What If Biden Can’t Finish the Race?

AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris

President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to announce his 2024 re-election bid as soon as Tuesday. But with increasingly clear indications that the 80-year-old Biden is in a state of physical and cognitive decline, and with voters and some party leaders making clear they want someone other than Biden at the top of the ticket, there is a very real possibility Biden might not finish the race – whether by choice or by design.

There are four possible scenarios where Democrats would have to replace Biden before a potential swearing in for a second term, each with different rules governing what would happen.

The first scenario would be if Biden drops out next year after most of the primaries but before the Democrat convention in late August.

Even if Biden runs unopposed, he still has to participate in the formality of “winning” delegates. In the case that he wins the necessary 1,991 delegates to secure the nomination but then drops out or is unable to continue before the convention (when the candidates for each party are officially chosen by the votes of the delegates) it would technically free up all of Biden’s delegates to vote for whomever they choose at the convention.

However, it is important here to remember two things: first, campaigns pick their own delegates; second, Democrat Party rules give campaigns effective veto power over their delegates. This means that if Biden were to drop out before the convention, his campaign would have the power to control who all of his delegates vote for – in essence allowing Biden to hand-pick his own replacement as the Democrat nominee, all without any input from voters.

In all likelihood this would be Biden’s running-mate, at this point assumed to be Kamala Harris.

The second scenario would be if Biden runs, defeats any potential primary challengers, becomes the Democrat nominee at the convention in August, and then drops out or is unable to continue to the general election.

In this case, the 400+ members of the Democrat National Committee would meet and select a replacement candidate by majority vote. But because many states allow early voting weeks out from an election, it would likely be impossible to re-print ballots, meaning that the election would have to be conducted across all 50 states with Biden’s name at the top of the Democrat ticket.

In any states that Biden wins, the Democrat Party would then have to count on the electors assigned to him to vote for the party’s chosen replacement when the Electoral College ballots are officially cast sometime in December of 2024.

But this situation would immediately create some thorny legal problems for Democrats. In most states, Electoral College electors – who actually decide who becomes president – are not required to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote, and thus Biden electors could just cast their votes for Harris or another Democrat.

But some states have laws in place that bind electors to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote. It is an open legal question whether electors in these states could change their vote if the winning candidate is unable to serve, meaning that court battles would likely ensue.

Moreover, this scenario would potentially create a major legitimacy crisis if the Biden ticket wins the presidency but Biden is no longer in the race. It is easy to imagine a situation where a voter casts his or her ballot early for Biden over the Republican nominee, but would prefer the Republican nominee over Harris if Biden is no longer in the race.

As the country saw in 2020, the early vote has the potential to shape the final outcome of the election. In some states, voters can spoil their ballot and cast a new one. But in others, voters would be stuck with their original vote.

Either of these first two scenarios would undoubtedly invite speculation that Biden never had any intention of finishing the race and was only running to clear the field for Harris. Given Harris’s turbulent tenure as vice president and historic unpopularity, she would almost surely face a serious field of challengers should Biden announce now that he is not running and force Harris into a contested and divisive primary.

Keeping Biden in the race just long enough to avoid a contested primary would also be a convenient way for the Democrat establishment to keep radicals like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren – both of whom are viewed as having virtually no chance in a general election – far away from the nomination. Democrat Party elites went to great lengths to prevent Sanders from upsetting their favored candidate in 2016 and 2020, and would no doubt be just as alarmed at the prospect of a Sanders campaign in 2024.

The third scenario would be if Biden wins the general election but drops out or is unable to continue before the Electoral College votes were counted. In this case, the process would be largely the same as if Biden dropped out between the convention and the election – with the same alarming implications, ending in a legitimacy crisis and court battles over who electors can cast their vote for.

Things would be much clearer in the fourth and final scenario, if Biden were unable to serve after a potential general election victory and after the Electoral College votes were counted. In this case, the 20th Amendment would kick in, and the vice-president elect would be sworn in as president.

This final scenario, however, has potentially drastic implications for whoever replaces Biden and even American democracy itself. If Biden were to win the election and then announce that he could not take the oath of office to serve a second term just weeks or days before his swearing in, every American would have reason to believe Biden and the Democrat establishment were lying to them all along and attempting to effectively rig an election to install Harris or another Democrat as president.

It’s worth noting that Biden’s decision to seek a second term seemingly runs counter to what even most Democrat voters want. According to an AP-NORC poll from earlier this year, just 37 percent of registered Democrats want to see a second Biden term. Overall, a whopping 78 percent of voters think Biden should not run again. A separate poll from March found that 68% of voters said specifically that Biden is too old for another term.

Politico also reported in February that, in private, many elected Democrats and high-level Democrat operatives are expressing the same sentiment. Some have even spoken out publicly, like Democrat Reps. Angie Craig and Dean Phillips, both of Minnesota, who have called for a “new generation” of leadership.

Yet Biden appears determined to plow ahead anyway. Whether his actions are motivated by hubris or a shady scheme to backdoor Kamala Harris into the Oval Office, only time will tell.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @Shane_Harris_.