What happens if Biden quits the race? President Kamala, nominee Kamala or a contested convention
If the ageing, embattled president does decide to step aside in coming days, despite his weeks of insisting he wouldn’t be going anywhere unless the “lord almighty” told him to, the president and the party have three broad options.
He could announce he will stand aside from the nomination and back his deputy, Kamala Harris, he could decline to back anyone, or he could resign from the presidency entirely in what might be seen as the least likely and ‘nuclear’ option.
Joe Biden won over 99 per cent of his party’s delegates in the state-based primary contests that wound up in March, but if he stands aside, they’ll be free to vote for whomever they want at the party’s scheduled convention slated for Chicago between 19th and 22nd August.
If Biden backs Vice President Kamala Harris, considered the most obvious and logical choice given he picked her as his deputy in 2020, most delegates would feel at least a moral obligation to back her.
She also has better claim political and legal to the hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign funds the Biden-Harris team has already raised. Strict US campaign finance laws make it difficult if to transfer funds between political candidates.
Harris also polls betters than the party’s most widely canvassed alternatives, such as California’s governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, and not much differently from the president himself against Donald Trump, which is to say worse.
At the time of writing Harris had a 20 per cent chance of being elected president in November compared with Biden’s 8 per cent and Trump’s 66 per cent, according to most bookies.
Biden at his gaffe-filled NATO press conference last week said he wouldn’t have picked the former California attorney general “unless I thought she was qualified to be president from the very beginning”. But the true state of their personal relationship is unknown; she implied he was a racist, after all, the 2020 Democrats party debates.
So Biden might well decline to back anyone, which would trigger an intense wave of political jockeying behind the scenes in order to avoid a very public and likely acrimonious fight among whoever came forward. All the 3,949 ‘pledged delegates’, and the 700 ‘super delegates’ who can vote only in the event of an indecisive first round of voting, could then vote freely.
After Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt last week not many might bother, though. The former president’s political power has increased so much the party’s grandees might decide to keep their political powder dry until 2028 and let Harris lose.
History, to the extent it’s useful, isn’t particularly kind to this option: the last time the Democratic Party had an open convention was in 1968 in Miami, after which Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey, who, like Harris, was the departing Lyndon Johnson’s deputy.
No president has voluntarily left the White House early under pressure from their own party, and Biden still has six months left to enjoy the power and prestige of the West Wing.
But if he did, Harris would become president, giving her the imprimatur of office ahead of her showdown with Trump in November.
Democrats are almost as worried about the implications for congress as much as they are about the presidency. Republicans and Democrats hold wafer thin majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate, respectively. Should Republicans win the Senate, the White House and keep the House, the party will have untrammelled scope to pass laws, make senior appointments and conduct foreign policy however the president sees fit.
More Coverage
China’s navy reveals Albanese as Pacific’s biggest jellyfish
The Chinese government’s flotilla of warships produced an aquatic circus, and the clownfish were aplenty. Beijing succeeded in intimidating and humiliating our PM.
Be warned, this is no ordinary trade war
The trade war repercussions will shape the world in ways we never anticipated when Donald Trump returned as US President. Now, terbium and other rare earths have become potential trade weapons.
As Joe Biden’s hold on the Democrat party nomination for president, and perhaps even the White House itself, slips away, the Democratic Party faces a depressing set of options to take the fight to a resurgent Donald Trump.