In a podcast with Tim Miller on the Bulwark Podcast, New York Times writer Ezra Klein said many Democrats privately tell him Biden should leave the presidential race, while publicly supporting him. In a New York Times podcast, Democratic U.S. Representative Adam Smith of the 9th Congressional District in Washington said the same thing. Other reporters have found this, as well.

To frame to understand why this is ridiculous is three-fold:

• The polling for Biden continues to look bad, especially in the battleground states that will determine the Electoral College result.
• Democrats have told us for some time that our very democracy is at stake. If Trump gets re-elected, it will be the end of the republic.
• The Biden campaign does not seem to have a fresh plan to turn things around – not that’s obvious to me, anyway (or to Klein and Miller).

If you have a candidate who is clearly losing, doesn’t have a working strategy, and the entire country is at stake, shouldn’t you take extreme steps?

“Extreme” is a loaded word, of course. Theoretically, extreme could mean grabbing guns and heading for the hills. Let’s keep “extreme” here to working within the system. After all, many people who support Biden are trying to defend a sense of long-standing, democratic practices and order. (As opposed to, you know, ginning up supporters to attack the Capitol after running a months-long campaign to overturn an election that was thoroughly vetted by the courts.)

So, let’s get extreme.

Replace Joe Biden. Raise up Kamala Harris. Or even run some sort of fast-moving mini-primary.

Do something.

If you’re not prepared to do any of this as an elected Democratic representative or Democratic party poobah, then I guess our entire democracy is not at stake – that you believe we can survive another Trump term. Sure, fight bad ideas and bad faith all the way, but it’ll work out. This is oddly comforting if it’s what Democratic officials actually believe.

For my part, I think there are strong reasons to worry about a second Trump administration. Anyone who has found a way to embrace what occurred on January 6 is a genuine danger to the republic. (That’s almost the entire Republican Party by now, of course.)

This doesn’t have to do with any specific policies, by the way. Instead, it’s the steady undermining of running elections as a non-partisan activity. It’s the denial of courts as a way of settling our differences. And worst of all, it’s the normalization of the introduction of violence into our political process with zero political consequences.

Will that impulse fade, or will it worsen? If Trump wins, it certainly will be rewarded.