The Capitol Hill building where Democratic senators heard from top Biden aides Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Jen O’Malley Dillon had two exits, one on a side street with a nice view of the Supreme Court and the other emptying out onto four lanes of traffic on Constitution Avenue with no shade from the July sun. Most senators invariably used the second, because it was the one where they wouldn’t be interrogated by reporters.
The few who trickled out of the first exit were reluctant to answer any questions at all about the meeting where they sought reassurance from the president’s team that there was a way he could win reelection. They didn’t even answer questions about what was for lunch.
Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal offered the cryptic answer that “some of my concerns are allayed, some others have been deepened” after the meeting — which Politico reported didn’t seem to have changed anyone’s minds. Still, Blumenthal insisted ahead of Biden’s press conference that he has to “go to American people, not just in one meeting, in one press conference, or in one speech but consistently and constantly.”
“Tonight will be important,” he said. “The press conference will be potentially a turning point, but there has to be more than one.”
Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire offered a panglossian spin, rare among Democrats who have been increasingly stone-faced in recent days. “The best way to defeat Donald Trump is to reelect President Biden,” she said. “I thought the presentation we had was a really excellent one.”
The windows of the building, which was headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, were plastered with stickers encouraging passersby to look up www.goponabortion.com — a campaign website where they criticized Republicans for their opposition to Roe v. Wade. No one outside was pulling up the website though. They were too busy reading the statement from the latest House member to demand that Biden drop out.
Democrats may not believe Joe Biden is the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump in November, but there seemed to be a grim resignation on Capitol Hill on Monday night that none were willing to take the steps that might actually push Biden to drop out. If Democrats could simply wave a magic wand to remove the president from the ticket, they would. But all they have are knives, and few are inclined to use them.
The fretting was based on the calculus that while Biden was likely to lose if he remained on the ticket, an unsuccessful effort to oust him would just widen the margin of defeat (and the resulting down-ballot casualties). Many took an abstract view of the process as if it was some intellectual question that needed to be worked out on a blackboard. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told reporters “I think we are having an important national conversation and I am confident that the president will make a decision in the best interest of the country.” There was no sense that Biden has already announced that decision a number of times, including hours before in a letter to Congressional Democrats and again during a phone interview with Morning Joe.
Fatalism gripped the Democratic Party on Monday, fueling a desire among many just to resolve all of this quickly. As one donor said “the longer it lingers, the worse it is going to be in November.” Only Joe Biden could really decide to remove himself from the ticket, and barring a shocking turn of events, he wasn’t going to relinquish that grip. In the meantime, the more the media feeding frenzy continued, the tougher it would be for Democrats in competitive races. After all, the last thing Democrats want to do is spend day after day answering questions about Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities, and until there was a definitive resolution, they wouldn’t have a choice. There would be no open convention, no Sorkinesque sacrifice — just another grim four months of plodding along with a flawed nominee.
One senior Democratic aide invoked the T.S. Eliot line that became a cliche long before even Biden was born: “This won’t end with a bang but a whimper.”
This section of the interview focused on the widely reported concerns about Biden’s capacity to be a winning candidate, and his current standing in the race — and the president’s answer is unlikely to assuage those concerns. From the transcript (video of the exchange here):
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: If you are told reliably from your allies, from your friends and supporters in the Democratic Party in the House and the Senate that they’re concerned you’re gonna lose the House and the Senate if you stay in, what will you do?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: I’m not gonna answer that question. It’s not gonna happen.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What’s your plan to turn the campaign around?
BIDEN: You saw it today. How many– how many people draw crowds like I did today? Find me more enthusiastic than today? Huh?
STEPHANOPOULOS: I mean, have– I don’t think you wanna play the crowd game. Donald Trump can draw big crowds. There’s no question about that.
BIDEN: He can draw a big crowd, but what does he say? Who– who does he have? I’m the guy supposedly in trouble. We raised $38 million within four days after this. We have over a million individual contributors, individual contributors. That– that’s less than 200 bucks. We have– I mean, I’ve not seen what you’re proposing.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You haven’t seen the fall-off in the polls? You haven’t seen the reports of discontent in the Democratic Party, House Democrats, Senate Democrats?
BIDEN: I’ve seen it from the press.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, I’ve heard from dozens of your supporters over the last few days, and a variety of views, I grant you that. But the prevailing sentiment is this. They love you, and they will be forever grateful to you for defeating Donald Trump in 2020. They think you’ve done a great job as President, a lot of the successes you outlined. But they are worried about you and the country. And they don’t think you can win. They want you to go with grace, and they will cheer you if you do. What do you say to that?
BIDEN: I say the vast majority are not where that– those folks are. I don’t doubt there are some folks there. Have you ever seen a group– a time when elected officials running for office aren’t little worried? Have you ever seen that? I’ve not. Same thing happened in 2020. “Oh, Biden, I don’t know. Man, what’s he gonna do? He may bring me down, he may…”
STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. President, I’ve never seen a President with 36 percent approval get reelected.
BIDEN: Well, I don’t believe that’s my approval rating. That’s not what our polls show.
Democrats who are freaking out about Joe Biden’s dismal performance in his Atlanta debate with Donald Trump have a lot of question about their options going forward. Now that talk of replacing the president as the Democrats’ 2024 nominee has gotten serious, distant historical precedents and arcane Democratic National Committee rules are suddenly very relevant. Here’s a guide to what happens if Democrats choose another candidate to face Trump in November.
Sure. At this point he is simply the “presumptive nominee.” The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which begins on August 19, would normally name the actual nominee. But in order to meet Ohio’s general election ballot deadline of August 7, the Democratic National Committee has voted to hold a “virtual roll call” before the convention (the exact date has not yet been set, though July 21 has been floated as a possibility, raising suspicions the DNC may be trying to run out the clock on any Plan B scenario). Until then, the name that will go onto the bumper stickers, theoretically at least, could be Joe Biden, me, or you.
If Biden is to be replaced, it would be much easier — and from a political point of view, immensely better — if Biden withdrew as a candidate. For one thing, that would get rid of the obligation delegates had to support him under the laws of 14 states. And it could pave the way to a reasonably harmonious convention and far less disruption of the general election campaign.
But technically speaking, a majority of convention delegates can nominate whomever they wish. State laws aside, pledged Democratic delegates (unlike Republican delegates) have no more than a moral obligation to back their candidate, and a convention-passed rule could even override state laws.
No. Like Biden, until she is formally renominated (again, via a virtual roll-call vote at some point prior to August 7), the vice-president has no special status. Even if Biden resigned his office and Harris became president, she’d have to be nominated by delegates to appear on the November ballot.
In theory, anyone who met the constitutional qualifications to serve as president could replace Biden. In reality, there’s no sort of consensus behind any particular “replacement” candidate. (Perhaps the most discussed fallback candidate, former First Lady Michelle Obama, has repeatedly denied interest.) No one is likely to step forward as long as Biden is still running, and if Biden withdraws, his support for a replacement will be all-important and perhaps dispositive. There’s no reason to think he’d back anyone other than his vice-president.
Names of Democrats who have been kicked around in fantasy scenarios for a Biden-less ticket have included a number of governors — notably California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro — along with 2020 candidate and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and some real long shots like Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. Some progressives might even note that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turns 35 in October. But again, there’s no consensus, and while pundits thrill at the idea of an “open convention” where multiple candidates duke it out, that would be a nightmare for a party trying to plan a general election campaign.
There’s been an effort by some voices who favor a non-Biden, non-Harris solution to the current quandary to imagine some sort of pre-roll-call public gatherings — perhaps even debates — to build consensus. It’s unclear whether this sort of “mini-primary,” as Democratic poohbah Jim Clyburn called it, is in any way feasible. (It’s possible Clyburn was referring to a process for choosing a new VP to run with Harris, whom he earlier endorsed for the presidential nomination if Biden “steps aside.”). In any event, all these “open convention” scenarios should be assessed in terms of the disaster that could face Democrats if they push aside both Biden and Harris and then deadlock on a nominee. One unhappy precedent is the Democratic Convention in New York exactly a century ago, where a dispirited and divided party nominated an obscure diplomat after 103 ballots who got absolutely clocked in the general election.
The presidential balloting is scheduled to take place prior to the convention. But the process, virtual or live, would be the same: a name or names would be placed into nomination by a delegate, and state delegations would vote in alphabetical order until someone has a majority.
Unlike Republicans, Democrats have superdelegates — 744 of them in 2024 — who attend the convention in recognition of the offices they hold (or held). They include members of the DNC; members of Congress; governors; and former presidents and vice-presidents. They are free to support whomever they wish but cannot vote on the first ballot, when the nomination will very likely be determined.
Just as the old vice-presidential nominee was chosen: by a roll-call vote. This person would probably be the presidential nominee’s preferred running mate, but delegates could choose someone else. The last time there was a serious convention vote for someone other than the presidential nominee’s running mate was at the 1968 RNC, when George Romney got a significant number of votes against eventual nominee Spiro T. Agnew.
Members of the Democratic National Committee (not convention delegates) have the power to fill vacancies on the presidential ticket by a simple majority. It exercised that power in 1972 when then-Senator Thomas Eagleton stepped down as George McGovern’s running mate after revelations of drunk-driving charges and electroshock therapy. So if Biden or Harris or anyone else resigned from the ticket after the convention, the DNC could replace them. But there’s no clear power to remove a nominee who won’t go quietly.
No. Plenty of presidential nominees have begun the general election campaign in a deeper hole than Biden is in right now, but none have been replaced. The talk of replacing him is largely a function of the special horror Democrats have for the prospect of a second Trump term.
There are two very recent surveys that test alternatives, including a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on July 2:
When asked about hypothetical Democratic candidate matches against Trump, 50% of registered voters say they would vote for Michelle Obama, and just 39% say they would vote for Trump.
All other hypothetical Democratic candidates either perform similarly to or worse than Biden against Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris hypothetically wins 42% of registered voters to Trump’s 43%. California Governor Gavin Newsom hypothetically wins 39% of registered voters to Trump’s 42%. All other hypothetical Democratic candidates earn between 34% to 39% of potential votes among registered voters.
A CNN survey also released on July 2 showed Kamala Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing Trump by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whimter trailing him by five points.
It’s hard to say. The first credible post-debate general election polls are showing Biden losing a couple of points against Trump, with some terrible internal findings that big majorities of voters think Biden is too old. But there’s no sign just yet that the race has changed fundamentally, so the panic right now is mostly among Democrats who were already on the edge of panic before the debate.
After absorbing the initial waves of shock from Thursday night’s debate debacle, allies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have begun whispering to the media their reasons why the Democratic ticket must consist of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is that, if Biden steps aside, the party’s only option would be to anoint Harris. If they fail to do so, Black voters would be outraged and register their dismay at the polls (or by refusing to go to the polls), thus ensuring Donald Trump’s election.
The Biden logic then proceeds to its next step: Harris would be a worse nominee than Biden, thus nullifying any reason for him to relinquish his spot on the ticket.
You can see the logic being traced out via the media. “Biden allies have played out the scenarios and see little chance of anyone besides Harris winning the nomination if he stepped aside,” explains Axios. “Is the Democratic Party going to deny the nomination to the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected V.P.?”
“Most Democrats who want to replace Biden also remain extremely dubious that his incumbent running mate, Kamala Harris, could beat Trump — but if she sought the nomination, then denying that prize to the first woman of color who has served as vice president could tear apart the party,” reports Ron Brownstein. “The fear that such a fight could practically ensure defeat in November is one reason Democrats who are uneasy about renominating Biden have held their tongue for so long.”
Of course, Harris’s allies understandably dispute the premise that her nomination would be disastrous. But they very much cooperate with the implied threat that denying her the nomination would rip open mortal wounds in the Democratic coalition. “The fact that people keep coming back to this is so offensive to so many of us. They still don’t get that the message you’re saying to people, to this Democratic Party, is, we prefer a white person,” a veteran Democrat and Harris ally tells Politico, which notes that Harris’s allies and aides are “not shy about pointing out the optics of substituting any other candidate (likely White, possibly male) for Harris — a move that they suggest would upset not only Black delegates at the convention but also Black voters with whom the Biden campaign is already on shaky ground.”
And so, by the logic offered by the Biden and Harris teams, the ticket is frozen in place. Biden can’t step down because he would have to hand the role to Harris, and the party doesn’t trust her in that position. Harris’s allies are aiming a gun at the party, Biden is pointing at Harris, pleading his own helplessness.
If this reasoning characterized the situation accurately, then the party is indeed doomed to shuffle forlornly toward November and the likely restoration of Trump and all the horrorshe would bring. But I find the rationale not only suspiciously self-serving but also wrong on several key points.
First, while there was good reason to believe a year ago that Harris was clearly worse than Biden, there is much less reason to think that today. His catastrophic debate performance was an out-of-sample event. We will await more polling to measure the scale of the destruction, but Biden’s campaign had been pointing to the debate as the event that would redirect public attention from Biden’s faltering performance and onto Trump’s maniacal unfitness. Not only did Biden fail utterly, he achieved the opposite of his intention. It’s difficult to imagine anything Trump could do or say that would attract more attention than Biden spending an hour and a half sounding like a cast member in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Is Harris a mediocre politician? At this point, mediocrity at the head of the ticket would be a welcome improvement.
Now, while I think Harris is probably a better option than Biden, she is not the Democrats’ best option. If you undertake a change as radical as swapping out your presidential candidate because he’s losing to a sociopathic criminal, then you should really go ahead and pick a candidate whose political and governing skills have the confidence of the party elite. As Napoleon said, if you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.
This brings me to the next problem with the Biden-Harris argument for staying the course. If Harris is passed over, the threat is that Black voters won’t give Democrats the necessary landslide margins they need. That is happening already. Almost every poll shows the Biden-Harris ticket is garnering the lowest levels of Black support for any Democratic ticket in decades. The danger of a depressed Black electorate is being used to maintain a ticket that is losing in part because of a depressed Black electorate.
What evidence is there that having Harris as vice president and heir apparent has any positive effect on a constituency outside of political elites and professional activists who whisper to reporters? What reason is there to believe a different ticket, which could easily feature a different Black vice-presidential candidate on it, would fare any worse?
It helps to think more specifically about the hypothetical complaint that would ensue from Biden-Harris being replaced with, say, Whitmer-Booker. The complaint would be that Harris was passed over for a less-qualified white candidate, and Black candidates are being shunted into the vice presidency, a powerless role, because Democrats don’t trust them in the top job.
That complaint might have some rational basis if it weren’t for the very well-known fact that Democrats did nominate an African-American for president in the very recent past. Twice! Indeed, Barack Obama leaped ahead of the older white candidate whose supporters believed it was her turn to get the job. So the main basis of Harris’s discrimination charge would be obviously false.
That the hypothetical specter of baseless charges of racism are being used to empower an obviously ineffective white male candidate reveals a deeper problem to the Democratic Party’s approach to representational politics.
Identity politics in American elections is not some modern Democratic Party innovation. For most of our history, campaigns were bound by an unstated but extremely firm requirement that the candidate pool be limited to white men. Parties have always deliberately chosen candidates with backgrounds tailored to appeal to identity blocs — Protestant, Catholic, German, Irish, etc. It was long standard practice for presidential tickets to balance a Southern presidential nominee with a Northerner, or vice-versa. None of this was seen as fatally compromising qualifications for the sake of identity politics.
Still, even when parties employed hard regional or ethnic quotas for picking candidates, they still applied some test of candidate skill. The bosses in the smoke-filled room would try to assess whether the candidate could garner votes. That was the candidate’s job, garnering votes. And there has never been any reason to believe Harris possesses this talent at the level required to win a presidential election.
She won a Senate race in California, but that is a state where winning the nomination is tantamount to winning the general election. It does not require appealing to any voters who are not reliable Democrats. (For this same reason, I would absolutely not consider Gavin Newsom to replace Biden).
Harris is telegenic, and appears forceful in prepared settings when she can use her prosecutorial background. I was an early supporter of her 2020 presidential campaign. But that campaign was utterly shambolic. Despite having the benefit of the media treating her as a top-tier candidate, she committed a series of blunders, including changing her position on Medicare for All — at the time the most important issue in the campaign — three times, without ever being able to discuss the issue coherently.
Biden selected her anyway, due to a strange combination of factors. Early on, he promised to appoint a female vice-presidential nominee. And after winning the nomination, the murder of George Floyd led activists to pressure him to choose someone who was Black.
The combination of those two requirements functionally narrowed the candidate pool to a single person. Biden considered Karen Bass and Val Demings, who were both members of the House of Representatives, and even Susan Rice, who had never held elective office. But the traditional bar for vice presidents is a governor or senator, and Harris was literally the only Black woman who met that bar. It is surely true that deeply embedded racism and sexism has prevented more Black women from attaining those positions. But where things stood in 2020, Harris applied for a job in which she had the only qualifying resume.
A more sure-footed Biden campaign would have been able to resist demands that had boxed in their options to such an extreme degree. Here, I think, the extreme non-diversity of Biden’s inner circle left him highly vulnerable. Biden has long confined his trusted confidantes to a small handful of mostly male and entirely white advisers. This made female and non-white Democrats groups understandably suspicious that Biden was not listening to their perspective, and made it harder, especially in the feverish post-Floyd atmosphere, to push back. Biden’s path of least resistance was to avoid any identity politics fights during the campaign and get through to November with a united party.
Democrats hoped Harris learned from her campaign and would develop into a plausible successor. It’s clear that few leading Democrats believe she has done so. Assessing the performance of a vice president, who has no real official responsibilities, is notoriously amorphous and inherently subject to all kinds of bias, including racism and sexism. Still, Harris has churned through staff. Last year, a New York Timesstory on her performance contained an absolutely devastating passage:
But the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.
Harris can chalk this all up to racism and sexism, but even Democrats her own team selected as character witnesses have said they don’t think she is up to the job. If you want to understand why Democrats are so hesitant to replace Biden with Harris, this more than explains their belief.
So where does this leave the party right now? Obviously, Biden can’t change decisions he made four years ago. But this history should give Democrats a more skeptical perspective on the use and abuse of political jockeying styled as identity politics.
The modern Democratic Party’s laudable and correct interest in expanding its leadership to excluded groups has had the unfortunate side effect of allowing candidates to weaponize insinuation. Just try to recall the endless volley of charges of racism and sexism between supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008, Clinton and Sanders in 2016, or basically everybody in 2020 without cringing.
That history is the backstop of the party’s current paralysis. And that toxicity has now returned, with Biden-Harris supporters already taking to social media to tar Democrats who disagree with them as racist, sexist, or both. It may or may not be the case that Democrats are so deeply enmeshed in the most cartoonish form of identity politics discourse that they can’t make clear-headed political choices, even with the highest possible stakes.
What they should not do is passively accept this state of affairs as an unalterable force of nature. Democrats have a choice about how they conduct their public debates over their nominees. When political actors use charges of bias to position their favored candidate for power, they can subject these claims to the appropriate level of skepticism rather than treat them as nuclear weapons aimed at their base. Submitting to this form of extortion is a choice, as is, potentially, ignoring or resisting it.
This doesn’t mean Harris can’t be the nominee. At the moment, according to one post-debate poll, only 27 percent of Americans believe Joe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. This poses an almost-insurmountable obstacle to his election, even with Trump’s manifest unfitness. Biden is losing, and he has already squandered what his own campaign considered his best chance to change the race.
Again, even with all her limitations, Harris is probably a stronger candidate now than Biden. I also think there are better options than Harris. My choice would be Gretchen Whitmer, who’s displayed a repeated talent at appealing to swing voters, and who could be paired with a Black running mate like Cory Booker. There are other promising options, but I won’t pretend I can offer any single solution with any confidence that it’s the best way to go. I do believe that almost any change, including a Harris nomination, makes more sense than keeping a nominee who has so deeply forfeited public confidence.
My overarching point is that Democrats need to summon the collective willpower to make political choices in the clear-headed interest of their party and their country. It’s not too late, but very soon it will be. The Biden campaign has brought the party to a crisis point by a series of choices dictated by personal comfort, short-term thinking, and narrow self-interest. These decisions may be rational for the individuals involved, but they add up to a collective disaster.
If that persists, they will continue to drift toward a potentially irreversible setback for American democracy. If Biden and Harris haven’t opened their eyes to what we are now facing, everybody else in their party with influence has a duty to grab them by the shoulder and force them to.
Per Survey USA’s summary of its national post-debate poll, which was conducted among 3,300 adults, including 2,315 likely voters:
Just 29% of all voters say Biden is up to the job; 57% say he is not. Among Biden’s own voters, just 64% say he is up to the job; 14% say he is not; 22% are not sure. … 55% of likely Democratic voters say Biden should continue his run for a second term in office; 34% say he should step aside and allow another Democrat to run. 10% aren’t sure. If Biden does not step aside, 57% of likely Democratic voters say the Democratic Party should nominate him to run again at the Democratic National Convention this August; 33% say they should nominate another Democrat instead.
If Biden is replaced on the top of the ticket, which Democrat should replace him?
• 43% of likely Democratic voters say it should be Vice President Kamala Harris, including 63% of Black Democrats, 56% of Democrats age 35 to 49, 55% of those with children under 18 at home, and 53% of those with high school educations. Harris leads or ties as the top choice among every demographic subgroup.
• 16% choose California Governor Gavin Newsom, including a high of 24% among the oldest and typically most reliable voters, where he is tied with Harris. Newsom also sees outsized support among Democrats with higher income and education levels, and among men.
• 8% choose Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who outperforms his numbers among white and rural Democrats.
• 7% choose Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who outperforms her numbers among liberals.
If Biden leaves the stage of his own accord, Democrats will have options. Photo: Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
Editor’s note: this piece originally ran in February 2024. We are republishing it this morning now that talk of replacing Biden has exploded following his disastrous debate performance.
One byproduct of what some are calling “Oldgate” — a panic over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s suggestion that President Joe Biden is an “elderly man” with memory issues — has been media efforts to understand and explain how Democrats could replace the 46th president as their 2024 nominee, either with or without his consent. From a political perspective, the idea that Biden might be dumped from the ticket is extremely far-fetched. But technically it is possible, though increasingly complicated, right up to Election Day.
When it comes to changing horses in the middle of a presidential race, Democrats differ from Republicans in one fundamental respect: While GOP rules bind delegates to the candidates who win primaries or caucuses, Democrats have a moral rather than a legal obligation to remain faithful to their candidate. Fourteen states have laws that seek to bind delegates to the winning candidate, but it’s reasonably clear that party rules supersede such laws when they are in conflict. And in most states, delegates are released from their obligations if a candidate withdraws from the race.
Another difference between the parties is that Democrats have an established set of “unpledged” delegates who hold convention seats by virtue of elected or party offices they hold. These “superdelegates” don’t get to vote unless there’s a second presidential ballot. At the 2024 Democratic convention in Chicago this August, there will be 744 superdelegates out of a total of 4,532 delegates.
The idea that superdelegates might vote for anyone they want is largely fictional. They are chosen by campaigns to be 100 percent loyal to their candidate. This loyalty is even fiercer when the candidate is the incumbent president of the United States. There’s a reason no sitting president has been denied renomination if he wanted it since Republican Chester Arthur in 1884. So the idea that Democratic delegates are going to look at the polls in August and decide they can do better than Biden is nonsense; it’s not going to happen. Even if faced with the emergency of avoiding a Trump presidency, the Democratic Party will remain a coalition of interests and principles, not just a vehicle for winning one election.
But if Biden, for whatever reason, chooses to “step aside” — as a self-defenestration is euphemistically described — it’s another matter altogether. The problem for Democratic delegates won’t be liberating themselves to look elsewhere (with the possible exception of those from a few states with stricter “binding” statutes than others); it will be agreeing upon a successor. And the closer to the convention that this decision has to be made, the likelier it is that these 4,000-plus Biden loyalists will back whoever he designated as his successor. Fantasies of a President Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker or Pete Buttigieg or Michelle Obama notwithstanding, that successor will almost certainly be Vice-President Kamala Harris. Any other choice would not only infuriate Harris and her supporters; it would also retroactively label Biden’s first decision as party leader in 2020 as a mistake. For better or worse, the party will unite around its new leader; the Trump factor will, if anything, give Democrats an abiding hope of victory no matter how things look a few months out.
It is possible, I suppose, that Biden and Harris could decide to “step aside” together as an act of patriotic self-sacrifice and help design a spanking new ticket that’s dressed for success. But that’s more likely the stuff of potboiling novels from the kind of writers who pretend there are such things as spontaneous candidate drafts and moderate Republicans.
The cleanest Plan B scenario would involve some cataclysmic event happening to Biden that leads him or the party to reconsider his candidacy after the Chicago convention. In that extremely remote contingency, the Democratic National Committee would have the power to name a replacement nominee, just as it did in 1972 when vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton “stepped aside” after revelations of DUIs and shock therapy. The DNC isn’t going to dump a renominated incumbent president, no matter how poorly he’s doing in the polls; back in the days when presidential elections weren’t almost always desperately close or vulnerable to post-election challenges and insurrections, one party regularly went to battle after Labor Day knowing it was likely to lose. But if Joe Biden cannot take up the cudgels for the last stages of a rematch with Trump (assuming the 45th president isn’t himself dumped for his vast record of misconduct, if not for some physical ailment), the party can quickly move on with Kamala Harris.
