I Haven't Seen Anyone Asking About The 2024 Democrat Primaries

I keep coming up with questions nobody else is asking -- for instance, although we hear leaks now and then about how insiders were getting worried about Joe's cognitive decline at least by early this year, why were the national and state Democrats working so hard to discourage serious primary campaigns for other candidates? For instance, Bobby Kennedy Jr originally planned to run as a Democrat in the primaries. Via PBS in October 2023,

Longtime environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday he will run for president as an independent and drop his Democratic primary bid, adding a wrinkle to a 2024 race heading toward a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

. . . Kennedy has spent weeks accusing the DNC of “rigging” the party’s primary against him and threatening that he might need to consider alternatives.

In campaign emails and videos, he blasted the DNC’s decision not to host debates between Biden and other candidates and railed against the committee’s plan to give South Carolina rather than Iowa or New Hampshire the leadoff spot on the primary calendar this election cycle.

Dean Phillips was only slightly more successful with a primary campaign, suspending it on March 6 of this year following Super Tuesday. According to Wikipedia,

Phillips has objected to being left off the primary ballots of several states by their respective Democratic parties, including in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

. . . On November 9, 2023, asserting that his campaign was hampered by ballot access policies and a lack of candidate debates, Phillips issued an apology to Bernie Sanders, regretting his previous disbelief towards Sanders's 2016 campaign's complaints of biased rules by the DNC governing the presidential primary. When asked for comment, Sanders responded, "He's changed his views now that he's a candidate? I'm not getting involved in this."

Phillips accused representatives of the Biden campaign of pressuring liberal media outlets to not platform him. Phillips also accused the Democratic National Committee of actively obstructing Democrats and Independents from ballot access — “bleeding campaigns dry” by handing out lawsuits against non-incumbent candidates and "absurd signature requirements["].

Phillips announced his candidacy in October 2023, only a short time after Kennedy decided to run as an independent. Here is ABC News's assessment at the time:

The congressman's campaign is motivated by concerns over Biden's electability given Democrats' apprehensions about the president's advanced age (he'll be 81 in November), poor approval rating (40 percent in 538's national average) and early general election polls that may foreshadow a difficult race against Trump.

Clearly some Democrats were looking at Biden's chances realistically, but thery were a small minority. ABC contniues,

Phillips has laid out one chief campaign goal: Ensuring Democrats defeat Trump in 2024. However, the two paths he's set out for how to do that don't seem especially viable — and are also somewhat incongruous. One route involves him actually winning the nomination and offering a stronger (and notably younger) opponent to Trump. But Phillips's path to defeating Biden in the Democratic primary looks vanishingly small. . . . Moreover, to have any shot at success, he probably should have launched his campaign much earlier in the election cycle.

The second option, according to Phillips, is that his challenge will push Biden with a tough primary campaign that better prepares Biden for the rigors of facing Trump. But despite his intentions, the little-known congressman may risk damaging Biden ahead of the general election by indirectly calling attention to the president's weaknesses.

But he was an obscure figure who started late and attracted little money, while the Democrat establishment's strategy of discouraging serious primary challenges to Biden proved successful. We must assume this strategy had the assent of other powerful Democrats, including Obama and Pelosi. But after effectively eliminating challenges to Joe during the regular primnary season, Pelosi had this to say once Joe was pushed aside for Kamala in July:

Former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insisted on Wednesday that her party's presidential nominating process after President Biden dropped out was "open," and Vice President Kamala Harris "won it," despite the absence of any such contest.

Prior to Biden stepping down as the Democratic Party's nominee in mid-July, Pelosi reportedly said she favored a competitive open primary process to replace him if needed. On Wednesday, Semafor’s Kadia Goba asked Pelosi if she had changed her mind after seeing all the "excitement" Harris generated when she was tapped to replace Biden.

"No, I didn't change my mind. We had an open primary and [Kamala Harris] won it. Nobody else got in the race," Pelosi said. "Yes people could have jumped in – there were some people who were sort of preparing, but she just took off with it, and actually it was a blessing because there was not that much time between then and the election and it sort of saved time."

So Pelosi's idea of primaries 2.0 wasn't much different from her idea of primaries 1.0, namely, no primaries. It's intriguing that Harris withdrew from the 2020 primary race in late 2019, before even the Iowa caucuses, yet Biden chose her as his running mate despite her lack of national stature. This brings us to another question nobody is asking: why, really, did Biden choose Harris as his running mate in 2020? Beyond that, why was she chosen, unopposed, to replace Biden as the nominee in 2024, having bypassed any primary process?

Here is the conventional wisdom behind the choices:

South Carolina’s most influential Democrat endorsed Biden just three days before the Palmetto State’s 2020 primary and changed the course of the election. It propelled Biden to victory after a dismal fourth-place finish in Iowa, a dreadful fifth-place finish in New Hampshire and a distant second-place finish in Nevada. Here’s the story behind it.

The day before Clyburn endorsed Biden was the day of a candidate debate. And the day before that, Clyburn made what the 2021 book “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency” by NBC’s Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes called a political “ask” — “the favor a politician requests in return when he is granting one” — of Biden.

“Find a way to say that you were a part of picking the first Latina woman member of the United States Supreme Court and you’re looking forward to making the first African American woman a member of the United States Supreme Court,” Clyburn told Biden the day before the debate.

Yet a full hour and 45 minutes into the debate at a Charleston concert hall, Biden had not promised to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Clyburn rushed backstage in a commercial break, found Biden and cautioned him privately, “I’m telling you, don’t you leave the stage tonight without making it known that you will do that.”

The rest is history.

But the rest isn't history. Even in this version, all Clyburn demanded was an African-American woman nominee to the Supreme Court, not a vice presidential running mate. And in this version, a promise to do the Supreme Court nomination was what got Joe Clyburn's must-have support in the primary the next day. The African-American woman running mate, at least in this apparently authoritative version, wasn't even part of the 2020 deal between Joe and Clyburn.

So this doesn't really explain how Kamala got the vice presidential nod, and that means it's even more puzzling that, as Pelosi put it, "nobody else got in the race" when Joe stepped down. Over the months before Joe dropped out, the front-runner for his replacement, Gavin Newsom, first failed to become a primary opponent and then slowly withdrew from the public eye, pledging his support for Joe all the way. I strongly suspect Nancy Pelosi was behind this -- I think she had been clearing the way for Harris long before Joe's health became a top issue.

I actuaally think the Clyburn story itself is a smoke screen, the Harris choice probably came from others in the Democrat establishment, primarily Obama amd Pelosi. That she was a poor candidate in 2019-20 didn't matter, they were going to byhpass elections fom the start, as they effectively did in 2020.

And Joe's health was never a decisive issue. Joe would be bullied out under the threat of the 25th Amendment at some point, just preferably after the election, but Kamala was always going to be in the plan. That was a big reason they didn't want primaries in 2024.

I suspect something like this will eventually come out.