Even if voters or the establishment wanted to, there really isn’t a viable process to replace Biden as the nominee.
That President Joe Biden is an old man is nothing new. It’s also not groundbreaking to say that he’s unpopular with broad swathes of Americans.
But after last week’s special counsel report on Biden’s handling of classified documents highlighted lapses in Biden’s memory during questioning, a familiar question has taken hold: Is Biden really the best option Democrats have in 2024?
This malaise isn’t limited to Biden; this presidential cycle there’s widespread dissatisfaction that two old men are all but guaranteed to be the major parties’ presidential nominees.
On the Republican side, that’s come across through a contested primary that despite still delivering Donald Trump resounding victory after resounding victory, has shown a small but fierce opposition to Trump among a subset of GOP voters.
Meanwhile, in the press and on the Democratic side, there’s an unwillingness by a subset of people (progressives, young people, and some politicians) to accept that Biden’s nomination is really happening. Now the past week has left normies and politicos alike wondering: What would it take for someone to replace Biden at this point? Is there a feasible process? Is it too late?
It would be a historic effort to even try — no sitting president has lost his party’s nomination to a primary challenger in the modern political era.
Replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee at this point would be a herculean, if not impossible, task. It would take overcoming two kinds of obstacles: real-world, practical challenges, and the more hypothetical but still important political challenges that exist for any potential Biden replacement.
The practical problems are daunting
Let’s start with the real-world challenges.
The Democratic presidential nominee is chosen in August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where a candidate needs to win the support of 1,969 of the 3,936 Democratic delegates. Those delegates are assigned proportionally based on the vote totals in a state’s primary (for any candidate who wins more than 15 percent of votes), and are then “pledged” or “bound” to that candidate in the first round of voting at the Democratic convention. Under this system, another candidate would need to win more delegates than Biden.
Those 2024 primaries are well underway, and Biden has won every contest and every delegate so far. His support has been nearly uniform: In South Carolina, he won about 96 percent of the vote and in Nevada, he won about 90 percent of the vote. Those states collectively only have 91 delegates — or 2 percent of the total available — but his primary challengers have either dropped out or face nearly impossible odds of beating him in any of the upcoming March contests, when more than 2,000 delegates will be up for grabs.
And in those upcoming contests, before even rallying a base of support or raising money, a Democratic challenger would need to have registered with states to appear on the primary ballot. As the former political pollster Adam Carlson has pointed out, those filing deadlines have passed in 44 states. So it’s literally too late for a primary challenger who isn’t already out there (ahem, Dean Phillips) to make it onto ballots.
Even if someone could magically mount a successful challenge and notch some delegates, any that Biden has won will be bound to support him at the first DNC floor vote, according to party rules. Only Biden can make the decision to direct his delegates to vote for someone else, but they are pledged to vote for him unless he drops out beforehand.
And this is where the practical and political challenges merge: Biden is the only one who can decide if he wants to drop out before the floor vote. And there are plenty of reasons that wouldn’t happen.
The political challenges are very risky
Politically, it’s incredibly risky for anyone else to jump into the contest. The vast majority of the Democratic establishment has already united around Biden — endorsing him, stumping for him, and leading the party’s operations because of Biden.
This is also where it’s important to dispel the notion that anyone could force Biden to drop out.
The DNC is not some omnipotent, shadowy operation that has the power, influence, or ability to crown a different party leader. Who do you think chose the DNC chair and vice-chairs? There just isn’t a council of decision-makers who can tell Biden to drop out or choose to ditch him.
And that speaks to a bigger issue with how our political parties are thought of. The power of party elites is often overstated — and the primaries so far show the influence of voters. As unpopular as Biden might seem to some folks, he still won handily in the 2020 primary, and when given options to protest-vote in New Hampshire or select “none of these candidates” in Nevada this year, Democrats have still sided with Biden.
So only Biden could make the decision to drop out. He doesn’t want to (not least because he sees himself as key to stopping Trump’s reelection.) And even if he did choose to, the only option that would not risk massive dissension among the Democratic base would be to choose his vice president, Kamala Harris. The vice president has her own political drawbacks: She polls worse than Biden against Trump, hasn’t run a successful national campaign before, and, unfortunately, faces different voter prejudices because she is a woman of color.
Other Democratic stars, like Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Secretary Pete Buttigieg, are also loyal Biden Democrats, poll worse than Biden, or are biding their time. And to bypass Harris for one of them also opens up potential ire from Black voters, without whom Democrats can’t win.
Should a different, other Democrat emerge, with the vocal support of, I don’t know, Barack Obama and a core of Biden-critical strategists and politicians, and should first lady Jill Biden and other Biden confidantes approach Biden and convince him to drop out, we’d likely head toward a brokered convention with multiple rounds of voting. That also opens up the chance for even more chaos and disunity among Democrats. Does that seem worth it to anyone in Democratic politics right now?
The simple answer is no. It’s too late.
If you’re a Democrat, or want to beat Donald Trump, it looks like it’s Biden or bust.
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
Inflation is cooling, but food companies keep raising prices.
In 2022, grocery prices rose more than they had in over four decades, since the “great inflation” of the 1970s. The hair-raising climb has finally stopped, but the pain remains: We’re still paying 25 percent more for groceries than we did in 2019. A pound of ground beef in December 2019 was $3.86 — in December 2023 it was $5.21. A 16-ounce bag of potato chips went from $4.53 to $6.40. The price of a 12-ounce can of soda rose almost 64 percent. Consumer prices tend to go only one way — up.
Despite a falling inflation rate and low unemployment, Americans have a dismal outlook on the economy; food prices being stuck stubbornly high is almost certainly a big reason why. A majority of people, according to a recent YouGov survey, now blame inflation on big corporations seeking maximum profits.
Food companies were quick to pass along their rising input costs to consumers, says Lindsay Owens, executive director of the progressive economic advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative. Now those costs have come down, but “they are not quick to pass along their savings,” she says.
Not only that, but companies haven’t stopped raising prices, partly because demand hasn’t plummeted. PepsiCo, which makes not just beverages (Pepsi, Gatorade, Aquafina) but beloved snacks (Doritos, Cheetos) as well as packaged foods (Quaker Oats), raised prices seven quarters in a row, and by 11 percent just between July and September of last year, according to AP. It plans to make more “modest” hikes in 2024. There’s been anger and pushback from both consumers and lawmakers, and even the president — yet food prices keep trickling higher, even if at a slower pace.
But is another world possible?
In January, a major European grocery chain called Carrefour said it would drop some of Pepsi’s products from over 9,000 store shelves in Poland, Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain, citing “unacceptable price increases,” displaying signs in stores to explain the absence. Across the pond, apparently, it’s not just consumers that try to boycott food brands — powerful grocery retailers get in on the game too. PepsiCo, for its part, is insisting that it pulled out of Carrefour, not the other way around, because it couldn’t agree on a new contract. A PepsiCo spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that it couldn’t “sustain customer relationships which are no longer profitable.” Neither Carrefour nor PepsiCo responded to a request for comment for this article.
It’s a kind of corporate beef that may feel novel to those in the US, where grocery retailers and food companies have been raising prices with no end in sight for the last few years. In theory, the biggest supermarkets in the nation — Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Publix — could send a similar volley putting the blame on food conglomerates. Why there hasn’t been a public brouhaha between these factions here highlights the dire state of market concentration in the grocery industry, where a sprinkling of companies pull almost all of the strings.
Has a US grocery chain ever said “no way” to a brand over price?
It’s not quite accurate to call what Carrefour is doing a “boycott.” Not all PepsiCo products are gone from all their 14,000-plus stores, and the industry term for when a store no longer sells a product is “delisting.” It happens from time to time, for a variety of reasons — but usually the impetus for it isn’t so public.
We know Walmart isn’t happy with its price-hiking suppliers, with some food brands reportedly getting pushback from the largest grocery chain in the nation. But the company hasn’t publicly made any threats or taken any action so far. In 2022, CEO Doug McMillon said mildly that the company has been asking suppliers to “help us not have to pass something on to a customer,” that “something” being costs. Mostly, the company line has been that they’re working together with food brands to negotiate prices.
Often we just don’t know why a store stops carrying a brand. It could be that they didn’t sell well enough, or there was another more appealing brand that deserved the shelf space, or an item was hard to get consistently in stock, or its competitors were offering it for a lot cheaper than the store was willing to. What’s notable in Carrefour’s case is that it has not only delisted products from a huge, well-known company, but has also made explicit why it’s doing so: It’s PepsiCo’s fault. It’s a good PR move for Carrefour, and it also handily explains why some sought-after products are suddenly unavailable.
It’s also not the first time that Carrefour, headquartered in France, has been publicly aggressive about food companies’ price hikes. Late last year, it started adding labels next to products such as Lipton ice tea showing that their package size had shrunk but their price didn’t decrease — a practice coined as #shrinkflation.
Why we haven’t seen a grocer vs. food giant face-off in the US
Europe and the US have dealt with food inflation in distinct ways: The former tends to be more aggressive about it. With people clamoring for relief — food inflation in many EU nations has been even worse than in the US — several countries set price caps on food staples; a few got rid of the value-added tax on food (most US states already exempt groceries from the sales tax, though some states have also recently lowered or axed them.) Last year, the French government demanded supermarkets and food manufacturers start their annual price negotiation earlier — they typically agree on prices between December and March, and can’t adjust them for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, US retailers and food companies negotiate prices all year round, which means price hikes can (and do) come at any time.
Owens, whose organization just released a report on how to bring down high grocery prices, called the #shrinkflation labels Carrefour rolled out last year an interesting strategic move. “The [price] negotiations are coming up, and they’re basically driving down the volume of sales in certain companies — sort of saber rattling.”
While President Biden recently called for food companies and grocery stores to end “price gouging” and “greedflation,” the US hasn’t gone after food corporations directly to lower prices. It has beefed up antitrust enforcement and has spent money on bolstering competition in concentrated food industries like meatpacking in the hope of keeping prices lower in the long term. But the fruits of these efforts will take a while to grow; the discontent over food prices isn’t going away.
“In principle, nothing stops companies such as Walmart or Target responding in a similar way to Carrefour,” Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Vox in an email. “But this would require major political pressure. Retailers will not act on their own, but with the right mix of sticks and carrots they might be mobilized as strategic allies in the fight against the cost of living crisis.”
Walmart versus everyone else
One reason we might not have seen a Carrefour-like campaign play out here is that there’s an even greater power imbalance in the grocery business than in Europe. Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at the consulting firm GlobalData, notes that the European grocery market overall is more competitive than America’s. No single major player wallops all others in market share: In France, the largest grocery chain, E. Leclerc, commands about 24 percent of the market, according to consulting firm Kantar. The next biggest — Carrefour — has about 19 percent. In the US, Walmart possesses about a quarter of the grocery store market (not including Sam’s Club, which it also owns), while its closest competitor, Costco, has just 7 percent.
“I think that the brands are just so much keener to stay on the shelves of grocers like Walmart,” Saunders says. Walmart is the source of about 20 percent of sales for big suppliers like General Mills. The supermarket king may not see a reason to drag disputes out into the daylight. They regularly demand — and get — cheaper prices from their suppliers than smaller competitors can. Those suppliers then make up their losses by charging more to other smaller grocers.
Food company executives have overtly recognized that “capitalism is a little more unfettered in the US and in Europe,” says Elizabeth Pancotti, a strategic adviser at Groundwork and one of the authors of its recent grocery price report. The negotiation approach is different, too — nicer. “They’re like, ‘Look how much volume we can give you if you cut a dollar off the price you’re charging us,’” Pancotti continues. Owning 25 percent of the US grocery market is also a lot bigger than having a quarter of the French market.
Price disagreements between grocery stores and the suppliers that fill their shelves happen from time to time. Retailers want to gain customers who will stuff their shopping carts, so they would prefer the cost of goods not to rise too much — especially if you’re a value chain like Walmart or Costco. In 2017, Walmart reduced their Campbell Soup orders, reportedly over a dispute on discounts and shelf space. Campbell’s sales dipped as a result. It’s not clear how the standoff was resolved, but it’s worth noting that, at the time, Walmart made up 20 percent of the company’s yearly sales.
At the same time, grocers, even ones as mighty as Walmart, have less leverage when it comes to kicking out the likes of Pepsi. The company makes too many popular snacks and beverages; people tend to have strong feelings about Pepsi versus Coke, and no store-brand substitute will do. PepsiCo’s CEO even boasted in an earnings call that people “are willing to pay more” for their brand. On the other hand, people are much more likely to buy the cheapest trash bag or household cleaning product, so it’s harder to push prices up there.
It’s a lose-lose for the consumer — for now
It might be refreshing to see a giant grocery chain attack out-of-control food inflation, but the reality is that meaningful pro-consumer change is unlikely to arise from giant retailers taking a stand on our behalf when the messy root is market concentration.
There’s an incentive for grocers to offer a lower sticker price than competitors, but they — just like food companies — are eager to improve profit margins where they can. One of the most notorious industry practices is something called a “slotting fee,” which is a price that a store charges suppliers to get shelf real estate. Nielsen says slotting fees for new products can cost between $250 to $1,000 per item, and the most expensive slots are areas like the checkout counter, where it’s easy for a customer to impulsively throw a candy bar onto the conveyor belt.
Pancotti calls it a “pay-to-play and a pay-to-stay model,” and says that slotting fees are “ripe for regulation.”
Slotting fees are one more cost that ultimately gets passed on to the consumer. These fees have the added effect of widening the price gap between other brands and stores’ private labels, which grocery giants have been leaning into in recent years. Walmart’s cheaper private label is great for your bank account, but it means giving even more market share to the industry heavyweight — which, in the end, can counterintuitively drive up prices. A dominant retailer like Walmart doesn’t need to keep prices roughly the same (and it hasn’t) — it just has to be cheaper than the other guys that are marking up groceries, and small, independent grocers can’t compete. Pancotti notes that there’s already a federal law, called the Robinson-Patman Act, that outlaws suppliers from giving special discounts to just some of their buyers — like, say, Walmart. But enforcement of the law has fallen to the wayside since the 1980s. Slowly, the small grocers will either fail or try to merge to survive.
The way to discipline continued price hikes is to dismantle food monopolies — but that doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye, especially when so much money is arrayed against it. Whether the Kroger-Albertsons merger, which would make it the second biggest supermarket chain in the US, will be blocked by the government is still up in the air. A quicker balm to high grocery prices would be to increase food stamp benefits and increase eligibility for them, say Pancotti and Owens of Groundwork, putting more money for food into people’s hands.
As grocery prices remain sky-high and continue to creep higher, some retailers want a hard stop, says Saunders. But food brands don’t see a reason to stop. “We’re seeing more of these skirmishes emerge now,” he says. It remains unlikely that grocery retailers will suddenly band together to publicly call out their suppliers. Vox reached out to the four biggest supermarkets in the US, who together make up almost half of the entire market, asking whether they were considering doing something similar to what Carrefour has done. None responded.
The world’s “coolest dictator,” Nayib Bukele, wins reelection.
On February 4, as El Salvador held presidential elections, current president Nayib Bukele showed up at a polling place accompanied by speakers blasting “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by R.E.M.
The song choice was deliberate — Bukele was once again trolling critics who claim he’s steering the country toward autocracy. For a while, his Twitter bio read “The World’s Coolest Dictator.”
Since being elected president in 2019, Bukele has made international headlines for what some have described as a millennial persona, eschewing ties and suits in favor of jeans and sunglasses and taking a selfie during his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly. He has famously sold El Salvador as a cryptocurrency paradise, making it the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.
But Bukele’s detractors say he has used the presidency to push El Salvador away from democracy, packing the nation’s judiciary with judges sympathetic to his policies and reshaping electoral law to ensure his political party holds a majority in the legislature.
During his nearly five years in office, Bukele has declared an ongoing state of emergency, using the threat of gang violence to curtail civil liberties. He very publicly stormed the legislature with the aid of the military to demand funding for his policy priorities. And the fact that Bukele ran for reelection at all was unprecedented and probably illegal: El Salvador’s constitution explicitly bars reelection to consecutive presidential terms. Still, he has claimed victory in the vote and few are disputing that he won the presidency, though 60 seats in Congress are being disputed by El Salvador’s electoral body.
Silvia Viñas is the co-host of a new podcast about Bukele, Bukele: El señor de Los Sueños. She says that if you define a democracy only as the people being able to vote, El Salvador has that.
However, democracy is about much more. If Bukele controls everything without checks to his authority, Silvia asks, is the country’s government still a democracy? What follows is an adapted transcript of her conversation with Sean Rameswaram, co-host of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, edited for length and clarity.
Sean Rameswaram
[Bukele is] the youngest president in the history of El Salvador when he’s elected in 2019. A millennial president. What’s he like when he gets into office? Is it all avocado toast and Instagram or what?
Silvia Viñas
He sells this image of the young, hip millennial president who is different from the other presidents in Latin America. He was 37 — as you say he looked very different from other presidents. He didn’t wear suits. He wore leather jackets, he used social media to conduct state business, to fire government employees or to ask them to take care of an issue. When he went to the UN, he took a selfie.
When he took office, the Congress did their job of being a counterweight and performing checks and balances, as they should in a democracy, because he doesn’t have a majority there. And so he started a fight with lawmakers because he wanted them to help finance his plan to reduce violent killings and to fight the gangs.
So Congress asked for more details about how he’s going to spend the money. And Bukele got tired of legislators delaying everything, so he called for an extraordinary session for Sunday, February 9th, 2020.
So some legislators go, but they don’t have enough people to actually carry out a session to vote on the loan. Meanwhile, Bukele advertised on social media for people to go march to Congress. They use government buses driven by military personnel to bring people to this gathering. And inside, while the legislators are waiting for the session to start, armed military personnel show up inside the building.
Legislators feared that this was a coup, with military entering the Congress.
Sean Rameswaram
It sounds like January 6th if it worked.
Silvia Viñas
Yes, and so Bukele asked the crowd, will you let me enter Congress? And of course, they say “Yes!”
So he entered the room where the legislators are waiting, with the military already inside. He sat in the chair where the president of the Congress would sit during a session. And he said, “Let’s say a prayer.”
He puts his hands on his head and he prayed in silence. And then he just got up and left. It was like a show of force, showing what he’s capable of doing. It was a fear tactic, showing that he could instigate a coup.
Sean Rameswaram
Does he find a way to consolidate power after that?
Silvia Viñas
Yeah, he consolidates power the following year when his party and allied parties win a majority in Congress. So within a few months after winning that election, he was able to gain legislative power and then judicial power. After that it’s like, okay, he can do anything he wants. He controls everything.
Sean Rameswaram
It’s my understanding that one of the reasons people back Bukele is because he’s taking a stand against the gangs and gang violence in El Salvador. How does he, as president, oppose the gangs?
Silvia Viñas
You might remember the images of prisoners in Salvadoran jails with shaved heads, without a shirt, with their hands behind their back, all sitting very close to one another in lines? Those images went around the world.
That was a reaction from President Bukele, because in April 2020 there was a surge in violence and 76 homicides in four days. His response was to crack down on gang members in jails, and he authorized security officers to use lethal force on inmates and suspects. He mixed members of rival gangs in the same cells. He was trying to show that he was treating the gang members terribly because they’ve done so much damage to our society. But then another big wave of violence happens, and there are 87 murders in three days.
So Bukele requested that Congress declare a state of emergency. And this state of emergency has been renewed 22 times, every 30 days. We’re almost at a two-year mark under a state of emergency in the name of fighting the gangs.
Sean Rameswaram
And what does the state of emergency get him in terms of power?
Silvia Viñas
It suspends basic rights, like right to defense or the presumption of innocence. More military on the streets and more military resources. The government so far has imprisoned over 75,000 people — that’s more than 1 percent of the population.
El Salvador is the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. There are thousands of reports of arbitrary arrests, of abuse, of torture. But again, this is possibly his most celebrated measure and the one that has ultimately made him one of the most popular politicians in the Americas.
Sean Rameswaram
Bukele seems to have consolidated so much power while in office. But he is still restricted by a constitutional term limit. How does he get past that?
Silvia Viñas
The Salvadoran constitution is very clear that reelection is prohibited. Basically, you can be president as many times as you win in El Salvador, but just not consecutively. So in September 2021, the Constitutional chamber, which is controlled by pro-Bukele magistrates, issued a resolution that says that only the people can decide whether the president should continue, ignoring the articles of the Constitution.
The chamber basically interprets one article of the constitution to say the only requirement is that he step down from the position of president six months before the beginning of the new presidential term. So he stepped down from office before December 1st of 2023, and the new period will begin in June.
Sean Rameswaram
What do people think he’s going to do now that he has this historic second term?
Silvia Viñas
When he announced that he was running, he said we have shown that this is the only correct path for El Salvador. We can expect the state of emergency to continue. There’s no indication that Bukele plans to dial back his policies.
There’s a concern that several experts mentioned concerning his popularity while so many people have been arrested. As his popularity decreases, there’s a concern that he will use the military even more, become more ironfisted, and implement more of these policies to maintain his power.
To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.