Biden's Right (and Aaron Sorkin's Wrong)
Sorkin should stick to fiction and the Democrats should stick to winning.
Aaron Sorkin, the brain behind The West Wing, has some thoughts, and The New York Times, which can’t be accused of particularly good judgment over the last few years, has given him a platform. Sorkin’s big idea, published the same day President Joe Biden announced he’s stepping aside is this: Democrats should nominate a Republican.
Among Sorkin’s first fallacious claims? There’s not a Democrat polling as well as Biden against Trump. Some fact-checking would do him some good here—this is reality, not Studio 60. Public Policy Polling shows Harris is more than competitive even as a hypothetical. Her ascendance to candidate will result in a surge in enthusiasm, one that will grow as she hits the campaign trail.
While generic polls—and those dealing in hypotheticals—aren’t reliable indicators of much, if we note that Harris runs slightly behind Biden in Michigan, well, that’s all the more reason for Harris to pick Governor Gretchen Whitmer as her running mate. With Harris at the top of the ticket and popular governor Whitmer boosting her in Michigan Biden will be free to spend time in his beloved state of origin, Pennsylvania—shoring Democrats’ prospects in two key swing states.
Sorkin’s proposed solution is that the Democratic Party pick a Republican. Specifically, he wants Democrats to nominate Mitt Romney—who, just a reminder, announced his retirement last year. It’s possible Democrats could reshuffle some of the $150 million raised outside Biden’s war chest, but the $91 million in it already? It can only be transferred to Harris with any degree of ease or legitimacy. And the same is true of the nomination itself. Even in Sorkin’s alternate reality, in which, presumably, those funds could be sent Romney’s way—those would be the last he’d see from Democrats.
Sorkin claims that “[n]ominating Mr. Romney would be putting our money where our mouth is: a clear and powerful demonstration that this election isn’t about what our elections are usually about it, but about stopping a deranged man from taking power.” Here, too, he’s wrong: Biden handing the torch to Harris, applauding her choice of a female running mate, showing his faith in an America that can and will rise to the occasion of proving our nation better and stronger than the one that saw Donald Trump rise to power in 2016 is the game changer we need.
Curiously, Sorkin makes a feeble name ID argument. But if Romney doesn’t need to be introduced to voters, neither does Harris. And unlike Romney, Harris hasn’t run a presidential campaign with the full support of her party behind her and lost. Unlike Romney, Harris has spent the last four years traveling our country and the globe, building relationships that will be vital in the years ahead amidst devastating conflicts.
Yes, Romney can “peel off Republican votes.” And that’s exactly what he should be doing from this moment onward or, better yet, from the moment he gives a rousing speech at the Democratic convention in support of candidate Harris. His full-throated support might achieve what Sorkin aptly cites as a productive objective: Giving Nikki Haley voters somewhere to go. In a better America, he’d be joined by Haley. But Haley’s thrown her lot in with Trump. She will regret it.
Sorkin’s attempt to make his case at times undermines it instead—and exposes his disconnect and lack of professional political acumen. As he points out, Romney opposes abortion rights. When abortion’s on the ballot in this post-Roe America, reproductive justice—and Democratic values—win, even in Senator J.D. Vance’s Ohio and Kentucky.
The GOP knows it’s in trouble on abortion. That only semi-concealed frisson of fear shaped notably toned-down Republican Convention speeches. And the current slate of states with abortion on or likely to be on the ballot? Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. Read that again.
So what’s Sorkin on about? Unions, maybe? At a time when 71 percent of Americans have faith in unions, running a candidate with a history of opposing them isn’t an advantage. What about raising the minimum wage? Also not Romney’s thing. Meanwhile, two-thirds of Americans believe the minimum wage has to be at least $20 to ensure a decent quality of life for workers. For the record, Aaron, the current minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
And a word on transgender rights—it’s a losing issue for the GOP. Project LPAC polling by veteran pollster Celinda Lake finds attacks on transgender people don’t aid Republicans. A poll by the LA Times and NORC at the University of Chicago found an overwhelming majority of Americans (77 percent!) believe that politicians’ attacks on transgender and nonbinary people are an effort to distract Americans from more pressing issues. A March Mason-Dixon poll found that 71 percent of voters—in South Carolina—opposed government intervention in gender-affirming care decisions for minors. Going back to 2022, Pew found nearly two-thirds of Americans favor or strongly favor protections for transgender people.
Sorkin’s right on when he labels Trump “a cartoon thug who did nothing but watch TV while the mob he assembled beat and used Tasers on police officers.” He’s right-ish that “[t]he choice is between Donald Trump and not-Trump, and the not-Trump candidate needs only one qualification: to win enough votes from a cross section of Americans to close off the former president’s Electoral College path back to power.” He’s wrong about the path forward.
But Americans knew they could do better than Mitt Romney in 2012, when he lost all but one of the nine battleground states, and if he hasn’t supported Trump, neither has he distinguished himself as a strong and principled opponent. 2024 is not the time to test a writer’s room theory about how voters will choose between strong-and-wrong and a quietly-sometimes-principled-and-right-on-some-issues Twitter lurker.
Not when abortion is on the ballot across the country. Not after the Supreme Court, divested of legitimacy under Trump, has remade the Constitution to crown the president as King.
Like Sorkin, I want to see Barack Obama at the Democratic convention next month in Chicago. But the message he needs to deliver is not that the Democratic Party should give up on its voters, shaft its donors and its own Vice President and the host of Democratic governors who would make dynamite running mates to back a milquetoast Republican. Remember how Joe Lieberman worked out?
Sorkin’s right that Democrats should invite Mitt Romney to the convention. If Romney is a principled as he would like Americans to think he is and as Sorkin fantasizes he is, Romney will put the country first. He will argue that Democrats are putting country before party—and so is he—in ways that Trump, Vance, and the MAGA crowd could never conceive of doing. Then Romney should hit the campaign trail, do—as Sorkin says he can—everything he can to speak to Republican voters.
What we cannot do is attempt to try to meet a need for change by Democrats in a moment of panic with a half-assed storyboard from Hollywood that culminates in decimating the Democratic Party for a generation. Sorkin neglects the enormous harm the the Democratic Party would do, and the betrayal it would be, if it bypassed the Vice President, an indisputably qualified Black woman, in favor of a retiring Republican.
The Democratic Party has allowed itself to be outmanned on the ground and in outreach efforts to what should be key Democratic voting groups. That’s little surprise: In 2013, Republicans came up with a 100-page “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a plan to reach out to younger voters, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. It’s an apt referendum on the 2000 Matthew Dowd memo, which James Carville and I detailed in our 2009 book, theorizing that the Republican base was shrinking as a matter of demographics and the only way forward was to galvanize the base. Over the last decade, the GOP’s been doing both—and getting results.
The answer isn’t to concede and nominate a Republican. It’s to double down on the Democratic Party’s accomplishments. The Biden-Harris Administration has made history many times over: The American Rescue Plan Act. The Inflation Reduction Act. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. A National Climate Resilience Framework. The CHIPS and Science Act. Expanding health care for veterans. Meaningful movement on criminal justice reform, including pardoning federal marijuana convictions. Student loan debt relief. Protections for same-sex and interracial marriage to safeguard Americans’ dignity and choice. Fighting to restore reproductive rights as countless Americans suffer and die for lack of access to basic medical procedures.
2024 is not about perfecting our union: It’s about protecting it. That’s the truth Joe Biden recognized and acted on. Now is the time to honor his achievements—to reach out, register, and get voters to the polls. Stacey Abrams showed us how. And, on that note, don’t send a man to do a woman’s job—which, post-Dobbs, uniting this country decidedly is.