It’s not an accident that Joe Biden was voted in as the Democrats’ presidential nominee in the first place, and, even now, it’s not at all obvious to me that anyone else would represent an improvement over him. That isn’t because Biden is strong — he’s not, he’s a disaster — but because the Democratic coalition doesn’t actually make a great deal of sense, and to remove Biden from its head would be to start a fight over the direction of the party that the party would be foolish to start deliberately in an election year. I don’t think they’ll do it. …

I’d invite you to look back to the last competitive set of Democratic primaries, in which, at a relatively late stage, Biden was engineered into the nomination by a team of palpably panicking party-power-brokers, who intuited correctly that he was the only candidate who could unite its various factions and have a shot in the general election. At that time, the alternatives to Biden were Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg. Even now, does anyone really think that the Democrats made the wrong choice?

I don’t. And, because I don’t, I am highly skeptical that the party will want to take the same risk four years later.