Analysis by Alex Caldwell | Photo: Alamy
Top Democrat Party officials are reportedly weighing whether to replace Joe Biden as their party’s nominee following the incumbent’s disastrous debate performance against President Donald Trump.
Should Biden suspend his reelection campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is supposedly the top choice to replace her boss on the presidential ticket this fall, according to a report from Reuters, who cited comments among seven individuals affiliated with the Biden campaign, the White House, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Although she is grossly more unpopular than Biden, holding a 29 percent favorability rating compared to the incumbent’s 36 percent, Harris generally polls better against the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee than her boss.
According to a post-debate SSRS-CNN survey of 1,274 Registered Voters, President Trump led the vice president by just two points (47 to 45 percent), compared to a six-point lead in a race with Biden (49 to 43 percent).
Harris even outperformed three other potential Democrat candidates in the poll, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg.
If selected, Harris would assume all funds raised from the Biden campaign, and inherit the incumbent’s current campaign infrastructure, Reuters’ sources explained.
The vice president’s polling numbers, along with having the most name recognition among this bench of Democrats, may further prompt top officials to tap her as their party’s nominee, the seven sources added.
However, the question of Harris becoming the nominee cannot be answered during this time. Since Joe Biden’s troubling debate night, his campaign insists that he plans to stay in the race.
“Yeah, no. This was announced a week ago. Joe Biden is and will be the Democratic nominee,” the Biden campaign wrote Saturday on X after dismissing reports suggesting that the incumbent’s family was arranging a meeting at Camp David to discourage him from running again.
Unless he drops out himself, Democrats will likely have no choice but to renominate Biden. In order to drop him, more than 1,976 of the 3,894 delegates—who already pledged to support Biden—would have to each defy their primary voters and refuse to vote for him during the DNC’s virtual nomination this summer, according to ABC News.
If the delegates were to somehow go their own way, a brokered convention would take place, meaning that the delegates would be responsible for choosing a new nominee only three months before the general election, leaving them almost no time to run a campaign.
Regardless, Democrats truly have two options, and neither of them is good. They could keep Biden, whose support has fallen even more across every battleground and even some blue states, or they could nominate a new candidate as soon as possible—a candidate who will undoubtedly face party infighting and have a maximum of four months to campaign.
Either way, this situation does not bode well for the Democrat Party.
Additionally, it is even more rare for a party to snub their party’s sitting president to choose another candidate as their nominee instead. In fact, no sitting president has lost their party’s nomination since President Chester A. Arthur in 1884.
Of the remaining 44 U.S. presidents, only four sitting presidents lost their party’s primary, such as Presidents John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and Andrew Johnson.
Bucking even more trends, Biden leaving the race would historically make him the first incumbent in 56 years to not seek reelection to a second term—the last being President Lyndon Johnson in 1968.
Following Johnson’s narrow primary win in New Hampshire, along with plummeting popularity over the Vietnam War, the president announced in March of 1968 that he would end his primary reelection campaign.
Interestingly, the 1968 election closely mirrors 2024. Democrats nominated incumbent Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey after the president left the race, which they are rumored to do again potentially with Kamala Harris.
However, Humphrey caught the same criticism as Johnson despite his trying to distance himself from the president. Had a different Democrat been nominated, it’s possible the election could have ended differently.
It is possible that if Harris is nominated, she will face the same scrutiny over Biden as Humphrey did.
Nonetheless, Richard Nixon won a historic comeback in 1968, despite previously losing the presidency to President John F. Kennedy eight years earlier. However, Democrats’ vote shares were split between Democrat Humphrey and third-party candidate George Wallace, which helped deliver victory to the former vice president Nixon.
Like Nixon in 1968, President Trump can very well deliver a comeback in 2024. With Biden’s potential to exit the race and have Kamala Harris take the helm late in the race, while the liberal Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. potentially takes in double-digit support, the 45th president is likely to capitalize amid Democrats’ disarray.
