US President Joe Biden's performance in the first debate Thursday has sparked a new round of criticism from Democrats, as well as public and private musing about whether he should remain at the top of the ticket,
NBC News reports.
In the modern era, a national party has never tried to adversarially replace its nominee, in part, because knows it would most likely fail. The issue came before both parties in 2016, but neither took action.
Party rules make it almost impossible to replace nominees without their consent, let alone smoothly replace them with someone else. And doing so would amount to party insiders’ overturning the results of primaries when Democratic voters overwhelmingly to nominate Biden. He won almost 99% of all delegates.
And at the moment, there’s no known, serious effort to push him off the top of the ticket.
Still, the Democratic National Committee's charter does make some provisions in case the party’s nominee is incapacitated or opts to step aside, and an anti-Biden coup at the convention is theoretically possible, if highly unlikely. So how would it work?
The only plausible scenario for Democrats to get a new nominee would be for Biden to decide to withdraw, which he has sworn off repeatedly during other bumpy stretches of his campaign.
He could do so while serving out the rest of his term in the White House, as Lyndon Johnson did in 1968.
If Biden were to drop out before he is scheduled to be formally nominated in August, it would create a free-for-all among Democrats, because there’s no mechanism for him or anyone else to anoint a chosen successor.
It takes a majority of the roughly 4,000 pledged delegates to win the party’s nomination. Biden’s won 3,900 of them. Under recent reforms, the party’s more than 700 superdelegates — Democratic lawmakers and dignitaries — are allowed to vote only if no one wins a majority of pledged delegates on the first ballot, so their votes could be crucial in a contested convention.
