In Your Dreams

A piece by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect argues The Drumbeat for Biden to Step Aside Will Only Grow Louder.

If Biden were to announce that he is stepping aside, the effort to influence the nomination would take the form of organizing to select who is to be chosen as the delegates. Biden will have won most if not all primaries, but the individuals selected to serve as actual delegates will not be chosen for several more weeks or months, and the role of delegate will be up for grabs.

. . . In other words, the immediate consequence would be a series of late quasi-primaries in all states. At the convention itself, with multiple hats in the ring, it is very unlikely that the nominee would be chosen on the first ballot. That’s where the smoke-filled room part comes in. As in the old days, there would be a lot of deliberation and horse trading between ballots to come up with a ticket that can win.

. . . What about the tricky issue of Kamala Harris? In stepping aside, Biden might just throw it open. Or he might urge the convention to select Harris.

But either way, it’s hard to imagine a multi-ballot process choosing Harris, since the delgates above all want to win. And it would take some of the sting out of her being denied the nomination if she fails to prevail in a legitimate process, especially if the nominee for president or vice president were African American.

It may be that this is all wishful. A brokered convention might be perceived as elite and undemocratic. After late-night dealmaking, it might not pick the strongest nominee.

He concludes,

Quite apart from what we think, the calls for Biden to step aside have taken on a life of their own. They will be all over the talk shows and social media, and the drumbeat will only grow louder as Biden invetably keeps making verbal slips.

The advantage of a fresh face, say a Whitmer-Warnock ticket, is that most of Biden’s liabilities disappear. Gretchen Whitmer is 52; Trump at 77 becomes the geezer. It isn’t Whitmer’s inflation, or Whitmer’s Israel policy, or Whitmer’s verbal gaffes. Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, who appeared cowed by Trump’s looming presence, Whitmer is terrific at standing up to bullies, as well as delivering for working-class voters. But would she be the nominee?

This strikes me as unreal. A Whitmer-Warnock ticket would be dumped on the electorate following the convention in late August, with neither having participated in any primary contest. The primaries are critical in giving candidates the practice they need to campaign on a national stage, polish their public profiles, build a sense of momentum, and deal with potentially hostile media. Both Whitmer and Warnock have baggage, Whitmer for her strict lockdown policies during COVID and Warnock as a Christian pastor hypocritically evicting low-income tenants from apartments he controls.

Current polling has Trump performing better against Harris, Newsom, or Whitmer than he does against Biden:

In a hypothetical match-up, Trump leads Vice President Harris 46 percent to 43 percent and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) 46 percent to 36 percent. He also leads Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) 45 percent to 33 percent.

Newsom and Whitmer have increasingly gained national attention as prominent Democrats, and pundits have included them as possible future presidential candidates.

And Harris has been running her own campaign either to stay on the ticket as vice presidential nominee or to replace Joe in a contingency:

More than two dozen sources tell CNN that Harris has been gathering information to help her penetrate what she sometimes refers to as the “bubble” of Biden campaign thinking, telling people she’s aiming to use that intelligence to push for changes in strategy and tactics that she hopes will put the ticket in better shape to win.

Multiple leading Democrats, anxious about a campaign they fear might be stumbling past a point of no return, say their conversations with Harris have been a surprising and welcome change, after months of feeling sloughed off by the White House and Biden campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

. . . But Republican forces have been capitalizing on her low approval numbers and Joe Biden’s advanced age by making the 2024 campaign more about Harris and the chance she could become president, especially as questions about the president’s mental acuity continue to define his own candidacy.

And in any case, Ed Kilgore argues at Intelligencer, Replacing Biden at the Convention Is Risky and Unprecedented:

[A] nominee chosen not by primary voters or by a consensus of party leaders is just as likely to produce a calamitous general-election campaign as some burst of enthusiasm among united partisans. The last multi-ballot Democratic convention nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He lost. The last multi-ballot Republican convention chose Thomas Dewey in 1944. He lost.

. . . The 2024 Democratic convention will end on August 22 (assuming it doesn’t go into overtime like the 1924 affair), leaving ten weeks before the general election on November 5. Would a Democratic Party fresh from an “open convention” be able get its act together in that span of time, particularly if the nominee is someone other than a universally known figure?

I’m interested in learning more about “open convention” scenarios. But at first blush it seems a far riskier proposition for Democrats than just going with the incumbent president of the United States, the man who was left for dead as a presidential candidate in 2020 more times than you could count.

Right now, the problem for Democrats is that Plan A is increasingly shaky, but there's no Plan B at all.