Democrats’ top five Biden replacement roadblocks

President Joe Biden’s feeble debate performance has Democrats worrying about his reelection prospects to the point where some in the party are for the first time seriously entertaining scenarios for replacing him as the nominee.

Notwithstanding the Democrats’ intense fear of another election loss to former President Donald Trump, Biden’s party faces immense and possibly insurmountable hurdles when it comes to dislodging the incumbent from the ticket.

It’s (mostly) up to Biden

Biden is the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. He won all the primaries, even if he faced only token opposition in most of them, and more than 90% of the pledged delegates. Under the rules, the simplest and arguably only feasible path to removing Biden is for him to withdraw voluntarily.

Over the weekend, Biden met with his family to discuss the future of his campaign. It is not clear whether he ever seriously considered dropping out. Either way, the Biden family by all accounts came away from their meeting more committed to continuing his reelection bid.

DEMOCRATS CALLING FOR BIDEN REPLACEMENT FACE OBSTACLES

Leading Democrats could go to the Oval Office or Camp David and try to convince Biden to end his campaign, arguing that a loss in November is inevitable and would tarnish his legacy as the man who got Trump out of the White House. This would be similar to how Republicans persuaded Richard Nixon to resign as president in 1974.

But Nixon was facing impeachment, and Republicans could tell him they didn’t think they had the Senate votes for his acquittal. Democrats have no comparable leverage over Biden should he reject their political counsel, aside from big donors withholding campaign contributions — which could increase the risk of Trump winning if Biden were to call their bluff.

There are some longer-shot options to force Biden out, which we will explore later, but the most realistic scenarios require his cooperation.

The Kamala Harris problem

As vice president, Kamala Harris would be the most logical Biden replacement. Most campaign finance experts also believe she could keep the Biden-Harris campaign war chest, which could be transferred to other Democratic entities but not a new campaign.

The problem is that Harris doesn’t poll better than Biden, or at least she didn’t before last week’s debate, and most Democrats who want to replace Biden want to get rid of her too.

Ousting both the sitting president and vice president while also needing them to remain in office would be a tall order.

One suggestion on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was that Justice Sonia Sotomayor could be persuaded to retire and that Biden could appoint Harris to replace her. But Harris would have to be confirmed by the Senate and her replacement as vice president would need to be approved by both chambers, including the Republican-controlled House. If the vice presidency was left vacant, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would be next in the line of presidential succession.

Passing over Harris for president or replacing her as vice president would also create political headaches for a party that is already trying to shore up its black support ahead of November.

Not clear other Democrats would do better

A post-debate poll by Data for Progress found the Biden-Trump race was still competitive and none of the other major Democrats tested — Harris, Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Josh Shapiro (D-PA), and J.B. Pritzker (D-IL), Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — run convincingly better than the president against his Republican predecessor.

The counterargument to this is that none of them run meaningfully worse than Biden either despite not having done any campaigning for themselves. Presumably, Whitmer, Shapiro, or Klobuchar could help narrow the gap against Trump in their now-competitive home states, though there is no guarantee.

It’s also true that all the candidates except for Harris would have to raise their own money and stand up their own campaign organization, though some of the former could be transferred from Biden to the Democratic National Committee or super PACs. Even Harris would presumably need to make some changes to the campaign’s top brass.

There’s also a risk that a candidate who runs to the left of Biden might also be vulnerable to Trump, as most Democratic campaign professionals believed about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2016 and 2020. This is why Biden won the nomination over Sanders and a slew of younger liberals, including Harris, who dropped out before the first primary. Biden so far remains the only politician who has beaten Trump.

Conventional wisdom?

A massive mutiny at the Democratic convention could in theory displace Biden. But there would be huge practical problems.

While nearly all the pledged delegates are committed to Biden, there is some question as to how fully bound they are, with DNC rules allowing them to “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” But it would require a huge slice of Biden’s nearly 3,900 delegates to defect to deprive him of the nomination and the failure of anyone to clinch a majority on the first ballot for the 700 uncommitted Democratic superdelegates to get to weigh in on the nominee. The superdelegates are party elected officials and leaders whose participation could help Biden, though it would probably require his near-total collapse to even get to that point.

There are provisions to remove an incapacitated nominee. Donna Brazile claimed in her memoirs that she floated this idea for the 2016 Democratic convention, as much as to improve the party’s chances of beating Trump as because of any health problems Hillary Clinton might have had.

“Perhaps changing the candidate was a chance to win this thing, to change the playing field in a way that would send Donald Trump scrambling and unable to catch up,” Brazile wrote. The idea went nowhere. Clinton was still under 70 at the time and generally polled better against Trump than Biden has this cycle.

But Clinton was also the former secretary of state at the time, not the current president. The Democrats would have to hold that Biden lacked the capacity to be the nominee while also needing him to serve out the remainder of his term.

The same calculus that led Democrats to forgo a meaningful primary challenge to Biden could doom any DNC coup attempt: These gambits would be more likely to weaken Biden further than to succeed in removing him.

Democrats and democracy

Democrats have made the preservation of democracy a centerpiece of their argument for 2024. While that can be used to justify any legal means necessary to stop Trump, whom they argue is a unique threat to democracy, it would be poor optics to replace the nominee with someone who didn’t participate in the primary process.

Every president up to Dwight Eisenhower was nominated before anything much resembling the modern primary process, which arguably wasn’t fully in place until Jimmy Carter. But modern Democrats are arguing that features of the constitutional republic like the Electoral College, the filibuster, and the Senate itself are undemocratic.

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In this context, Democrats are going to remove the winner of every single presidential primary this year and replace him with a noncandidate who received zero votes or only a smattering of write-ins throughout the country? For no reason other than he is not guaranteed to win a democratic election?

Nevertheless, many Democrats are saying Trump’s threat to democracy has been worsened by the Supreme Court. This could make them willing to contemplate drastic measures if Biden slips further behind in the polls.

• Tags
• 2024 Elections
• Democratic Party
• Donald Trump
• Joe Biden
• Kamala Harris