Jason Linkins has a surprisingly good piece up in TNR titled, “The Case Against a Biden Run Is Obvious—and Weak”

What about the future? Goldberg claims Democrats have “a deep bench.” She’s only able to name two politicians, Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock. Take it from someone who watched the Virginia men’s basketball team crash into—and out of—the NIT last year: Two people is not enough for a “deep bench.” Whitmer is one of a few Democrats (I’ll spot Goldberg J.B. Pritzker and Josh Shapiro) who might well round into presidential form, given another few years of seasoning. The notion that Warnock should make an early departure from his hard-won Georgia Senate seat—especially after all he went through to secure it—to take on a quixotic bid for the White House in 2024 is one of the more ludicrous notions I’ve encountered in a while.

Besides, any attempt to solve the dilemma of Biden’s age by seeking a replacement will engender a problem of greater magnitude: It will inject the pre-primary season with a massive dose of unnecessary tumult. Even if Biden had to give way for a clear and obvious reason, the ensuing disarray would touch off a combative primary in an election cycle in which a unified purpose among Democrats couldn’t be more important.

And the pundits who’d sell such a switch as a brilliant tactical decision, as Goldberg has, can’t be counted on to ratify the wisdom of their directive after the fact. Remember: The political media are chaos junkies who treat conflict as catnip and would relish the crisis caused by Biden’s departure. Meanwhile, the lesson of the midterms is that voters are turned off by disarray. Biden’s own polling struggles reflect this: Nothing damaged his approval ratings more than the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. He is still struggling to recover from that one moment when it did not appear that the adults were in charge.

But Afghanistan is instructive in a different way as well. The withdrawal may have hurt Biden’s numbers, but the fact that he was unwilling to keep paying the sunk costs of the Afghanistan scam was a real break from the status quo. Biden’s State of the Union address suggested that the president still has that yen for fresh thinking. As HuffPost’s Kevin Robillard noted: Clinton used his address “to declare the era of big government over, Obama used them to sell a grand bargain and a free trade deal.” Biden, by contrast, “used it to attack big pharma, rule out social security cuts, talk about antitrust policy, and declare the tax code unfair.”

This is a phenomenon that we’ve noted before: Many of Biden’s throwback instincts about the way America could be are incredibly well suited to the moment, and seem fresher than his predecessors’ ideas. Would-be Biden successors should take heed, because at the moment it’s Biden who sounds most like a bona fide party standard-bearer and a better tribune of the middle class than any of the GOP’s weird culture warriors, and more prepared to battle the larger universe of chiselers and cheats who have gotten away with nickel-and-diming ordinary Americans.

Biden represents decency and, at least as of now, that can attract enough votes to overcome the other half of the population that doesn’t care about (or fully supports) a proto-fascist form of government in which everyone is told lies and half-truths designed to do nothing but make them feel that America is the greatest country ever.

Barring a real (not made-up) scandal or some serious age-related gaffe, Biden is my guy until he bows out.

Matt Yglesias has a good column up about lessons learned from the 2022 midterms and one of his chief arguments is a familiar one for anybody who follows him: Democrats are not going to win elections in conservative or conservative-leaning states by magically mobilizing some unseen progressive base that sits elections out.

Democrats are going to win in states with lots of conservative voters when Democrats are willing to very intentionally go after the votes of moderate Republican voters. And he starts by looking at Stacey Abrams’ blowout loss in Georgia — despite having an enviable get-out-the-vote machine — and how her loss can be explained in light of the fact that Warnock won (again) by appealing to middle-of-the-road voters who voted for Kemp but switched over to vote for Warnock:

I don’t think Abrams’ loss reflects poorly on her — I don’t see how any Democrat using any set of tactics could have beaten Brian Kemp in this midterm. It looked early in the cycle like a MAGA primary challenger might beat Kemp, in which case Abrams would have had a fighting chance and we could critique her choices.

But the fact that she lost badly is relevant context for Warnock’s win: he scored the plurality in the original election and won the runoff because a lot of Kemp voters voted for him. And if you look at how the down-ballot races went in Georgia, it’s clear that these aren’t just Brian Kemp superfans or people who have some huge problem with Stacy Abrams. The whole GOP ticket won, and the party controls both houses of the state legislature. As in all elections, a majority of Warnock’s voters were hardcore Democrats and a majority of Republicans voted for Herschel Walker, but the reason Warnock won is that a sliver of people who are otherwise party-line GOP voters backed him.

[Washington Post columnist] Perry Bacon, Jr. looked at these results and concluded that “Stacey Abrams didn’t win. But her ideas did.”

He then lists a bunch of Abrams-associated ideas that really were vindicated by the race, and it’s absolutely true that she was right to say in the wake of 2016 that Democrats had better odds of growing in Georgia than of winning back Ohio and Iowa. But I think it’s also indisputably true that along with the ideas Bacon attributes to her, Abrams is associated with the idea that Democrats could organize their way to victory. And that’s just not what happened.

There’s also not some huge mystery as to how Warnock’s campaign persuaded crossover voters. Especially in the runoff, his allies made direct appeals to Kemp voters urging them to vote for Warnock.

And obviously this worked in large part because Walker had a lot of serious flaws as a candidate. But Warnock’s campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, describes their deliberate efforts to court these voters.

“There could have been other campaign operatives or another campaign that could have said, ‘OK, Herschel Walker has all this baggage, so we’re just going to run to the left and just try to turn out as many of our voters and just let Republicans eat their own,” he told Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur. “We didn’t do that.”

This idea of deliberately courting crossover voters is so banal that it hardly seems worth analyzing. But it really did go out of style in the wake of liberals’ shock and horror at the idea that anyone would vote for Donald Trump. Normally, when you lose an election, the first order of business is to figure out how to convince some of the people who voted for the other guy to change their minds next time. But lots of progressives found Trump so appalling that the idea of trying to do outreach to his voters was beyond the pale. Even though Hillary Clinton’s infamous analysis put only half of them in the basket of deplorables, there was very little interest in even trying to reach the other half. But there just isn’t some other way of doing politics.

I agree with much of what Yglesias says in this piece.

I am as blue as blue can be, and I think the life I lived mostly in Boston has inoculated me against even the idea of trying to appeal to any Republican voters. Especially in the Trump era.

But Georgia, Pennsylvania and other states are proving that fielding middle-of-the-road candidates, not offering up far left candidates who might magically get more liberal voters to the polls, is the way to win in statewide races in places where Democrats otherwise get creamed at the polls.

I’ve followed politics my entire life and had no idea that, in a U.S. Senate split 50-50, committees (including Judiciary) are also split 50-50, but if the Dems are up by one, that all changes:

Under President Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell was venerated — or denounced — for his efficient and cutthroat approach to ramming through Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court picks and confirming federal judges.

In four years, Mr. McConnell’s Senate majority confirmed three right-wing justices and 234 new judges overall, many of them youthful conservatives rubber-stamped by the Federalist Society. These Trump appointees can serve for the rest of their lives; it is plausible that some of them will still be remaking federal law 30 or 40 years from now. Most of these judges are avowed originalists, fiercely opposed to the “living Constitution” school that dominates liberal jurisprudence and allowed for all sorts of social progress that is now being turned back. The overturning of Roe v. Wade is the exemplar.

Since Democrats retook the Senate majority in 2021, Mr. Biden has undertaken his own successful counteroffensive, in tandem with Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader. Mr. Schumer’s Senate has actually confirmed federal judges at a faster rate than Mr. McConnell’s at the time of the first midterm election. So far, over 85 judges appointed by Mr. Biden have been confirmed, including a new Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. The judges, overall, are traditional liberals, many of them younger and nonwhite. Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer were willing to elevate judges who were former public defenders, an unlikely prospect in the law-and-order 20th century.

If Mr. Warnock wins, the Senate can move more rapidly and seek judges who are perhaps more progressive in their worldviews — the sort who could hit a snag if someone like Joe Manchin, the centrist from West Virginia, or Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is the deciding vote.

Democrats must evenly split committee members in the 50-50 Senate, giving Republicans the power to delay votes on judges. A 51-49 majority would be much more dominant: Committees like the judiciary would be stacked with Democrats, greatly speeding up the confirmation process. There are about 75 vacancies on U.S. District Courts and nine at the appellate level. That number is bound to grow as more judges retire in the next two years.

The more you know!