Would Biden help Democrats by dropping out?

In recent weeks, whispers among Democrats that President Biden should withdraw from the 2024 presidential race have grown louder amid mounting concerns over the president’s age and fitness.

And yet, while everyone seems to be asking whether or not Biden should step aside, the real question is, would Democrats be better off if Biden did withdraw and allow a younger candidate to represent the party in the 2024 election? At this point, the short answer is that Democrats would be unlikely to benefit.

To be sure, this is a sensitive topic for Democrats. Whether out of respect for Biden, or hoping to avoid being seen as ageist, party leaders have circled the wagons around the president, pushing back against warnings by prominent Democrats such as David Axelrod that, due to concerns over Biden’s age, he has no more than “a 50-50 shot” in 2024.

It’s easy to understand Axelrod’s pessimism. Biden’s approval numbers continue to decline and he trails his likely 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, in five of six battleground states, per New York Times/Siena polling.

Moreover, the same poll shows Biden losing all six swing states — Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to potential GOP challenger Nikki Haley, and losing by double digits to a “generic” Republican candidate.

However, by ignoring the question of whether or not Democrats would actually benefit from a Biden withdrawal, the party is inadvertently giving oxygen to those like Axelrod, who think a different candidate would significantly improve the Democrats’ chance of victory in 2024.

Quite simply, if Biden decides in the coming weeks or early next year that, for whatever reason, he is going to drop out, it is highly unlikely that Democrats would be in a more advantageous position than they are in right now.

The immediate choice to fill the void at the top of the Democrats’ ticket would be Vice President Kamala Harris. With only 33 percent of registered voters having a favorable view of Harris, she is even less popular than Biden, who himself has a dismal 37 percent favorability rating, per CNN polling.

To that point, by staying in the race as long as he has, Biden has made it near impossible for a candidate other than Harris to meet filing deadlines to get on primary ballots, or to build out the massive organizational infrastructure necessary to run a presidential campaign.

Aside from Harris, perhaps the only other Democrat who could put together an effective campaign is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has actively been working to raise his national profile, including meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and campaigning across the country for Democratic candidates as well as for Biden.

Despite Newsom’s efforts, whether he is ready for a national campaign against Harris — the sitting VP and former senator of Newsom’s own state — is an open question. Additionally, it is unlikely that the Democratic base would look favorably on Newsom, a wealthy, white man, attempting to leapfrog Harris, an African American woman and the first female VP.

In that same vein, the party’s base is committed to Harris, with slightly less than one-half (45 percent) of registered Democrats saying she would be their first choice to replace Biden if he decided not to run, per HarrisX polling.

Finally, polling by Fox News belies the argument that Biden’s withdrawal would give Democrats a leg up. In hypothetical Trump-Biden, Trump-Newsom and Trump-Harris matchups, the results are virtually identical, no matter the Democratic nominee. Trump leads both Biden and Newsom by four points and Harris by five points.

Taken together, it is clear that whether or not Biden is the nominee, Democrats are in a weakened position ahead of 2024. And while it may be fair to ask whether Biden should have said at the beginning of the year that he would not seek reelection in order to give challengers time to position themselves, the simple fact is that he did not.

As such, despite Biden’s declining poll numbers, changing horses in the middle of the 2024 race would, at best, have very little impact. At worst, it would make Trump’s path back to the White House that much easier.

This is not to say Democrats cannot beat Trump in 2024, they most certainly can.

Indeed, Democrats’ argument — that Trump is so extreme as to be a threat to our very democracy, is facing a slew of criminal trials for trying to subvert our democratic process, and is particularly responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade — worked well in last year’s midterms. And more generally, making the election a referendum on Trump served Democrats well in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Put another way, Biden may be down, but he is not out. And despite increasingly gloomy poll numbers, he is likely the Democrats’ strongest candidate.

Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an adviser to President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. His new book is “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”