John Donvan
A quick note for our listeners before we start this episode. This debate was recorded prior to the assassination attempt made on President Trump. Let’s get to the program.

This is Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan. Hi, everybody. We hear it said about a lot of things in recent years, We’re in cha- unchartered waters this time. Well, in regards to the presidential candidacy of one Joseph Biden, Democratic incumbent, the metaphor is precisely accurate. The idea that a party’s presumptive nominee, an incumbent who swept the primaries and has all the delegates he needs and more would be pressured to step aside weeks before the nominating convention is something we’ve never seen before. The two questions being asked, “Can Joe Biden beat Donald Trump? Can Joe Biden govern if he does?” are premised on concerns around his age and attendant cognitive abilities and a weak performance in a presidential debate.

Unique in this challenge to a sitting president is that the doubts are being raised by his enemies, by his opponents, but people who respect him and people who admire him and who know how disruptive it would be to switch candidates now so very late in our presidential election process. So what calculations make sense of this idea? Are they valid, or is there a better case to be made for Democrats sticking by Joe Biden all the way?

At Open to Debate, we present sharp disagreements on important policy issues thoughtfully. And in that spirit, we are asking this question for this debate: should Joe Biden step aside? Let’s meet our debaters. Answering yes to that question I want to introduce Michelle Goldberg. Michelle is an opinion columnist at the New York Times. She has addressed this very issue not just at the present moment but in the past as well. Michelle, welcome to Open to Debate.

Michelle Goldberg
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

John Donvan
And here to answer no to the question should Biden step aside, Dmitri Mehlhorn. Dmitri is a tech executive and political strategist who co-founded the investment fund called Investing in US. He works to fund organizations that have the infrastructure to beat Donald Trump. Dmitri, welcome to the program.

Dmitri Mehlhorn
Thanks for the opportunity.

John Donvan
So let’s get to our opening statements. We want to ask each of you to tuk- uh, take a few minutes to explain your position, why you’re answering yes or no to the question should Joe Biden step aside. Michelle, you’re answering yes. Here’s your chance, please, to tell us why.

Michelle Goldberg
Sure. Well, before I do that, I wanna say what I think Dmitri and I agree on, which is that Joe Biden in any condition is preferable to Donald Trump and a second Donald Trump presidency would be an almost unthinkable civic emergency and a fundamental threat to democracy. So this isn’t a question about, you know, kind of whether or not… which one of these two candidates is better. It’s about how do we stop this, um… how do we stop this steam train that… you know, how do we stop this kind of march off a cliff that we now seem to be headed towards.

As you said before, um… and in full disclosure, I’ve been on the Joe Biden is too old train for a while. I wrote in 2022 that he was too old for another term and that he shouldn’t run. And at that time, as every time I’ve written about this since, the majority of Democrats and Biden voters and even people who approved of Biden’s, uh, presidency agree with me. Polling has been pretty consistent that voters wanted another choice in these primaries.

So I wrote in 2022, “Biden has been a great president, but he is too old and shouldn’t run for re-election.” I wrote the same thing in 2023. I wrote something similar in 2024 after the Hur report came out. And even though I saw that report, I think as a lot of Democrats did, as a political hit job, I also thought that the reason that people reacted to it so, um… with such panic was because it seemed to confirm a lot of people’s worst fears about Joe Biden. And what I wrote then is that if Joe Biden can’t go out and campaign and do more unscripted events and town halls and podcast interviews and the sort of things that would let people see for themselves whether or not that assessment was accurate, then he should step aside.

So nevertheless, when you guys contacted me a little bit before the debate and asked if I… a little bit before Joe Biden’s debate and asked if I wanted to argue this point, I was very reluctant because at that point I thought, you know, “It’s too late. It’s not helpful to say that he should drop out when there’s no indication that he’s going to.” And so I didn’t really want to… You know, I kind of wanted to bite my tongue. And then the debate happened, and as I see the debate, it wasn’t just a bad night, it was a revelation that our worst fears about Joe Biden weren’t just correct, that it was even worse than we thought. And since then, it seems to me that everything is kind of pointing in the same direction. Um, before the debate, the polls already showed Joe Biden behind. Since then, there are some polls that suggest that the race is kind of frozen and that things are unmoved, and there are other polls that show both that, you know… that, that Joe Biden is falling even further behind, that states that weren’t previously in play like Minnesota and New Mexico now suddenly are.

I don’t think that we’re going to see the bottom really fall out because this is the country that’s extremely polarized. And I think, you know, there are… there’s a large number of people who kind of feel like I do, that Joe Biden in a comma is preferable to Donald Trump at his best. But that’s not… those aren’t the people… Those people are already convinced, those aren’t the people that you need to win over. And so, since the debate… After the debate you saw this intense panic, and Joe Biden had… You know, had it really just been a bad night, had they wanted to or been capable of addressing that panic, I think you would have seen him out doing a lot more events to show that, yes, he can, despite what we saw on that stage, that was, that was a fluke and he can indeed speak extemporaneously, you know, he can think on his feet.

And instead, we’ve seen… we saw one short interview with George Stephanopoulos that I didn’t particularly find reassuring, and I don’t a lot of other people found reassuring.

John Donvan
I wanna now, uh, bring it back to Dmitri. Dmitri, you take the opposite position, you believe that sh-… Biden should not step aside. Here’s your chance to make the case.

Dmitri Mehlhorn
Well, I am very grateful for Michelle and her comments that, uh, we all still agree that, uh, Joe Biden would a far better president than Donald Trump. The emotional reaction that she had watching the debate was the emotional reaction that I had also. Um, actually, I was just finishing up a cross-country flight and, uh, was maybe 10 minutes before going below 10,000 feet when the debate started, so all I got was the first 10 minutes and a bunch of frantic texts from my friends and family telling me that we were all gonna die.

And, yeah, I felt that, uh, but it’s not the first time I felt that in this era. I, I felt that when the New York Times needle told me he was gonna win in 2016. And I felt that, uh, when Kevin McCarthy visited Mar-a-Lago in March of 2021, that, “Oh my gosh, here we are.” And the sinking feeling is that, um, a movement like Trump’s can absolutely win in America. If you’re familiar with Huey Long or D. C. Stephenson or the Jim Crow South or any of a number of things, there’s always been a core of maybe a quarter or so of the public that it’s not despite Donald Trump, they want Donald Trump. And, and that has always been alarming. And when he won, we had to think through, “Okay, how do you, how do you protect America from it?”

And we can invest in journalism, we can invest in litigation, we have done those things. But at the end of the day, you have to actually get someone to win the Democratic Party nomination and then beat Donald Trump. And Democrats are not that good at winning the White House in general. And, uh, uh, sin-… for a few, uh… for a few years now it’s been clear to us, no matter what we want, that, uh, Donald Trump is the one person who can actually unite the Republican Party and give them a chance against Democrats. And Joe Biden is the one person who can actually unite the Democratic Party and give them a chance against Republicans. And the reason for that, as far as we can tell, is that Donald Trump’s movement in order to succeed has to present the system as catastrophically irredeemably corrupt, and not only is it corrupt but it’s corrupt in ways that you, the great American people, need to fight against because they’re coming to kill you. They’re anti-religious, they’re anti-male, they’re anti-white. They’re anti-America.

And those two central attacks, um, they’ve broken their pick on Joe Biden. Uh, Donald Trump tried to get Ukraine to announce an investigation. Uh, they’ve had, uh, state lies by foreign agents read into the well of the Senate to gin up this Joe is corrupt thing. And, uh, they use age to show how weak he is so that they can present as if he’s not a regular church-going Catholic, uh, who’s clearly also a white guy, uh, who’s clearly a public servant, uh, that people trust. Now, against all of that… Uh, and by the way, if you want to know how important Trump thinks that is, they’ve spent more time trying to present Joe as corrupt than they’ve spent on anything else, maybe even everything else combined. And it hasn’t worked.

And so if you take that seriously, then you get back to where Michelle was and where I was, which is that we would still vote for Biden over Trump. We are just worried that other people won’t. And that’s a totally legitimate emotional reaction, but you got to go check. You got to go ask. Th- the thing you got to know if you’re asking is, what actually do the swing voters think? And it turns out that the five or so million people in the four states that are gonna matter, their views have not changed. Biden has lost two points in the head to head, which is well within the margin of error of these people. Uh, Trump’s odds of becoming president have grown, uh, according to all the models, but by less than 5%. And in this kind of a race, that’s important, and I would do anything to overcome it, but it is not the case that swing voters are ready to dump Joe. They already thought he was that… They, they live in the TikTok Fox information ecosystem, they already thought he was that bad. So-

John Donvan
Okay, I got to break in on time, Dmitri. Thank you. We’re gonna come up to a break but before we do, I just wanna very, very tightly ask each of you, and by tightly I mean to give a tight answer, you know, something you could put on a billboard… Michelle, I’m gonna ask you both the same question. What is it you… the, the fundamental thing that you think the… anybody on the other side needs to understand in order to be persuaded by you? What’s, what’s the main argument?

Michelle Goldberg
Well, I think Dmitri’s argument is that basically the Republicans and Trump have already unleashed their worst and that he’s kind of inoculated. And that’s just not the case. Um, there was a recent poll that showed… A recent YouGov poll showed that the number of people who consider Joe Biden honest and trustworthy is now 36%. And in as much as the case for Joe Biden involves… keeps saying that he is honest and trustworthy, that is going to lauder on the shoals of people’s own perceptions of his, of his age-related decline.

John Donvan
Okay, that’s a big… (Laughs) The billboard’s getting big so I wanna bring the question back to Dmitri, uh, the same question to you, wha-… you know, fundamentally, wha- what do you think is wrong with the argument that Michelle is making that people would need to understand?

Dmitri Mehlhorn
It’s Joe Biden’s decision and we can have a conversation about the decision that he should make. But unless and until he decides otherwise, this is the same binary choice we had the last time, and both candidates have significant new liabilities. And the time we’re spending talking about Joe’s new liabilities is time we’re not spending talking about Trump’s new liabilities.

John Donvan
Okay. Thank you. We’re gonna take a break now. When we come back, we gonna get more into the question should Joe Biden step aside. I’m John Donvan, this is Open to Debate.

Welcome back to Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan, and we’re taking on the question, should Biden step aside? Our debaters are Michelle Goldberg, New York Times opinion columnist, and Dmitri Mehlhorn, co-founder, Investing in US. Uh, in, in our opening statements, we… i- it’s clear that both of our debaters prefer Joe Biden to Donald Trump. Michelle Goldberg saying that she felt that the debate itself was ultimately a revelation about Joe Biden’s, um, cognitive abilities were worse than thought, that this is evident and presumably dooms his candidacy. Dmitri Mehlhorn pushing back saying that he’s, he’s seen warning like this come before but that if there’s anybody in the country who can unite the Democrats and potentially undecided voters against Donald Trump, it is Joe Biden uniquely.

So the question for both of you to, uh, to, uh, to debate about, um, what you saw in the debate, uh, as you’ve indicated, you were kind of raising warnings before that. Does it show you… Um, are you saying it shows you a man who can’t win the election, or is it showing you a man who cannot govern?

Michelle Goldberg
I think the… certainly the first. I think it shows us a man who cannot win the election. And Dmitri-

John Donvan
And why is, and why is, why is that?

Michelle Goldberg
Well, as I said before, as I said, the polls already showed him behind. Now he’s further behind. I haven’t yet heard any plan from the campaign, from the campaign surrogates, from Dmitri about how he turns that around, especially when he cannot campaign, he evidently cannot campaign the way a normal democratic candidate would campaign. And Donald Trump hasn’t even begun to spend money in the swing states becau- and, you know, in part I think because he wants Biden to be the nominee at this point, but there’s just a gusher of money that’s coming to, if Biden stays in the race, hammer home all the doubts that people already have.

As for whether he can govern, I mean, look, I still trust Joe Biden’s judgment on the big things and I trust the team around him, but I think that that’s also a sort of elitist argument to go out and make to the American people, to say, “Yes, he might have declined precipitously, but, you know, trust us, trust the bureaucracy, trust this [inaudible

]. In as much as the Democratic Party has to go out and make that argument, it is catastrophic to all of their credibility.

John Donvan
What I’m hearing Michelle is that, that she doesn’t feel that president simply has the energy, the verve, at this point the linguistic ability to do what you have to do to be out on the stump.

Dmitri Mehlhorn
First of all, to the extent that we have any private access to anyone who’s making decisions at the White House for campaign, uh, we have also said that, uh, this needs to be prosecutely vigor. And, uh, you know, Donald Trump worked maybe two hours a day and, uh, Joe Biden is working too hard. Just that he’s logging too many hours. And, uh, he needs to do a little bit less presidenting so he can do more sleeping and winning so that he can do more presidenting. And, uh, if he works a little bit less and gets out a little bit more, we will see more of him.

However, who will we see? We are not going to see Barack Obama, we’re not gonna see a young John F. Kennedy. We are gonna see Joe Biden. And we thought about the age issue for a long while and we’ve engaged with medical experts about it and political experts because both of these men have been the most likely nominees for several years. And, uh, Michelle could make a lot of arguments about how it would great if we had a nominee who would be crushing Donald Trump. The problem is is there’s no single human being (laughs) that is obvious to do that. And when you play then all out, they’re all weaker, because the movement behind Donald Trump is very strong. They are going to win if we don’t get our act together. Now the question is, should we get our act together? The answer is yes. Does getting our act together mean replacing Joe with someone else? And there I would say, to Michelle’s point, if this was like a, a country in Asia where Joe Biden was treated as a revered elder, he would be napping and he would also be consulted on anything important, because the leader of the council of elders has the wisdom to resolve things. And he is brought in as the closer in bipartisan deal-making, international affairs. That is what people see.

If he’s out of the stump, he’s going to be bad at speaking. He has been for decades. And, uh, the kind of physical aging he’s doing makes that worse. Uh, so he needs to sleep less and go out more.

John Donvan
Michelle?

Michelle Goldberg
We don’t have a council of elders, we have a president. And I certainly think that people like me, you know, kind of writers, columnists, coastal leads can overstate the importance of verbal fluency, can overstate, you know, the importance of having a great order like Barack Obama, like John F. Kennedy. But that’s different than the fundamental question of communication. Donald Trump, although he cannot… also cannot speak in coherent sentences, he is an effective demagogue. He knows how to harmer home a message. And you need someone who can hammer home a message against him. And one of the moments in the debate to me that showed so starkly how, how Joe Biden cannot do that is when Donald Trump teed up an argument with this blatant lie about how everybody wanted Roe versus Wade to be overturned. But instead of, you know, kind of taking on this softball, Joe Biden started talking about a woman who was murdered by an undocumented immigrant. It was baffling.

And if the argument is Joe Biden is working too hard because he is not capable of simultaneously presidenting, as Dmitri said, and campaigning, right now that is the job. The job of a president running for re-election is to do these two extraordinarily difficult jobs simultaneously. It’s a huge list for a 50 or 60-year-old, and I just think we’re seeing that it is an impossible list for an octogenarian.

John Donvan
Dmitri, in, in, in, in light of what… everything that Michelle has just said, do, do you think it would be advisable for the president to go ahead and take a cognitive test and publicize the results?

Dmitri Mehlhorn
Sure. I think both candidates should take a battery of tests, but we still get back to the same, which is Michelle and I are both debating about what other people are gonna do, because we’re gonna vote for Biden. So we’re debating about what five million swing voters in Wisconsin will do. And you really have to… In order to win a campaign, you have to able to stand up next to a [inaudible

] showman who’s lost the ability to distinguish between truth and reality and correct every lie. Um, or do you need to be able to speak without notes fluently on the campaign trail? Neither of those is gonna be available for Joe Biden. Does that mean a single other person is better?

And again, uh, the amount of effort that has been put on damaging Joe Biden, yeah, people are a little bummed. Uh, but in terms of the swing voters, the information environment in which swing voters live, marginal voters, is an information environment dominated by TikTok and by Fox News and by Steve Berman and by, uh, Russian influence. And so the certainty that Michelle has, and by the way again, that I had when I watched the first few minutes of the debate, was that we’d lost the ability to persuade those voters.

So it’s not that we’ve been persuaded, it’s that we think other people have been persuaded. And if you look at them, they actually believe, because of misinformation, that Joe Biden is always like he was in those first 10 minutes and, and worse. They also don’t know any of the things about Donald Trump that Michelle and I know. This is the same choices four years ago, thus far, and both men have suffered tremendous brand damage, uh, Joe because of he presidented, some people didn’t like it, and also, uh, and, and, he’s, you know, responsible for world events that have happened on his watch. Uh, and also, he’s clearly physically aging a lot and is worrying to people because, uh, we sort of remotely medically diagnose that that is correlated with something even worse, and we’re sure of it.

John Donvan
Michelle, I wanna bring you to, to the same question about should he take a cognitive test? And if he took a cognitive test and he passed it, would that assuage your concerns?

Michelle Goldberg
I think yes, he should take a cognitive test, and I would say that it’s in some ways a measure of just, kind of, how dire the situation is that even, you know, say, Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan, is calling on… one of Joe Biden’s, you know, staunchest defenders, is saying, “Yes, it would help if he took a cognitive test.”

And Dmitri is right that this in some ways a kind of second order debate that we’re arguing about the perceptions of people who are far outside our own milieu, but that’s… they’re not a black box, right? There are focus groups, there are polls, there… and I don’t find… The argument that, “Well, they already live in an information environment that is tilted towards reaction because, you know, they’re getting information from TikTok and various news organizations, um, run by Rupert Murdoch and Steve Berman,” like, I don’t see how that is an argument for keeping someone who evidently can’t break through in the race. It’s not that I’m sure that someone else could do better. It’s that I’m sure that Joe Biden is… his campaign is in a kind of a death spiral. And so when you’re in that sort of situation, the right thing to do is take a gamble. There are some polls that show Kamala Harris performing better against Donald Trump than Joe Biden. I think we have to take seriously the fact that in… you know, that that’s before she’s being hit with a… an avalanche of, you know, vicious propaganda and disinformation and just kind of, you know, old-fashioned negative campaigning.

Nevertheless, there is an upside there, and what I haven’t heard Dmitri or anyone else say is, “What is the path forward for Joe Biden? How does Joe Biden turn this around?”

Dmitri Mehlhorn
The reason that I think Whitmer and others are wrong that a cognitive test is a good idea is it’s a binary choice and it needs to be both of them. I would like both of those men to take a series of tests that indicate, uh… Because I think Donald Trump actually has growing dementia and the kind of aging that he is doing is far more dangerous because he’s lost the ability to distinguish between truth and reality. And so if there’s a 3:00 AM phone call with Joe Biden, even in the worst case, which I don’t think is real, but even in the worst case, he will call his advisors, they will come to a good decision. If there’s a 3:00 AM phone call with Donald Trump, the, the worst case is a nuclear strike. I mean, it’s terrible. And so I want to make sure that if there is an evaluation of their brains that we evaluate them both.

Now, in terms of how Joe turns it around, I agree with Michelle that all of these other candidates have upside, for sure. The question is, is the aggregate upside versus the aggregate downside better or worse? And the thing that is soul-crushing for patriots like me and Michelle is that Trump is probably gonna win no matter who we put up. He was probably gonna win in 2016. He’s probably gonna win this time. Uh, and so the question is, how much risk do we take? How certain are we that Biden is going to lose? There are models, all sorts of models, that bake in polls in all sorts of ways. They all give the odds of Trump beating Biden at roughly two to one, which is horrible. But even the most bearish model, which is Nate Silver’s new model, uh, gives Biden a 30% chance of winning. And, and by the way, the most bullish model on Biden, which is 538, which is the most historically accurate model, gives the odds at 50-50.

John Donvan
The fact that, Dmitri, that you are so involved in fundraising and the fundraising has been going well for Joe Biden but then we see George Clooney come up, very successful fundraiser himself, saying it’s time to… for, for the president to step aside from the race, wh- where is the smart money on this and, and what do you make of the fact that George Clooney who is saying it’s time to, to turn the corner?

Dmitri Mehlhorn
I definitely believe that George Clooney think that Biden is going to lose. Now, there is a problem of a self-fulfilling prophesy, because we do have a binary choice. And right now those five million swing voters, they look over at the Republican Party and they look at the Fox News media leads and the alerted officials and the, uh, the donors on the Republican side, they are all in lock step trying to prevent those swing voters from understanding how Trump has changed, all of the different ways, from Roe v. Wade to January 6th, to criminal convictions, to insanity. And none of that is being discussed right now to swing voters because we are in this crisis.

Now, this choice between these two men, which is the same choice that was made four years ago, the delta is different. Trump is more dangerous. The evidence that Biden can be a good president is more compelling.

Michelle Goldberg
Okay, well, I just wanna say that, you know, the idea that the… Dmitri said before that the Democrat… that Biden unites the Democratic Party, and I think that that at this point is evidently not true. And so the argument that everybody should just choke down their doubt and kind of get in line, well, I… it’s, A, I don’t think it’s, it’s feasible. And I also think that it’s dishonest, again, because asking the entire party to unite behind a message that they do not believe is true, it’s not just fatal to their own credibility, but it also feeds into the very cynicism that Dmitri opened by saying is, um, you know, such fertile ground for Trumpism.

John Donvan
So Michelle, let’s go to the scenario where the president is persuaded to drop out. How smoothly can that go or how disruptive might that be?

Michelle Goldberg
Well, I mean, there are two paths, and I’m somewhat agnostic between them. I think that probably the easiest path and the path of least resistance and the past that unites the Democratic Party the most is for Kamala Harris to be the nominee. I mean, that is, you know, what she’s for. People talk about the Democratic legitimacy of, uh, Joe Biden having won all these primaries. You know, Kamala Harris was elected to be there if Joe Biden can no longer fulfill the responsibilities of his office. And so… And you know, and she can inherit like campaign treasury. However, there is another path which is to have the sort of brokered convention that we used to have in this country prior to the reforms that came after 1968.

John Donvan
And how do you feel that will play to, to the party broadly and to undecided voters and, and especially to, you know, to the 14 million who cast votes in the primaries? Will they feel relieved by this or will they feel disenfranchised?

Michelle Goldberg
So I think in most polls majorities of Democrats want a new nominee. They want Democrat… They want Biden to step aside. So I don’t think you’re gonna have… You’ll certainly have some people. Biden has superfans, I hear from them all the time. But I think in general people will, um, unite behind the new nominee. And I, I, I wish I had the power of predicting how an open convention would actually play out. Um, I think you can imagine a scenario when… which is complete chaos and in-fighting and all of the parties seizures erupt, or you can imagine a scenario in which it’s dramatic and exciting and, you know, kind of the hunger of the American people for something new gets channeled in a productive direction and they get really invested in who this new candidate is gonna be.

Dmitri Mehlhorn
Uh, I certainly agree with Michelle that Kamala is the best nominee. And your question, John, gets to, um, the question… the, the point that Michelle was making that, uh, you know, Joe doesn’t unite the Democratic Party and our arguments are dishonest and that reduces moral. When I say that Biden is the only one who can unite the party, I’m not saying it’s unanimously for him, I’m saying there has to be some other individual human being. And I tell you what, if Biden steps down, my number one job is going to be to deal with, uh, the anti-Kamala people. Uh, because the movement to oust Joe, about half of it is anti-Kamala and have of it is pro-Kamala, and they will be at each other’s throats.

The alternative to Joe Biden is a highly fractured Democratic Party. And so when Donald Trump is saying he wants Joe to stay in, that’s a lie. They’ve spent over a billion dollars trying to make sure someone other than Joe Biden is the nominee, and they started when Trump first took office in 2017. It was his top priority the need to have… kept Donald… uh, Joe Biden.

John Donvan
We’re, we’re coming up to a break, but before we do, Michelle, I wanna ask you if you were somebody who is in the president circle and had the president’s ear, what’s the case that you could make that you think would be persuasive to him?

Michelle Goldberg
First of all, I, I really hope that somebody is showing him the polls and not just showing him the polls that he wants to see. I mean, I was pretty alarmed when he said on George Stephanopoulos that the polls he’s seeing are 50-50, which Dmitri I think agrees is not the case overall. And I think what I would ask him to imagine is what I imagine often in a kind of cold sweat, which is imagine what it will be like if despite all the warnings, despite all of the obvious, uh, flashing red lights that we are in an extremely dangerous situation we kind of trudge forward and Joe Biden doesn’t just lose, but he loses in a landslide, which is what the polls are suggesting is possible right now. Because when Donald Trump won in 2016, there was a feeling that it was a fluke and that the American people had not by any measure given him a mandate. And there was instantly an enormous amount of resistance.

If Donald Trump wins overwhelmingly, not just he… you know, him and his circle now know how to work the lev- levers of government in a way that they didn’t know going in before, but if they have a kind of a mandate behind them, if they have a trifecta behind them, because again, I think it’s very telling that you have senators in tough races like John Pastore and Gerard Brown, you have frontline members of Congress like, um, like Pat Ryan and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and others, they are the ones who are saying that this isn’t tenable. And so kind of despair and grief that people feel about this election threatens the Democratic Party more broadly.

John Donvan
Dmitri, you know Joe Biden. Do you think he would be persuadable with a scenario that is depicted the way that Michelle just has, as, as a politician, as a man who wants his place in history?

Dmitri Mehlhorn
The answer is you’d have to persuade me. The bar is higher for him. And your analysis is, uh, heavily poll-weighted, editorial-weighted and, uh, inconsistent with the analysis that we’ve done, which is it is very much a tie race. And if we start telling people the things about Donald Trump that we now know, instead of having all of this evidence against interests of Democrats saying, “Hey, swing voters, the one thing that’s changed in the last four years is that Democratic guy is now unfit,” that’s a pretty horrible message.

John Donvan
Okay, we’re gonna take a break, and when we return, we’re gonna bring in some other voices to, um, add to the conversation. Our question is, should Joe Biden step aside? I’m John Donvan, this is Open to Debate, and we’ll be right back.

Welcome back to Open to Debate. We’re taking on the question, should Joe Biden step aside? I’m John Donvan, and I’m joined by our debaters, Michelle Goldberg for the New York Times and Dmitri Mehlhorn, co-founder: Investing in US. Now I wanna bring in some other members of our audience who have been listening to the, uh, to the debate so far. And we’ve invited them to stir things up with some questions of their own. So first I wanna welcome in Molly Ball. Molly is a senior political correspondent at the Wall Street Journey… Journal. Molly, welcome and thanks for joining us on Open to Debate. Please come on in with your question.

Molly Ball
As you both have noted, we’re, we’re sort of debating a, a decision that is fundamentally Joe Biden’s to make. And so my question for Michelle is, if he doesn’t make the decision that you want, how far do you think this is worth taking? Do you think it’s worth continuing to press and trying to force him out in some manner going all the way to the convention? Uh, and, and the question for Dmitri is sort of in the opposite direction. I, for the past year, have been hearing Democrats making these recommendations for what Joe Biden needs to do and they’re still saying… they’re still framing it as a sort of audition, “He needs to get out there more. He needs to do more interviews. He needs, you know, demonstrate fitness in this or that way.” And he persistently refuses to do those things. So, uh, my question is, i-isn’t too late for him to turn this around? And then, and then I’d like to hear both of you since you seem to believe, uh, that Vice President Harris is the most likely replacement, uh, get into a little bit more of what you see as her strengths and weaknesses as well.

John Donvan
Michelle, do you want to take that one on?

Michelle Goldberg
I think the first question that Molly asked, hi, Molly, is a really difficult one. When do Democrats basically burn the boats, right? When do they decide that this is so far gone that they need to do anything they can to get another nominee, even at the, even at the risk of further do-… of further damaging an already extremely weak one.

Um, I think to some sense we’ve past that point where people are going to be able to swallow their terror and their doubts and their desperation for a stronger candidate, you know? So you have an oped like the one that George Clooney wrote. There’s no putting that back in the, the tube. Um, as to the question about Kamala Harris, my sense is that… You know, first of all, I mean, again, I think that there is such a tremendous hunger among the, among Democrats and among just really the anti-Trump coalition for somebody who can make and really prosecute the case against Donald Trump again and again and again and in a, you know, kind of clear and coherent way. And that is Kamala Harris’s strength, right? She’s former prosecutor, we’ve seen her do that kind of thing in senate hearings.

Um, you can imagine, again, there’s, there’s downside with Kamala Harris. You can imagine her going into the race and sort of, you know, all of these glaring flaws becoming really evident and see her swift-voted. But you can also imagine, again, this huge sigh of relief and energy… and unleashed energy. You know, people who’ve been walking on eggshells who have their, their, their heart in their stomach every time they see Do- they see Joe Biden talk will all of a sudden be able to get out there and go door to door and I think you’ll just see like a huge flood of new energy, new money, um, new excitement. In the best case scenario, Kamala Harris can make this election a referendum on Donald Trump, whereas, as long as Joe Biden stays in the race, it’s going to be very hard to make it anything but a referendum on Joe Biden.

John Donvan
So the question to, to you Dmitri was, the president has been getting advice for quite a while from members of the party, “Try to do this, try to do that,” and Molly’s question is, are we at the point where it’s too late for him actually to take and execute advice that he might be getting?

Dmitri Mehlhorn
If Joe where to choose to step down, and basically what that means is pass the torch, release his delegates, it is not too late for him to do that. So to that extent that he’s open to the kind of advice that Michelle is offering, it’s not too late for him to do that. I think it’s gonna be a ref-… It’s not gonna be a referendum on Donald Trump no matter what. Whoever else is up there, Trump and his team are gonna make it a referendum on that person. And, uh, no one else has the kind… Like, it is a lot harder for Donald Trump to make the argument that everything is so corrupt and bad that, uh, it’s irredeemable and, uh, you have to fight those corrupt people because they’re anti-Christian, anti-male, anti-white. It doesn’t work. And so if we lose that, we may gain a relief, we may gain a lot of energy. And I certainly agree with Michelle’s point about prosecutorial upside of Vice President Harris. I think there is a lane there that I would be very excited about supporting, and also there are downside that I would be terrified about dealing with. And so the emotional pleasure of that minute… The, the first time Kamala gets up there and says something that you, you think is not optimal for beating Trump, you’re gonna feel that same sinking feeling.

Molly Ball
Can I just ask you a question, Dmitri, ’cause you’ve made this point a couple of times that, that Joe Biden is somewhat inoculated from what you might call this culture war identity based attacks? But undecided voters already feel that he is too old. I think that they have an exaggerated view. I think they think he’s basically a dementia patient. I mean, that’s what you see on TikTok, that’s what the focus groups of undecided voters tell you. And so what they’re seeing is a party and administration that is covering up or attempting to cover up, um, something that is extremely evident to them. And so how does that not, um, encourage the same sort of intense cynicism that you’re describing?

John Donvan
I’m gonna need to leave that as a rhetorical question for… in the interest of time. Molly, thank you very much for your question. I wanna bring in Tyler Foggatt, who is a senior editor at The New Yorker and host of the magazine’s flagship politics podcast, The Political Scene. Tyler, thanks for joining us on Open to Debate.

Tyler Foggatt
I’m wondering how both of your positions would change, if at all, um, if Joe Biden were running against Mitt Romney instead of Donald Trump.

Michelle Goldberg
Um, okay, so I, I guess I’ll go first. I mean, one, I think that it would be less existential, um, so that… You know, I think that none of us would worry about if there’s going to be another election in 2028 if Mitt Romney were the Republican candidate. And so it would be… You know, the bar for taking such drastic action is relatively high. At the same time, I think that if he were evidently losing, you know, I also don’t want Mitt Romney to be president even though right now that sounds, um, like a huge relief compared to what we’re staring down.

And so, again, I would still… I think I would still say he’s losing, you know, that when, when you’re losing and nobody is able to articulate a theory of the case for how you turn it around and there’s still time to change course, you should change course. Um, but I don’t know if… I wouldn’t feel quite so urgent about it because I would feel like we were, you know, marching into a future that is not necessarily my preferred one, but I wouldn’t feel like we were marching off a cliff.

John Donvan
Same question to you Dmitri.

Dmitri Mehlhorn
I would be working outside of politics. The only thing I care about is beating Donald Trump. If Donald Trump gets defeated and that version of human evil is gone for this generation, I’m going back into the private sector.

John Donvan
Tyler, that was very brief answer, which gives you a little bit of a follow-up opportunity if you’d like to take it.

Tyler Foggatt
I guess it’s just I, I can see how voters might have trouble, um, seeing some of the arguments about keeping Biden in the race or getting him out of it, how they, they might, you know, perhaps if you’re a swing voter you’re not as concerned about the specter of a Trump as, you know, a Democrat.

Michelle Goldberg
Can I answer that?

John Donvan
Sure.

Michelle Goldberg
I mean, I feel like… Yeah, I mean, Dmitri’s argument as, as I hear it seems to be premised on getting voters to see the unique evil of Donald Trump, and so… and seeing that unique evil as, you know, so threatening that they can overlook all their qualms about Joe Biden. And I certainly feel like that’s the case. But I feel like if you feel like that’s the case, you’re kind of by definition not a swing voter. Swing voter is anyone who’s open to… Anyone who sees Donald Trump as a kind of fascist menace is already on the Democratic side. And so you need to convince people who are already are not convinced about the unique danger of Donald Trump, who are very skeptical about democratic intensions.

John Donvan
Dmitri, would you like to respond as well or we can move on to our next question?

Dmitri Mehlhorn
I, I’ll respond very briefly, John, ’cause I know you don’t wanna go into a lot. We have a lot of theories about how presidential elections work that lead us to believe that there are 5, 10% of the evangelical population might leave the, the top blank. Young voters, young urban voters might vote because of Roe. Um, the rule following law, pro-Regan Republican might leave the top blank. And then the actual swing voters, they don’t believe either me or Michelle, they believe us both. They believe Biden is too old. They believe Trump is too dangerous. And they’re going to be processing all of this information in 80 days in a bunch of different contexts and, uh… In that environment, I still think it’s a tied race. It’s very close. It’s slipping away. Uh, and I’m not blaming Michelle, I’m not saying that the, the public criticism is the problem. Our coalition is going to be public about things. Uh, so, you know, Donald Trump bronzes himself with makeup to look young, no one says a thing. Uh, the, the Biden team does things to try to protect Biden a little bit, and it’s, you know, the biggest story in the world.

So it is a problem, we just have to go back to the campaign, which is letting these swing voters know it’s a binary choice.

John Donvan
Tyler, thank you very much for your question. Um, I know wanna bring in Dr. Julian Zelizer, who is a history and public… a hist- a professor in history and public affairs at Princeton, uh, and also has a book coming up shortly called Our Nation at Risk. Julian, thanks for joining us on Open to Debate, and please come in with your question.

Julian Zelizer
Thanks for having me. I mean, my question is, what might happen between now and August 19th when the convention starts that would change, uh, your position? Uh, and that’s a question for both of you.

Michelle Goldberg
Biden could do a bunch of unscripted events because, you know, people keep saying, people who are sort of on the fence about Biden keep saying… or people who want to believe in Biden keep saying, like, “Well, he just needs to get out there and do a bunch of town halls and talk to people extemporaneously and kind of show that the debate was a fluke.” And, you know, so to me it speaks very loudly that he hasn’t done that, but if he did and he did really well, obviously that would change my position. And, you know, and, and I think if the polls either, you know, stabilized or reversed a little bit.

Dmitri Mehlhorn
Yeah, we huddled as a team to discuss that issue after President Biden’s debate. And fundamentally, the very first question we asked is, “Is the medical situation different from what we thought? Do the brain health experts that we’ve retained think that maybe he’s taken a turn that reduces his ability to perform or is it just more of the physical stuff that, uh, makes him look bad because of, of how he is?”

My point is that we’ve already run that scenario. That was the thing that could have happened. And I guess if it happens again and we learn that Biden is actually performing worse as president, uh, or that his two-way head-to-head campaign is dramatically performing worse, uh, then would have evidence that his performance has declined, and that would be different.

John Donvan
Thank you very much. And Julian, thank you for your question. Um, we have time for one more question from our live audience. We have a number of you who watching this taping happening in real time, uh, and have been submitting comments and questions. This one, um, it’s for both of you. “I would like to hear Dmitri’s take on how to make Biden a viable candidate, what to do at this point to improve the situation. And the question to Michelle would be, how do you do the same for an alternative candidate?”

Dmitri Mehlhorn
Uh, basically here Michelle and I exactly aligned. What Biden needs to do is get out there [inaudible]. You know, there are some commitments that he can’t get out of, but he needs to stop traveling overseas to war zones. Like, he needs to be here and visible. If he’s here and visible, people will see all the bad things about him and they will contextualize with all the good things and then they’ll go pay attention to Trump and then we win. That’s the play.

John Donvan
And Michelle, question literally, please talk about how to make an alternative candidate viable.

Michelle Goldberg
I think an alternative candidate is viable. I mean, you already see polls that show, you know… a- a- and some of these, some of these are difficult to… some of the… it’s not quite apples and… to apples because, you know, when they polls someone like a Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or Gerard [inaudible

] or how… whoever, they’re just not as well-known, so you have a lot more undecided voters. But you see in most there’s been a number of polls now where Kamala Harris is one or two points ahead of Joe Biden, some polls where she’s one or two points ahead of Donald Trump. In those same polls, Joe Biden is behind. Now, obviously that can change, but that shows that there is a, um… there is an electorate out there that is hungry for a new candidate, and that’s what they’ve been telling us all along. When you look at polls, kind of, all through the primary race, before the primary race now, people do not want to have to make this decision. They want an alternative.

And, you know, I think that there is an anti-Trump coalition out there, and you would need a candidate who can unite and excite it.

John Donvan
Okay, now we’re gonna pivot to our closing round. And in our closing round each of our debaters makes a summary statement. Michelle, you are up first, your opportunity, uh, for your closing remark one last time to explain why should Biden step aside.

Michelle Goldberg
I actually wish that Dmitri could persuade me because, you know, as we’ve said before, we’re both aligned on the threat that we’re facing and because Joe Biden has been so stubborn about continuing on this race, I would be relieved if I heard an argument for how he could win it. But I feel like we still haven’t heard that argument. Um, the best case scenario is that the debate didn’t hurt him that much. But he was already behind, and I have not seen any viable plan for changing that trajectory. Meanwhile, you have a vice president as well as a deep Democratic bench of people who, you know, wouldn’t be guaranteed to beat Donald Trump but would have significantly more potential to go out and drive home an anti-Trump message day after day after day.

And, you know, if this, this is unprecedented, it would be a difficult thing to do, and when people are terrified, as I think I’m terrified, as a lot of people are terrified, the natural response for a lot of people is to freeze or to wait for someone else to act. Um, we saw the Republican Party, you know, when they… You know, they, um, didn’t want to be captured by Donald Trump, but they have a collective action problem. As long as there is still time and as long as the situation is this dire, I just don’t see the argument for saying, “Well, we’re probably going to lose.” The, the situation we have right now is fundamentally untenable, and the only people I hear making a case for how you move forward are making a case for how you move forward with a different nominee.

John Donvan
Thank you very much. And at this point, Dmitri, you get the last word with your closing statement, once again, your last change to explain why you do not think Joe Biden should be stepping aside.

Dmitri Mehlhorn
So one of the things I’ve learned from this debate is I need to be more public about the path for Joe to win, because we see it, uh, and we’ve been working on it for a long time and we need to communicate it better. Um, I agree certainly with Michelle that the Democratic Party’s bench is fantastic, and I’m very excited about it. And that’s why if we can just beat Trump this one more time things are good. I’m just saying right now the binary choice that we have, uh, Joe… If, if we think Trump is most likely to win… is more likely to not to win, what’s our best chance of defeating him? That’s my only argument.

When I was nine years old, uh, the Empire Strike Back came out, and I saw it in the theater. And so I was there with Luke when he met Yoda. And when he met Yoda he was told to look for a leader who could protect against the dark side. And what he saw was a centuries-old, frail, rickety comic figure, uh, animated by Jim Henson, and he, like me, nine years old, was like, “That’s not a leader.” Because we see that leaders are not like that. We know that leaders are strong and alpha. People like us look at a big bucket of chemicals like Donald Trump and we’re like, “Ah, leader.” However, that’s not universally true. There are plenty of stories, Uncle Iroh, Dumbledore, uh, Master Splinter. Uh, Warren Buffett made more than half of his net worth, $50 billion, after he was 83. There are cases where physical age is different from broader age. And the job of the president in particular is one that can be adapted to Joe Biden’s unique ste- strengths and weaknesses.

When I was 12 years old, Return of the Jedi came back… came on, and I saw Yoda again towards the end of his life. I also saw Jabba the Hutt. Donald Trump is Jabba the Hutt. He’s vigorous, violent, predatory, deranged, criminal. And it may be that Yoda is very frail, the Jim Henson animation is very frail, but everybody I know would choose Yoda over Jabba the Hutt in any circumstance, including the Return of the Jedi circumstance. So we just have to make that case to the swing voters, and the polls show that we can. The swing voters have not moved very much. The people who’ve moved are people like George Clooney. And like, it’s important but it’s not the swing voters, it’s a different thing.

John Donvan
Thank you very much. And that is a wrap on his debate. And I wanna thank both of our debaters, Michelle Goldberg and Dmitri Mehlhorn. Uh, we really appreciate your willingness to show up, to disagree civilly, and the fact that you did it so simply and it’s in such an interesting way. Thanks to both of you for joining us on Open to Debate.

Michelle Goldberg
Thank you so much.

Dmitri Mehlhorn
Thanks, John.

John Donvan
And I also wanna thank my fellow journalists and, and other question answer- askers, uh, Mo- Molly and Tyler and Julian. Thank you so much for taking part in the program as well. And finally, a big thank you to you our audience for tuning in to this episode of a live taping of Open to Debate. I want to remind those of you who don’t know that we’re a non-profit working to combat extreme polarization through what we just saw, civil debate. And our work is made possible by listeners like you and by the Rosenkranz Foundation and by supporters of Open to Debate. Robert Rosenkranz is our chairman, our CEO is Clea Conner, Lia Matthow is our chief content officer. Elizabeth Kitzenberg is our chief advancement officer. This episode was produced by Alexis Pancrazi and Marlette Sandoval, editorial and research by Gabriella Mayer and Andrew Foote. Andrew Lipson and Max Fulton provided provided production support. And the Open to Debate team also includes Gabrielle Iannucelli, Rachel Kemp, Erik Gross and Linda Lee. Damon Whittemore mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Alex Climent, and I’m John Donvan. We will see you next time on Open to Debate.