Are the Democrats Stuck with Biden?

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon 

In the week since President Biden’s debate against former president Trump, calls from within the Democratic Party for Biden to sit out the election have become deafening. On July 5, The Washington Post reported that a letter signed by 168 major donors to the Democratic Party and delivered to the White House explicitly asks Biden to withdraw from the 2024 election. 

Powerful Democrat PACs are also lining up to finance a would-be successor. According to The New York Times, cryptocurrency billionaire Mike Novogratz is set to launch a political action committee, Next Generation PAC, which would help to fund a Biden replacement campaign. 

Adding to the intrigue, Democratic Party insider Rosa Brooks is, according to a report in Semafor, planning a “substitute” primary around mid-July, during which existing party delegates, without input from voters, would select the party’s nominee from a pool of six or so contenders. Such a process is arguably even more undemocratic than the Democratic primaries that allowed Biden to be crowned winner without any debates or robust opposition. 

The 2024 election cycle has been particularly corrupt, even by DNC standards. Last year, as reported in The Kennedy Beacon, the Democrats organized a primary that was rigged to prohibit any of Biden’s challengers from participating. The sham primary was noted for its lack of debates between Biden and his underpublicized challengers. Biden’s main challenger, Kennedy, was forced out of the party of his father and uncles, stalwarts of open debate and electoral accountability. 

Now, in a classic case of political karma, the Democrats will have to scramble their legal resources to do something they have previously done only against their opponents – namely, fight to remove a candidate from the ballot. 

But the Democrats may have trouble removing Biden from the ballot in the event that he withdraws. Republicans may block the new nominee using legal challenges across multiple states – since, for obvious reasons, they’d much prefer Biden to be the presidential candidate. 

Some states have regulations in place that make it very difficult for a party to switch its candidate at the eleventh hour. In Wisconsin, for example, a candidate cannot be removed from the ballot in any circumstance unless he or she dies. In Nevada, the late June deadline to swap out a candidate has passed.

Because Ohio, South Dakota, and California require that the nominee question be settled prior to the scheduled Democratic convention on August 19, they will likely be forced to hold a virtual convention some time in July, but this won’t remedy the situation in Wisconsin or Nevada. 

It might be that the Democratic Party will hope that the 25th Amendment can be invoked to remove Biden from office in order to get him off the ballot line too, but this would require approval from two-thirds of Congress.

Meanwhile this electoral season, Democrat activists have been busy trying to keep opposing candidates off the ballot, including failed attempts to keep Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump off ballots in Colorado, Michigan, and Maine. 

Now, though, many of those same DNC lawyers suing Kennedy may have to fight GOP lawsuits if they try to remove Biden from state ballots. They’ll have stiff competition: the Heritage Foundation, a conservative activist think tank, has said that it is readying litigation to force Biden to remain on multiple state ballots in the event that the Democrats pull the plug on their aging candidate. 

For his part, Biden is doubling down. He has responded to calls for him to withdraw with a letter that sternly proclaims his intention to remain in the race without any caveats. Going on the attack during a July 8 interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Biden blamed “elites” in his own party for the calls for him to drop out, the same elites who kept Kennedy from entering the primary. The president insists he will fight the election and “win,” but it is increasingly clear that the top donors who control the DNC won’t be with him. Something’s gotta give.