Unfortunately, we — meaning the entire political world, but especially those of us on the left — have spent far too much time in the 2024 campaign talking about Joe Biden’s personal strengths and weaknesses. For example, you may have heard that the president is somewhat elderly. But Biden is more than an individual. He oversees a government with hundreds of agencies and millions of employees. He sits at the head of a party that represents tens of millions of voters and is affiliated, closely or otherwise, with a panoply of left-leaning movements, organizations and activists.
All of these people, groups and forces will have roles to play and influence to exercise if Biden is re-elected. Democrats ought to depersonalize the campaign away from Biden himself and encourage everyone to see the bigger picture. Because a broader system, not just one man, will be on the ballot in November.
The administration has moved aggressively to provide relief to millions of Americans, even if most voters probably have no idea.
To understand what I mean, consider the White House’s announcement that the government will be forgiving $1.2 billion in student loans for an additional 150,000 borrowers. It’s the latest installment in a patchwork of initiatives and programs that, according to the administration, has already discharged the debts of nearly 3.9 million borrowers. Another 7.5 million borrowers now enjoy small or even $0 monthly payments on loans that can eventually be entirely discharged. Though the Supreme Court’s conservative majority torpedoed Biden’s far more sweeping attempt at student loan forgiveness last year, the administration has moved aggressively to provide relief to millions of Americans, even if most voters probably have no idea.
This is not a lament that Biden is not getting enough credit for the good things he has accomplished, though that is certainly the case. Rather, the point is that this extremely positive development — along with many others of the last three years — didn’t happen because of the particular person sitting in the Oval Office.
Though Biden is clearly committed to student debt relief, something similar probably would have happened if Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren or many of the other candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries had become president. Biden almost certainly did not personally design the collection of debt relief moves the Department of Education is implementing; like most presidents and most policy initiatives, he likely signed off on the broad outlines, then let the rest of his administration handle the details. Even though he’s old.
There are, to be sure, moments when a president’s own preferences, history and personality become important; the president enjoys a great deal of unilateral power, especially in foreign policy. But given how much time Democrats have spent arguing about whether Biden is too old, you’d think the entire U.S. government — one of the largest organizations on Earth — was staffed entirely by one man.
It’s useful to think of the government as a machine with a huge number of inputs and outputs, virtually none of which are determined by whether the president remembers who the vice president of South Korea is. Another Biden term will mean that the things you don’t like about him could affect policy, but it will also mean more progressive judges (where Biden has been by far the most liberal president in history), expanded health care access, stronger protections for workers’ rights and climate progress, among other things — even as Biden continues to age!
To make this effort even more complicated, Democrats should want voters to focus on Trump.
If the actions of a second Biden term in all those areas don’t go far enough — and they probably won’t — then activists can and should fight for more. But at least they’ll have a chance of succeeding because another Biden term will have progressives either in positions of power or in a position to influence those with power. The Environmental Protection Agency will be run by environmentalists who won’t shut the door in activists’ faces. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be led by people who care about protecting consumers and have relationships with consumer advocates. And so on.
That doesn’t guarantee any particular outcome, but it means that within the federal government there will still be an enormous engine of progressive policymaking pushing in the right direction, regardless of what is occupying Joe Biden’s attention on a given day. In contrast, another Donald Trump term will not only produce all the terrible outcomes of any Republican presidency but an entirely separate and utterly horrifying set of consequences unique to Trump and the extremists who surround him. The widely documented goals of Project 2025 demonstrate how much the dangers of another Trump presidency lie not only in his own delusions — extensive and growing as they are — but in the increasingly detailed plans of those who would staff his White House. Depersonalizing the campaign away from Biden is no easy task. We all are prone to seeing politics through the individuals who drive events. It’s why nonfiction authors write books with “characters,” and journalists build their news stories around what are sometimes called “exemplars,” individual people whose stories provide the vehicle to explain complex issues. To make this effort even more complicated, Democrats should want voters to focus on Trump — not because he’ll bring an army of authoritarians with him into power, but because the American electorate really doesn’t like him. He lost the popular vote in 2016, he caused his party to suffer a historic blowout in 2018, he lost in 2020, and his party failed in 2022 in no small part because of him. The anti-Trump coalition may be the largest and most durable force in American politics. Biden’s approval ratings are nothing to brag about, and polls show the race neck-and-neck. But there’s no reason to believe Trump will gain support the more people contemplate the idea of him being back in power. It may not be possible to convince voters to think a lot about Donald Trump but not think too much about Joe Biden. But at the very least — especially given the lukewarm feelings many in their own party have about the president — Democrats should do everything they can to widen the aperture through which voters view the choice they have in November. It can only help everyone understand what’s really at stake.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
