A new round of finger-pointing among Democrats about the 2024 presidential election raises more questions than it answers, chief among them why the party wasn’t better prepared for the possibility that former President Joe Biden might not be up for a reelection bid.
Biden turned 82 shortly after Election Day. He was already the oldest person to ever serve as president. He had considered serving only one term if elected as far back as 2019. Once Biden got to the White House, he did not commit to seeking a second term until 2023.
A new book claims that Democrats did have contingency plans a year before the election for what they would do if Biden either died in office or dropped out of the presidential race. Those plans did not, however, include a competitive Democratic primary process with alternative 2024 candidates.
“A handful of Democratic National Committee officials already had considered contingency plans,” reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write in Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, which comes out on Tuesday. “In hush-hush talks starting in 2023, these officials gamed out Biden-withdrawal scenarios, according to two people familiar with them.”
“They wanted to make sure the party was ready for every possible circumstance: if Biden launched his campaign and then stepped aside before the primaries; if he won a bunch of primaries and then could not continue. If he secured enough delegates for winning the nomination but dropped out before winning a floor vote at the convention, and if he left a vacancy at the top of the ticket after taking the nomination,” Allen and Parnes continued.
Yet Democrats were seemingly caught flat-footed when Biden bombed in a debate with then-former President Donald Trump and took nearly a month to dislodge the president from the top of their 2024 ticket.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris seemed ill-prepared to step in for Biden and campaign in his shadow, even though she was serving as vice president under an octogenarian. (Elsewhere in the Allen-Parnes book, Biden is said to have resisted any Harris efforts to distance herself from him in order to win the election.) This is despite top Harris aides having “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office.”
Democrats did not initially appear to have a lot of confidence in Harris to replace Biden. Her performance as vice president up to that point had been widely panned. Her approval ratings were low. She had significant staff turnover. She had to abandon her own bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination before the first primary votes were cast.
“One veteran operative summed up the sentiments of Democrats who worried they would get stuck with Harris but still wanted Biden out: ‘Well, at least she has a pulse,’” Allen and Parnes write.
“For months, even those now nudging Biden out the door haven’t been confident that Harris would be a winning presidential candidate, reviving some of the same concerns that sank her White House run and dogged an uneven vice presidency,” Politico reported the day before Biden dropped out.
As Biden deliberated over what to do in the weeks following his disastrous debate performance, there were multiple media reports of him asking advisers if Harris could win if he departed the race.
“He’s gone from saying, ‘Kamala can’t win,’ to ‘Do you think Kamala can win?” CNN quoted an unnamed Democrat as saying three days before Biden threw in the towel. “It’s still unclear where he’s going to land but seems to be listening.”
But the bottom line is that Biden did not pick someone he had confidence in as a successor, despite that being the main purpose of the vice presidency. Harris seemingly hadn’t given much thought as to how she would escape Biden’s negatives if she did succeed him before the election. And even though some Democrats were reportedly worried Biden was going to die before the election, there were no major primary challengers.
It is possible that in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody, Biden thought he needed to pick a black woman. Black Democrats saved his 2020 presidential campaign in South Carolina. It is not obvious in retrospect that Karen Bass, another Democrat on Biden’s vice presidential short list who is now the embattled mayor of Los Angeles, would have been obviously better than Harris.
Yet it seems more likely that Biden, who had been trying to become president since at least 1987 and finally won the office 33 years later, was never going to go quietly. He chose a running mate who was good insurance for him keeping the job he long wanted rather than someone who could easily step in at a moment’s notice, despite his advanced age.
In light of that, Democrats feared a primary challenger would not result in a new nominee, but would further weaken Biden in the general election. This had been the history of Gerald Ford when he was challenged by Ronald Reagan in 1976, Jimmy Carter when he was challenged by Ted Kennedy in 1980, and George H.W. Bush when he was challenged by Pat Buchanan in 1992.
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The Democrats also lost when Lyndon Johnson dropped out in 1968, standing aside for his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. And they lost again last year when the same scenario played out with Biden and Harris.
The Democrats’ preparation for life after Biden came to naught.