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As President Joe Bidens embattled reelection campaign tries to regain its footing after a disastrous first debate with presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, panic among Democrats in Congress is slowly spreadingmostly in private or off the record, but increasingly in front of a camera. On Monday night, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet told CNN that the White House has done nothing to really demonstrate that they have a plan to win this election and that Republicans could win the election in a landslide. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday that Biden should reexamine his decision to run. A group of center-left House Democrats met Wednesday with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to convey their fears about Bidens ability to campaign and win.

They arent just worried about Trump winning a second term. They fear that a sinking Biden candidacy might doom the party to minority status in both chambers of Congress, and in many cases, sink their individual campaigns. These are not idle fears. Current polling suggests that the Democrats position in the battle for Congress has deteriorated since Bidens debate fiasco, and recent history does not provide much comfort down-ballot. Anything can happen, but if Biden goes down, a lot of House and Senate Democrats are highly likely to go down with him.

That winning presidential candidates have a positive effect on other races is hardly controversial. It is known as the coattail effect, and while it isnt the most studied question in political science, the research thats out there is fairly clear: Congressional candidates tend to rise or fall in conjunction with the top of the ticket. Political scientist Robert Erikson found in 2016 that for every percentage point that a presidential candidate gains in the two-party vote, their partys down-ballot candidates gain almost half a point themselves. A 1990 study by James E. Campbell and Joe A. Sumners found that for every 10 points that a presidential candidate gains in a state, it boosts that partys Senate contender by 2 points, and its House hopefuls by 4. This basic logic is a large part of why the past five presidents brought congressional majorities into office with them when they were elected to their first term.

Democrats can also ill afford a visibly aging void at the top of the ticket because the partys quest for congressional majorities started off this cycle at a major disadvantage to begin with. Democrats are defending 23 Senate seats (counting independents who caucus with them) to the GOPs 10. Many of these endangered seats are in states Trump has won twice, including Montana and Ohio, or once, as in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona. Because Sen. Joe Manchins retirement means that West Virginia is all but lost, Democrats would either have to run the table in the races they are defending or offset losses with flips elsewhere on the map. The problem is that no one seriously believes that any Republican-held Senate seats are in play this cycle. The House also likely maintains a modest Republican biasespecially after North Carolina Republicans aggressively gerrymandered their states mapmeaning that Democrats would likely need to win 51 percent or more of the total House vote to emerge with a majority. At the moment, both the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics polling averages show an extremely tight race in the generic ballot question: whether voters want Republicans or Democrats in Congress.

Heres another extremely uncomfortable historical fact for Bidens defenders: Since 1988, the only losing candidates for president whose party secured a branch of Congress were Mitt Romney with the House in 2012 and Bob Dole with both chambers in 1996. It is worth noting that in both cases Republicans lost seats while holding on to the House, and in 2012 they were able to keep their majority mostly because of post-2010 gerrymandering. This doesnt mean that Democrats cant and wont run ahead of Biden in many races, but rather that in the aggregate, it is highly unlikely to be enough. Neither party has kicked away a chamber of Congress that they already held when their nominee won the general election since 1832, when Andrew Jacksons Democrats lost the Senate. Democrats came close to flipping the Senate in both 2000 and 2016, when their nominees won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College, but close isnt going to cut it.

It gets worse. Lets say that Biden ultimately emerges with less than 40 percent of the vote on Election Day, as the RealClearPolitics average currently suggests. (FiveThirtyEight has him a hair over that number as of Thursday afternoon.) What happened to the political parties of the last major-party candidates to do that badly? No major-party nominee has dipped below that bleak threshold since George H.W. Bushs 1992 campaign, when he won 37.4 percent. Republicans that year won 176 seats in the House and 43 seats in the Senate. Yes, they gained a few seats in the House over their 1990 numbersbut they didnt get anywhere near a majority.

And while Democrats won the House every time they lost the presidency between 1956 and 1988, American politics were so different during this time period as to be unrecognizable. Beginning in 1992, ticket splittingvoting for one partys candidate for president and the other partys candidates for Congresswent into terminal decline, and the correlation between presidential and congressional outcomes went way up. In 1992, voters in 13 states split their tickets between presidential and Senate races. In 2020 that number was at onean uptick from 2016, when it had fallen to zero. My guess is that number will go up this year, but it would have to go up by a lot to preserve the Democrats Senate majority in any scenario that includes a Biden loss.

Would a new nominee at the top of the ticket change this grim reality? Those of us convinced that Biden needs to exit this race pronto have to acknowledge that there is not a ton of hard evidence that swapping out the nominee at this stage would help. A FiveThirtyEight analysis suggested that putting Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket would only improve the odds of winning the Electoral College by 3 percent. Polls testing lesser-known candidates like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer look even worse on the surface but are likely the result of many respondents not knowing who she is. A CNN poll that showed Harris doing marginally better than Biden also had so-called double hatersthose who dislike both Trump and Bidenbreaking heavily for any conceivable Democratic replacement for Biden. And on Thursday, an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found Harris beating Trump 49 percent to 47 percenta net 3 points better than Bidens standing in the poll. For the first time, Harris now does better in the RealClearPolitics head-to-head average against Trump than the president does.

It is also possible that Democrats struggles in congressional races are simply baked in at this point, because a new presidential nominee might also be blamed for inflation and housing woes, bear the brunt of the publics dissatisfaction with immigration policy, inherit outrage over the Gaza war, and become a vessel for the publics generally dyspeptic disposition. But there are two pieces of evidence suggesting that Biden is a unique drag on the partys fortunes: A number of battleground state Democratic Senate candidates are running way ahead of Biden, including Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey. And thats not just the value of strong incumbents. Democratic candidates Ruben Gallego in Arizona and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan are also polling well in front of the president. And a November New York Times/Siena College swing-state poll also found Biden losing to Trump by 4 but a generic Democrat beating him by 8. That all suggests someone else would likely do better. At the least, having a national nominee capable of making a forceful case for the Democratic vision would be an improvement over what the party has now.

There is no public polling testing congressional races with different presidential nominees atop the ticket. So exactly what a new nominee would accomplish down-ballot is, ultimately, anyones guess. But the fact that many Democrats are hoping that Biden steps asideespecially the most vulnerable candidates like Montana Sen. Jon Testerindicates that they feel like theyd have a better shot with someone else up there. They believe, with reason, that they are almost certainly holding a losing hand. Why wouldnt they want to trade in some cards for new ones even if it carries some risk of making their hand worse?

None of this is fun to read or think about for Democrats; it would be preferable to keep the focus on Trumps increasingly authoritarian bent and designs. The far rights reactionary Project 2025 policy blueprintwhich includes plans to gut the civil service and use the executive branch to drastically cut down on abortion access even in states where it remains legalhas become so toxic that even Trump has tried unsuccessfully to distance himself from it. But make no mistake: Donald Trump is the most dangerous person ever to serve as president, and his menace to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law has only grown over time as his handpicked Supreme Court has closed off all avenues of possible accountability. But drawing attention to Trumps dystopian project will be all but impossible with Joe Biden at the helm. Every day between now and Election Day, there will be questions about his age, his latest flub, his faltering poll numbers, his frail gait, and more. His decision to stay in the race will inevitably be the story between now and November, as Democrats brace for defeat and sharpen knives for the party elites who put them in this position.

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If Biden Loses the Election, a Lot of Democrats Will Go Down With Him - Slate