President Biden is not voluntarily ending his re-election campaign.
Democrats should abandon their hope that some of the party’s senior figures — Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer — will visit the White House and convince Biden not to run for another term. If that kind of intervention were to happen, it would probably have happened already. Those figures have been largely positive since Biden’s debate debacle. Nancy Pelosi suggesting to MSNBC on Wednesday that Biden should reconsider his reelection bid probably won’t change much.
If Democrats want a candidate not named Joe Biden, they need to fight for the delegate in Chicago and start preparing now.
An estimated 1,968 pledged delegates are needed to win the Democratic nomination, and Biden has won 3,896 of the 3,903 delegates pledged to a candidate, with another 36 uncommitted. On the face of it, Biden has everything locked up, and there is no way for Democrats to change course.
Under Democratic National Committee rules, “all delegates to the National Convention who have committed to a presidential candidate will honestly reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” But polls conducted after Biden’s dreadful debate performance on June 27 have indicated that about half of the Democratic Party is losing confidence in Biden and wants someone else.
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A June 28 Morning Consult poll found that “a 47% majority of Democrats say Biden should be replaced as the Democratic nominee for president.” A CNN report on its June 28-30 poll said, “Most Democrats and Democratic-leaning registered voters (56%) say the party has a better chance of winning the presidency with someone other than Biden, while 43% say the party has a better chance with him.” And a June 29-30 Florida Atlantic University national poll found “a split within the Democratic Party regarding U.S. President Joe Biden’s candidacy, with 40% supporting Biden as the nominee and 45% saying he should be replaced by another Democrat.”
The number of Democrats yearning for an alternative has always been high; in the summer of 2022, 75 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters told CNN pollster they wanted the party to nominate someone else. But that was when a Biden reelection campaign was still theoretical. We’re about 40 days away from the Democratic convention, when the decision will become official.
Convention delegates are typically among a candidate’s staunchest supporters, but even staunch Biden supporters may have had their confidence shaken of late. Delegates with increasing skepticism about the viability of his candidacy could plausibly argue that voting to nominate Biden without any debate or discussion of other options no longer “reflects the sentiments of those who elected them.”
There is a separate question of whether state laws can require Democratic delegates to vote for their initially pledged candidate on a certain number of ballots. According to Ballotpedia, a third of states had such laws in place in 2022.
The first issue here is enforcement — would the Michigan State Police, for example, rush to Chicago to enforce Michigan’s law that “a delegate to a national convention is required to vote for the presidential candidate for whom he or she has designated a bond … until the close of the first ballot at the national convention”? Would a prosecutor charge those Michigan delegates with violating state law?
The second issue is whether state law can supersede the DNC’s “good conscience” rule. Who decides who the Democratic Party nominates — the DNC or state legislatures?
Any Biden delegates who voted for someone else on their own would have a compelling argument: They no longer believe Biden can perform his duties and want to nominate someone else. It would be absurd to claim that state laws require delegates to vote for a particular candidate regardless, even if that candidate has suffered a stroke or is otherwise clearly incapacitated.
Note that Charlie Spies, a former Republican National Committee adviser and former counsel to the chairman of the Federal Election Commission, claims that Biden cannot transfer his expected $100 million campaign cash to Vice President Harris or another Democrat until he is officially the nominee. This sounds like something the lawyers would work out, but it could give Biden an argument that he should be nominated even if the delegates prefer someone else.
For Biden-skeptical Democrats, that would be a steep climb. By the Fourth of July holiday, many of Biden’s representatives had signaled they were leaning toward sticking with him. But the odds that the 81-year-old Biden can get through the coming weeks and months without another bad performance are slim. Biden isn’t getting any younger, and he’s not going to magically become sharper, more articulate or more energetic.
There is no deus ex machina lurking that would force Biden to resign, short of a serious health problem. He seems determined not to leave, and party elders could not force him to resign even if they tried. The only option left is a significant defection of Biden’s delegates. Even if it were not clear that a revolt would keep him below the required total for the nomination, a major display of delegate discontent could move him in a way that the artillery of a handful of Democrats in Congress has not.
Which option makes Democrats most nervous? The risks of a messy convention fight, or gambling on another campaign with Biden at the top of the ticket?
