Thursday night’s debate was, and I don’t say this lightly, a disaster without any conceivable parallel in modern American political history for President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, and anyone who cares about the future of our flawed but vital democracy. The president’s performance on CNN was nightmarishly confused and worrisome. And unless he wants to be buried right next to Ruth Bader Ginsberg in a tiny cemetery full of people who invited widespread calamity because they did not know when to quit, he needs to drop out of this race immediately. Despite the fact that we are less than two months away from the start of the Democratic National Convention, there is still plenty of time for Biden to withdraw from the race and make way for someone, anyone, to take his place. Don’t listen to those who say there’s no time—the only thing that can’t happen is for Biden to go back in time and not run in the first place. Every other option is, and now should be, very much on the table.
There is no denying that we are in uncharted territory, and that a change at the top of the ticket 67 days from the Democratic National Convention would be logistically challenging and potentially divisive, to put it lightly. This isn’t anyone’s dream scenario—not Biden’s, not whoever would replace him, and certainly not ours. No one would intentionally put Democrats in a situation where their nominee would be someone who got zero votes and zero delegates in a race they skipped, and the analysts who have been warning about what a mess it would be aren’t entirely wrong. But the fact that the path to a new nominee who can campaign vigorously against the menace of Donald Trump is difficult is no longer enough reason not to take it. The cold reality of the matter is that many people would be tempted to call 911 if their parents or grandparents showed up to dinner sounding like Biden did Thursday night. That’s no way to head into the most consequential election of our lifetimes unless Democrats are just resigned to losing. And I, for one, am not.
There are essentially three paths to a new Democratic nominee, and all are completely unprecedented. For all of American history, even when modern medicine was still a twinkle in everyone’s eye, neither party has had to replace a presumptive nominee this close to the election. It might seem crazy, but one path is: Biden could simply resign. And in many ways, this is the easiest and simplest route to a new nominee. When he got back to the White House after the debate, he must have seen or been briefed on the cable news roundtables, the Twitter chatter, and the general atmosphere of total panic that his cataclysmic performance caused in Democratic circles all over the country. Even if, up to that very moment, he truly believed that he was the only person in the country who could beat Donald Trump, he surely cannot believe it any longer unless he has descended into a state of unreachable delusion.
If Biden were to resign, making Vice President Kamala Harris the president, it would instantly resolve any looming debate about what would happen at the Chicago convention in August. A President Harris would have six weeks to build momentum, shore up the party’s coalition, and lean into the inherent gravitas of the presidency. Freed from the constraints of the vice presidency, she might just prove a lot of doubters wrong about her political skills. If Harris were even a teeny tiny bit more popular, there wouldn’t be any question about anointing her whatsoever, and it is worth noting that her net disapproval is now lower than either Trump’s or Biden’s, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Making Harris the president wouldn’t turn her into the nominee by acclamation, but it would be very hard for anyone else to compete with her. Biden’s delegates would be released, and given that they are loyalists, most of them would likely do whatever he says. If he said, “Kamala Harris is now the president and the presumptive nominee; let’s unite around her,” that’s what would happen, without question. It is truly difficult to see how she could do any worse than Biden at this point.
The second path is more complicated. Biden could, instead of resigning, take the LBJ path and say that he has decided not to run for a second term. He could cite health reasons, or family reasons—his only surviving son, after all, was just convicted of three felony counts—or say that he has had some kind of epiphany about the need to pass the baton to a younger generation of Americans. And if Kamala Harris isn’t the president by the middle of July, she would have no actual claim on the nomination, nor should she. She didn’t run, no one voted for her, and if Biden doesn’t endorse her, she would just be one contender among many.
The crucial detail is that if and when Biden drops out, his delegates are free to do as they please. And given the looming ballot deadlines in many states, Democrats would probably not have the luxury of waiting until the convention to figure this out. A furious competition would erupt, immediately, between nominees-in-waiting like Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The target audience wouldn’t be ordinary primary voters like you and me, since the primary contests are now 100 percent over, but rather the pledged delegates, as well as the so-called “superdelegates” to the Democratic National Convention. Thanks to reforms instituted in the wake of the bitter 2016 primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the latter group is prohibited from weighing in on the first ballot at the convention but would definitely come into play in any scenario in which Biden drops out and Harris isn’t the president.
The Democratic National Committee would need to devise, in very short order, some kind of process by which the convention’s delegates could vote well in advance of the actual convention that begins on Aug. 19, to avoid kneecapping that nominee. The good thing is that here’s no law, internal rule, or other obstacle to stop this from happening. In fact, the DNC had already been planning to officially nominate Biden and Harris as the ticket well in advance of the actual convention anyway, to get around an Ohio problem that no longer exists. Democrats were in a panic about the state’s Aug. 7 filing deadline for candidates—before the convention. The deadline meant that if Democrats didn’t move up their official nomination from Aug. 19 to before Aug. 7, Biden would not appear on the Ohio ballot in November. So they moved the official nomination up in the calendar accordingly. But Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill in May ensuring that Biden would appear on the ballot anyway.
If they can move up the nomination process that easily, they can also move whatever mountains need to be moved here. They could make the convention virtual and move it up in the calendar. They could hold a series of snap debates between the leading contenders and have the delegates vote in late July or early August. Folks, the DNC is not in the U.S. Constitution, and it can do pretty much whatever it wants.
But it is also possible that Biden can’t or won’t read the writing on the wall and refuses to bail. In that case, it is up to his own delegates to do the right thing. The DNC’s Rule 13, Section J says, “delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in good conscience reflect the sentiment of those who elected them.” That is a loophole big enough to drive the world’s ugliest Cybertruck through, because Biden’s delegates watched the same debate that the rest of us did, and must surely be feeling the same sense of dread and helplessness. And there is nothing in the DNC’s rules that would stop them from voting for someone else at the convention, or at some kind of accelerated gathering next month. That’s what “good conscience” means, and the architects of these rules must have had, at least dimly, some kind of scenario like this in mind: a doddering nominee, in failing health or deteriorating mental condition, who refuses to accept the reality of the situation. That’s where we are. And while it still seems unlikely that Biden’s delegates would do this, even after Thursday night’s horror show, it doesn’t make it impossible.
Even yesterday, it would have been hard to imagine writing this article, given the closeness of the race. But the bottom line is that the stakes of this election are too high to hope that Biden can recover from his debate fiasco. He can’t, and he won’t. And because there is no guarantee that the United States will recover from a Trump restoration, the time to act is now, and every Democrat in the country needs to work together, starting this morning, to push Biden aside. Anything else is pure, self-destructive madness.
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