Here’s How Democrats Could Replace Joe Biden Before November

Following an abysmal debate performance against Donald Trump, Democrats are scrambling to replace President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race. There’s just one hiccup: Biden himself doesn’t intend to step aside. So what are the options?

Per the Democratic National Committee’s rules, Biden cannot be stripped from the ticket by party leaders. But the convention can throw an open nominating process on the convention floor, opening the door for other candidates to take the front seat, reported Politico. That would necessitate a complicated gambit for power among the party’s 4,000 delegates, many of whom hold loyalties to the Biden administration for helping them get the position in the first place. Voting against him would effectively destroy that relationship.

Superdelegates, who previously held the power to vote for whomever they wanted within the party’s nominating process regardless of the desires of their localities, have also had a significant portion of that power stripped from them since the 2016 presidential election.

But, if Biden did agree to relinquish his run, Democratic strategists have already advanced a flurry of possible contenders to take his place. They include Vice President Kamala Harris, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Kentucky Governor Andy Besehar, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, among others.

Harris, who is already on the ballot, may be one of the most seamless options available, but her poll numbers have been anything but inspiring. A May Morning Consult poll found that, while Harris had higher favorability among African Americans, overall just one-third of voters thought she had the gumption to win in November. On top of that, the vice president has faced rounds of criticism for holding a relatively inactive profile since she took office in 2021.

But if she did take control of the reins, her own choice for vice president would set off a mad dash among the rising stars in her party. At the top of the possibilities would also be Newsom, though he’s not a beloved politician in California—something that could risk votes even inside a historically blue state. And, technically, unless either Harris or Newsom changed their place of residence, they wouldn’t be eligible for the state’s 54 electoral votes, according to Politico.

After Thursday night’s disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden, Democrats are sounding the alarm on the incumbent’s chances of defeating Donald Trump in November.

Former U.S. senator Claire McCaskill gave a blistering assessment to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow of how Democrats are feeling right now.

“Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight, and he didn’t do it,” McCaskill said late Thursday, speaking about how her phone blew up with messages from surrogates, senators, and other Democratic leaders. “Based on what I’m hearing from a lot of people, and some of them are people that are in high elective offices in this country, and you might guess where they serve, there is more than hand-wringing tonight. I do think people feel like we are confronting a crisis.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid said that she was on the phone with Democrats throughout the debate, and “the universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic.”

“It’s hard to argue that Biden should be our nominee,” one Democratic operative who’s worked on campaigns at all levels for over a decade told CNN.

It’s “time to talk about an open convention and a new Democratic nominee,” a Democratic lawmaker and Biden supporter told NBC News.

“If it gets Biden not to run, then it was very good,” a former Obama campaign aide texted to Semafor about the debate. “Otherwise it’s bad.”

“Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or dies,” an adviser to Democratic donors said to Politico. “Otherwise we are fucking dead.”

As The New Republic’s Walter Shapiro wrote Thursday night, “Let us pray, after a debacle of a debate, that the president has enough realism to recognize that he cannot win in an election that the Democrats cannot lose.” The Republican Party, meanwhile, has several disturbing plans to implement should Trump take office in 2025.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling on Friday essentially criminalizing homelessness by ruling in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Oregon.

In a 6-3 decision that followed the usual ideological lines, the high court ruled that it is not “cruel and unusual punishment” for local governments to issue citations or jail people for sleeping outside even if there is nowhere for them to go.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorcuch quoted Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed to make the point that the 9th Circuit had previously overstepped and was limiting local governments from utilizing “full panoply of tools in the policy toolbox.”

The case is a major win for Grants Pass, which has no public homeless shelters, but effectively banned homelessness by imposing escalating fines starting at $180 on those who sleep outside. Previously, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that cities must be able to provide and offer shelter to homeless individuals before they can impose fines and criminalize individuals for the act of sleeping outside. The Justice Department also intervened to say that the Ninth Circuit was correct in saying that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the effective criminalization of homelessness.

This was the most significant homelessness case to come before the Supreme Court in nearly 40 years, and the high court’s ruling opens up a portal of callousness toward the homeless, as right-wing think tanks and politicians work to craft laws across the country punishing those sleeping outside.

“Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion and passes a law identical to this, where are they supposed to sleep?” asked Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a hearing on the case earlier this year. “Are they supposed to kill themselves not sleeping?”

She echoed those same points in a brutal dissent on Friday, noting, “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. For some people, sleeping outside is their only option. The City of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

The Grants Pass ruling is dark, but it also bears a reminder that it doesn’t stop cities and states from doing the right thing: creating affordable housing to address the root cause of homelessness.

During Thursday night’s astonishingly bad presidential debate, Trump sprinted through a cascade of lies, half-truths, and misinformation with no pushback from CNN debate moderators Jake Tapper or Dana Bash. In lieu of challenging Trump’s lies, Tapper and Bash instead stuck to keeping candidates within their time limits, only pushing back against an answer when a candidate (Trump) failed to answer the question at all.

“The absence of real-time fact checking is the biggest failure of this debate,” wrote NBC News and MSNBC contributor Anthony Coley, arguing that CNN was “not meeting the moment.”

“How are none of the moderators fact checking this post-birth abortion nonsense??” Kate Smith, senior director of news for Planned Parenthood, fumed in response to Trump’s disturbing spew of anti-abortion disinformation, according to The Washington Post (her account is now private).

CNN’s political director David Chalian defended the tactic ahead of the debate, telling The Washington Post, “The venue of a presidential debate between these two candidates is not the ideal venue for a live fact-checking exercise.”

Lawyer and civil rights activist Olayemi Olurin largely agreed with CNN’s assessment, pointing out that, “It’s actually not the moderator’s job to ‘pick up the slack’ for the candidate who’s not doing a good enough job responding to or checking their opponent in the debate. That’s not impartial or the role of a moderator because they’d then be a part of the debate.”

“It is a failure on CNN not to fact check Trump’s lies but the thing is…if Joe Biden were performing the way he’s supposed to in a debate, his answers would be the fact-check,” Olurin noted during the debate. “So 3 things are true: Trump is lying his ass off, the [moderator] isn’t doing their job & neither is Biden.”

Regardless, the lack of real-time fact-checking was a boon for Trump, who nonsensically asserted Nancy Pelosi claimed responsibility for the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, raged against “post-birth abortions,” which are not a thing, and blamed Biden for both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel as Biden fumbled to push back. The only time Biden really went toe-to-toe with Trump’s claims was when Trump challenged his golf handicap and the two derailed the debate to argue about golf.

CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale had earlier sent Trump supporters into a tizzy after posting that he’d be fact-checking the debate live, but that tizzy was soon quashed. Following the bungled debate, Dale reportedly got just three minutes out of all of CNN’s post-debate coverage to go over the mountain of lies Trump spewed.

In Thursday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump was asked three times by CNN moderators to say whether he’d accept the election results, regardless of who wins, and he finally sort of gave an answer—but couched it in complaints about fraud.

The first time, Trump went off on a tangent about how he wished Biden was a great president, because he would be “at one of my many places, enjoying myself” and “wouldn’t be under indictment.”

The second time, Trump went on and on about Ukraine, claiming that Putin would take the country and accusing Biden of making “stupid decisions.” “Russia would have never attacked” on his watch, Trump claimed, dodging the question yet again.

The third time, Trump conditioned his answer with concerns about fraud.

“If it’s a fair and legal and good election, absolutely. I would have much rather accepted these—but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous,” Trump said, ridiculously overlooking his supporters’ involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and elsewhere.

Watch his heavily caveated answer below:

The two presidential candidates took a quick detour from stumbling over their words on Thursday to trash talk each other on a topic completely unrelated to the election: golf.

“Look I’d be happy to have a driving contest with him. I’ll remind you I got my handicap when I was vice president down to a six,” President Joe Biden said. Trump laughed and shook his head.

“By the way, I’ve told you before I’m happy to play golf with you if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?” Biden continued.

“That’s the biggest lie that he’s a six handicap, of all,” Trump said, adding “yup.”

“I was a eight handicap—eight …” Biden continued.

“I’ve seen your swing, I know how you swing,” Trump said.

“Two regular club championships,” Trump continued, bragging about his achievements in the game. “To do that you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way. And I do it. He doesn’t do it. He can’t hit a ball 50 yards. He challenged me to a golf match, he can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”

President Joe Biden had a chance to score easy points on immigration policy in his debate against Donald Trump Thursday, but he repeatedly dropped the ball.

Multiple times over the course of the 90-minute debate, Trump swerved his answers into complaints about Biden’s border policy. The former president repeatedly lamented his baseless claim that millions of people are coming into the country from the world’s “prisons, jails and mental institutions.” He lied a lot, and got away with it, because Biden failed to call him out on one important point.

Biden repeatedly neglected to mention Trump’s essential role in killing a bipartisan border security deal earlier this year, which would’ve granted $20 billion in emergency spending at the southern border, in the most restrictive border legislation pushed by a Democratic president in recent memory.

Trump urged Republican lawmakers to oppose Biden’s border security bill, and so they killed it. His allies in Congress made it clear they would rather help Trump fearmonger about immigration than actually do something about it.

Biden has since issued an executive order that will shut down the southern U.S. border if the average number of border encounters exceeds 2,500, which it already has, and only resume them once the number drops to below 1,500.

The new rule, implemented earlier this month, changed Title 8 immigration procedures, making those who illegally crossed the border no longer eligible for asylum (except in the event of “exceptionally compelling” circumstances) and further tightening the eligibility guidelines for deportees who fear returning to their home countries. The new rule inspired intense backlash from Democrats, and a lawsuit from the ACLU.

This wasn’t the only missed opportunity. Throughout the night, Biden uniformly neglected to fact-check Trump on his many more fantastical answers.

Trump supporters spent weeks railing that Thursday’s presidential debate between Biden and Trump would be rigged in favor of Biden, fuming about CNN’s moderation restrictions and spinning conspiracies that the debate moderators were biased against Trump. After insisting Trump would lose the debate and raging that CNN’s fact-checker would be fact-checking the debate, Trump supporters quickly changed their tune.

Trump supporters and Trump himself spent the lead-up to the debate claiming that Biden would be buzzing out of his skin doped up on drugs, and instead found themselves—like most viewers—stunned at Biden’s mellowness, which the Biden team claims is due to a cold.

Donald Trump was asked during Thursday’s presidential debate about concerns from voters about the January 6 riot and that he may lead his supporters to do the same again. In response, Trump promptly began spewing falsehoods surrounding the insurrection.

“What do you say to those voters who believe that you violated your constitutional oath through your actions and inaction on January 6, 2021, and worry that you’ll do it again?” moderator Jake Tapper asked. Trump initially denied that voters have that concern, then delved into a spree of falsehoods.

Trump responded somewhat quizzically, saying, “Well, I didn’t say that to anybody. I said peacefully and patriotically,” apparently in reference to his directive to his supporters to go to the Capitol.

Here’s what he actually told the crowd before the riot:

We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

And hours later, he posted on X (formerly Twitter):

I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. But you have to go home now, we have to have peace. We have to have law and order, we have to respect our great people in law and order.

Trump then stated then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed responsibility for the riot. “I offered her 10,000 soldiers or National Guard and she turned them down and the mayor, I have it in writing, by the way, the mayor in writing, turned it down. The mayor of D.C. They turned it down. I offered 10 times because I could see. I had virtually nothing to do.”

Recently released video during the Capitol riot shows Pelosi asking why the National Guard wasn’t present as she was evacuated from the Capitol, and later shows Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also demanding answers about why the National Guard isn’t mobilized.

“We need them fast. We’ve all had to—I’ve never seen anything like this. We’re like a third-world country here. We had to run and evacuate the Capitol,” Schumer snapped.

Trump has long falsely claimed that he signed an order for 10,000 National Guard troops to mobilize to Washington prior to the insurrection. Trump and fellow conservatives have also falsely claimed that Pelosi was responsible for preventing their deployment.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser failed to mobilize a sizable National Guard presence based on “intelligence failures” that believed the far-right extremists would be “friendly” to police, but she did in fact call for a limited National Guard mobilization ahead of the January 6 riot.

Donald Trump claimed during Thursday night’s debate with President Joe Biden that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have happened on his watch.

Trump claimed that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was so chaotic that it encouraged Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

“When Putin saw that, he said, ‘You know what? I think we’re gonna go in and maybe take my …’ This was his dream. I talked to him about it. His dream,” Trump said. Did Putin actually speak to Trump about attacking Ukraine, or is this Trump being braggadocious? But Trump has made no secret of his close, sometimes subservient relationship with Putin.

Trump also blamed Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel on Biden, claiming that Iran was broke during the Trump presidency and couldn’t fund Hamas.

Watch Trump’s bizarre recollection here: