioned, if six or more of the keys go against the White House party, they are predicted losers. This is not punditry. This is, not punditry. This a system with a 40-year track record. The Democrats cannot afford to lose the sitting president key, and they cannot afford to lose the party contest key. As Ross very accurately said,

if Biden doesn't run, you're going to have a wild contest between all of these different candidates. That means only four more keys would have to fall for the Democrats to be predicted losers, a very precarious situation. Whereas if Biden does run again, it would take six keys to predict their defeat. Okay, Ross, your opportunity to come back here. Your rebuttal, please. I would like to rebut that by saying that, yes, punditry is punditry and an academic rigor or something else. But I think when it comes to presidential contest, academic rigor mostly fails. And quite frankly, I believe the reason is you have a very small sample size to work from. You're talking 40 years.

That's only a handful of elections. We've only had 45 presidents over four centuries. And, you know, how many you talked about, you know, eight open seat incumbent elections, seven elections. These aren't that many elections, right? I mean, you could say going into the 2016 election, Donald Trump could never be president because the prior 44 presidents had all served in the military or held elected office before or it served in government like Herbert Hoover. So I'm a little skeptical of systems like that

because they rest in very incomplete data. The open primary system itself only dates back to the early 1970s with George McGovern. So it's hard to even discuss what primaries looked like in the 1960s or 1950s or 40s because these were being decided at convention. So I want to just state that at the top. The second point is the age question cannot be ignored.

yes, Ronald Reagan was considered old at the time. Joe Biden right now is older than the average life expectancy of the American male than the United States of America. Ronald Reagan, again, was 77 by the time he left office in the 1980s. There's also, again, this is a taboo topic and this might fall into punditry, but it's something average voters acknowledge much more than people in politics, which is that, you know, Biden's ability to speak off the country. has grown increasingly poor. Recently, he twice said his son, Bo, died in Iraq. He had to be corrected. Bo did not die in Iraq. He's called Vice President Harris, the president. He thought the late Jackie Wolerski, the Congresswoman who tragically died in a car accident, was still alive at an event a month later. I'm not a doctor. I'm not diagnosing Biden. I can only speak to what voters see. and voters see a president who quite frankly is not really willing to engage much with the press anymore.

I think because for these reasons, you know, Biden in 2020 was successful in part because there was a COVID pandemic. Donald Trump was deeply unpopular. You had a deeply polarized electorate. And Biden was really able to stay out of you for months at a time. Let's not forget he was campaigning for part of the year out of Wilmington. Again, that was acceptable in 2020. The 2024 contest, I agree, is going to be incredibly, incredibly important. Joe Biden is not going to be able to recreate the strategy of 2020 and hope to win again.

He's going to have to engage voters much more personally. He's going to have to engage the press far, far more personally. And it's these kinds of gaps like saying Joe Biden died in Iraq, which again, in the context of a news cycle can get washed away very quickly. when it's, you know, New Hampshire in 2024 and Joe Biden is saying this and the pressure is on, it's a very different matter. And it's the type of thing, a savvy opponent, let's say like a Ron DeSantis, could seize on right away. Thank you guys. Some great opening statements and rebuttals there. Let me join the conversation now and put to you some questions that are kind of top of mind to our listeners tuning into this debate. Our resolution today, just to remind everyone as be it resolved,

Joe Biden is the Democrats' best hope in 2024. And let me come to you first, Alan, with an argument that Ross has raised, and I think it's front of mind for many people, which is that Trump has had a disastrous back half of 2022. It looks increasingly unlikely. It's not impossible, but unlikely that he will be the nominee for the Republican standard bearer for the presidency in 2024. That does look, as Ross mentioned, like something that Ron DeSantis is increasingly well positioned to Clinton. blame. Again, a lot that can slip between cup and lip between now and then. But surely, Alan, generational change here is going to be a major narrative, a major message should Joe Biden run again. An octogenarian versus either Ron DeSantis or a younger candidate. You know, fully what? 30 plus years

age difference. How do you bridge that, Alan? How do you run someone, frankly, as elderly as Biden for the presidency effectively in this political moment. You can dismiss the Ronald Reagan example, but it was a much earlier time when age was a little bit different and exactly the same arguments were being made against Ronald Reagan. He's too old. He's going to face a much younger and more vigorous challenger. And you know what? He dismissed it with one line. He said, as far as the age issue is concerned, I will not take advantage of my opponent's youth and inexperience. You know, this, again, doesn't have a solid basis in how American presidential elections have worked. What matters is how well the party in power

has performed. And if they perform well enough, they get another four years. Ross admitted that Joe Biden has made extraordinary accomplishments in foreign and domestic policy. That's what this election is going to turn on, not on these smaller things that, you know, the pundits focus on. Remember, the pundits all told us that Donald Trump could not possibly win in 2016. Yet based on my system, I predicted Donald Trump's win in 2016. I was one of the very few academic predictors of any kind to do that. So keep your eye on the big picture of presidential performance and don't be distracted by the punditry that has no predictive value whatsoever in presidential elections.

Hey, Monk podcast listeners, I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program. It's called Friday Focus. And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday. It's half an hour long, and it provides you with a masterclass on international events, all the big issues and ideas shaping our world. We've got that for you. Each and every Friday, here at the Monk Debates, simply access via our website,

triplew monkdebates.com. Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. You'll get all the details, or check out a sample of the program in the same podcast feed as the main monk debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the next edition of the Friday Focus podcast. Now back to our program. Okay, Ross, to come back to you with another big question here that our listeners are thinking about tuning into this debate.

And it's the fact that that red wave that was supposed to crest and break over the Capitol buildings last November, it didn't materialize. It didn't appear. not only did, you know, the Republican Party as a whole underperform, but a lot of the fringe elements in the Republican Party, the Trump, the Trumpistas, the candidates that he backed lost. So why isn't Joe Biden and why isn't Alan Wright that he's supported by something bigger that's going on, a kind of wave moment in American politics, a change moment where Joe Biden and his style of leadership and the Democratic Party that he's molding here is, in a sense,

on the right side of history going into 2024. And that's enough to carry him over the finish line of the U.S. presidency in two years' time. I think it's important to keep in mind that the Democrat overperformance in the midterm, it was really due to a few factors. You know, one was the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which clearly changed. the entire dynamic of the midterm that was apparent from June onward. And the second is, you know, the Republicans on the Senate level, especially nominated a lot of very bad candidates. And, you know, when you think about elections, you know, in House elections,

House elections tend to be pretty polarized. The candidate equality is not always so important. On the Senate level, the candidate equality matters a lot more. And you see it over and over again where stronger Senate candidates can win in tougher environments. But Biden, coming into 20, may not have the benefits of that midterm environment anymore. Roe v. Wade will, you know, have been old news in some sense by then. There'll be more abortion ballots. There will be more protesting around it. But like with any political issue, they, unfortunately, they come and they go. So I think Joe Biden himself can't depend on the same macro phenomenons and factors that went into the 2022 midterm impacting 2024.

You know, Alan was citing past precedent going back to the 19th century. Again, it's hard for me to look at those elections because the electorate looked very different here. You do have, you know, electorates, you have, you know, voters, for the most part, who know who know who they're voting for going into an election. But now more and more, it's hinging on a smaller number of states, a smaller number of independence, a few ticks one way or the other in Arizona or Pennsylvania. And yeah, their candidate quality matters. I think if Hillary Clinton was not the nominee in 2016 and Joe Biden,

that Joe Biden was the nominee in 2016, she's probably carrying Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. So the idea that the candidate quality doesn't matter, that Joe Biden being 82 doesn't matter. I think it defies what's in front of us. And you can't just look to a few precedents because the American presidential election system has changed a lot in the last 50 to 80 years. Thanks for us. Great insights. Alan, let's talk a little bit about the Democratic Party itself. The first year of Joe Biden's presidency was in some ways forestalled, postponed by sharp divisions in the party between so-called progressives and moderates. Many people would argue that those divisions really have not been healed.

there isn't a reconciliation there and that Joe Biden going forward as a candidate in 2024 is bringing to the electorate and bringing to what will be, as you say, an incredibly high-stakes election for the United States, possibly a pivotal one, a divided party. And as much as Joe Biden may have strengths that you see Allen and your models may favor his possible election, isn't there an argument that the defendant? Democratic Party needs a unifying candidate as leader that can bring the different parts together and put in front of the electorate, a compelling united vision for, you know, a dynamic, energized DNC to lead the U.S. after 2024.

It was the great humorist Will Rogers, who once said, I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat. You know, that was back in the 1920s. There always have been major divisions within the Democratic Party. And yet they have always pulled together at the time of election, in part because the election of a Republican seemed unthinkable, and it is certainly far more unthinkable in 2024 than it was, say,

running against George H.W. Bush or running against Wendell Wilkie and many of those other nominees. And there was just an article from CNN just a week ago, which says that the Democratic leadership, the donors, the public officials, both progressive and more moderate, are now coalescing behind a Joe Biden presidency. just a couple of days ago, Michael Tomoski, one of the leading progressive voices in the Democratic Party said, I am enthusiastically behind a Biden re-election. And he said, the legislative accomplishments of Joe Biden are bigger than any in my adult lifetime. You know, a lot of the comments that Ross has made against Joe Biden, you know, all the gaffs, the baffs, the problems in communicating. Every one of them was made against George H.W. Bush when he ran in 1988. They said, you know, he called Dan Rather Barbara on national television. He couldn't

complete a sentence. You know, the Democrats said, you know, if we lose to H.W. Bush, we might as well leave the country. He was 17 points behind Mike Dukakis in May of 1988. And all the pundits had written him off, but I wrote at the time based on the keys to the White House, which looks at the fundamentals, the waves, not the froth on the waves, that Bush is a sure winner, because he's running on the record of the Reagan administration. The rank and file will come together, as they always do, regardless of the polls, two years out. You have a sitting president, you don't have an open seat. All of that points to a Biden re-election. You take that out of the equation and you're giving, you're giving away, Ross, a huge advantage to the Republicans.

Thank you, Alan. Okay, Ross, come back on those key points that you've just heard from Allen. The Biden record is really interesting to me. I think it's a great record. I think it's a two-year record. Joe Biden's going to have to serve four years. And what do the next two-year look like. Consider the Republicans control the House. There's been all this attention on, you know, the chaos, right, in the Republican Party. Kevin McCarthy barely becomes speaker. Well, he's speaker now. He's got the votes. He's going to investigate Hunter. They're going to be doing subpoenas. They're going to be going after the FBI. It's going to be a different two years. The Joe Biden domestic agenda is probably over. And I say that as someone who thought he had many

great accomplishments from the Inflation Reduction Act onward. That's the past. You can run on that in two years, but it's going to be two years old. There's not going to be a fresh domestic accomplishment to share with the American people in 2024. That's just political reality. Biden's going to be preoccupied with the debt ceiling. He's going to have to confirm a bunch of federal judges, which is the main thing he can do now. The time of having a record is pretty much over. And it's true. Barack Obama face something very similar with the red wave in 2010, but he was also a dynamic and much younger and more politically talented president. The Ronald Reagan comparison is interesting to me because, you know, Joe Biden and Ronald Reagan are, I think to me, to me at least quite different.

You know, Ronald Reagan was a former Hollywood actor who even in old age was quite charismatic and quite good at the one-liners. Joe Biden has not, other than the 2020 election, didn't win a competitive election for, you know, 40-odd years. The dynamics of 2024 will be different. We don't know what the economy is going to look like. We don't know what the domestic agenda is going to look like. And I think, again, you can talk about historical precedents all you want, but there just aren't that many elections to cite, and we are very much an uncharted territory. So, yes, let me be clear. As of today, Joe Biden is running for election, Joe Biden is going to be the nominee if he runs. No one is going to challenge Joe Biden. Dr. Lickman is right in that the party has coalesced around Biden.

But parties don't always make the right decision. I go back to 2016. The party coalesced around Hillary Clinton instead of Joe Biden in 2016. That proved to be a quite frankly disastrous choice given the stakes of the election. You know, Ross, it's interesting. I love punditry, especially when it's after the fact, punditry. You know, you predicted a Hillary Clinton win. And now, of course, after the fact, you're saying, well, she was the wrong nominee. Some other nominee would have won. You don't know that.

I never made a strong prediction, no. Let me finish. You said you predicted Hillary Clinton was going to win. I can only go with that. That's the problem with punditry. You know, every year there is something unique and different. an African-American nominee, a woman nominee, a social media, polarization of the parties. And the problem is, if you go with that ad hoc kind of punditry, you're going to make all the

same mistakes that the pundits made in writing off George H.W. Bush in 1988, writing off Bill Clinton in 1996 after the disastrous midterm election of 1990. writing off Donald Trump in 2016. You know, you keep saying historically we don't have enough elections. Ten advance predictions based on the keys to the White House, based on the big picture of the electorate being smart, the electorate judging the accomplishments of the party holding the White House and deciding whether or not they deserve four more years.

That worked in the horse and buggy days of politics. It works in the modern era of jet planes, polls, social media, diverse presidential candidates. That's why Joe Biden deserves to run. And we all admit the record is extraordinary, whether or not he's able to achieve any thing as extraordinary in the next two years. He still has an amazing record to run it. As you mentioned, other presidents have faced worse situations in their last two years.

Bill Clinton faced both houses of Congress controlled by the opposition party. So I would implore all your listeners to keep your eye on the big picture and ignore all all the ad hoc claims that so many times, like in 1988 and 2016, led us down the primrose path of misunderstanding what goes on in presidential elections and misleading the American people. Thank you, Alan. Okay, Ross, we're going to give you the last word in our terrific debate today. You guys have just given us a tour to force here.

Our resolution, be it resolved. Biden is the Democrats' best hope in 2024. Ross, bring this debate home for us. Sure. I would say for the record, I'm not writing off Joe Biden. Joe Biden can win again. I'm not saying he can't. If he's a sitting president running for, you know, a second term, of course he can win again.

The question is risk, right? The question is, should he do it, right? And the reality is, and it all due respect to your system, which has made many correct predictions that I have to go back and, you know, look harder at the methodology. Elections are not always the same. And the context of primaries are different. Again, you can't talk about a 19th century primary or a 1950s primary in the context of the 2024 primary because the primaries were just not primaries. They were conventions. There were a limited number of states that even voted in primaries. You could win a primary in the 1950s, for example, and still lose at the convention. So I'm very skeptical of any model that wants to refer. to primaries themselves as being inherently risky by citing some example from really even before the 1980s. And again, when you get into the 1980s or the 1970s, for example, you are inherently looking at a small sample size, right? Biden has many accomplishments. Biden will probably

not have more of them given the domestic situation. The Democrats have a very strong bench behind him. this debate wouldn't even be happening had Biden picked a more politically potent vice president. I think that's something we all forget. I tend to empathize with Dr. Lickman's position in part because Kamala Harris has not distinguished herself as a politically viable vice president, at least not yet. And I think there's real fear in the Democratic Party that if Joe Biden doesn't run, she's the presumptive nominee. And there's worry about that. But Harris could win. again, that is punditry too. Harris could win. She's a lot younger. She's been a senator from California. She has political skills or she can compete in an open primary and the strongest Democrat can win. So again,

I'm not moved by the idea that primaries are inherently dangerous because you have these precedents look at. These precedents don't date back very far. And they would have more resonance for me if the primary systems had been the same in, you know, for as they were in 1940 or, you know, even 1968. They weren't. They were decided conventions. We are very new, relatively speaking, in the primary era.

And we really just, we have to acknowledge that. Ross, Alan, thank you for a civil, substantive debate. Explored so many of the avenues and ideas that I hoped we would during our time together. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you both so much for coming on the program. Thank you for having me. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Alan Lickman and Ross Barkin. They certainly give us a lot to think about.

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