As President Biden faces pressure to abandon his bid for a second term, his Democratic party is entering uncharted territory, struggling with the many risks and rewards of deciding who to replace him with less than two months to go until the party convention.
No nominee has ever withdrawn this late before, but no party has ever faced the challenges Democrats now face: a candidate dogged by questions about his intellectual ability, his ability to beat his rival, former President Donald J. Trump, and his fitness to serve another four years as president.
In this climate, Democrats are struggling with key questions: Will it be easy to beat Trump, with or without Biden on top, and is it riskier to choose a new candidate or to support a president who appears headed for defeat?
A New York Times/Siena College poll released Wednesday showed Trump widening his lead over Biden among likely voters to 6 percentage points following his lackluster performance in last week's presidential debate.
The White House has said the president has no plans to back down, and he met with Democratic governors on Wednesday, but he has confided in at least two allies that he knows the next few days are crucial to keeping his candidacy alive, so much so that on Friday morning Biden began preparing for his first in-person interview since the debate, with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos.
Despite the risks, several Democrats said a new nominee could bring a lot of benefits to the party if Biden nominates a successor to ensure a smooth transition and minimize intraparty infighting.
A new generation of candidates could invigorate the race, giving so-called double haters — voters unhappy with the rematch between the 81-year-old president and the 78-year-old former president — another option in November's election. The new candidates would almost certainly benefit from a surge in campaign funds, at least initially.
“It's certainly dangerous to swerve right or left when you're driving straight off a cliff,” said Democratic consultant Howard Wolfson, who said he doubted Biden could bounce back from the debate to beat Trump.
But other Democrats, including some who advise Biden, said changing the nominee now could lead to divisions and destructive infighting within the party, saddle the party with an untested candidate and a logistical nightmare that would only increase the chances of a Trump victory this fall.
“A lot of things have to go right for this to work, but it's going to take an act of God,” said Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic consultant who also advises the Biden campaign but did not speak on behalf of the campaign.
Crash Course Campaign
Any candidate to replace Biden later in the election will likely have less name recognition and experience on the national stage than either Biden or Trump — an obstacle the newly elected candidate will have to overcome quickly.
Without traditional primaries, candidates would not be able to learn the on-the-job lessons of a presidential candidate — training on voter questions, learning the ins and outs of unfamiliar local issues, forming alliances with key players in each state — nor would they be subject to thorough scrutiny and testing of their record and political strengths and weaknesses by voters, opponents, and the media.
Political leaders have learned the risks of relying on unknowns for last-minute vice presidential picks: Sarah Palin of Alaska, John McCain's running mate in 2008, and Dan Quayle of Indiana, George H.W. Bush's running mate in 1988, both struggled and stumbled through election seasons.
“Choosing someone new is not without significant risk, which is why many Democrats are reluctant to consider replacing Joe Biden as the nominee,” said Steve McMahon, a Democratic strategist who worked on former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004.
Republicans won't make it easy: Campaigns normally have months to conduct opposition research on their candidates to prepare for any attacks.
But the Trump campaign has already had ample time to assemble an opposition dossier of potentially damaging information about Biden's potential successors, which it could use to help define them before choosing a successor itself.
(“Is Invasion Czar Kamala Harris the best they have?” the Trump campaign asked in an email sent Wednesday morning, which outlined a bullet-point attack that included Harris’ role in Biden’s immigration policy.)
Still, the sheer excitement of new faces could really give a boost to the fall campaign in a year when many voters are grumbling about the 2020 reelection. And while new candidates may be influenced by the results of Trump's polling of their opponents, that information has little time to be made public and percolated.
A difficult process
There is no real guidance on how to replace a candidate who drops out just weeks before the convention. For some Democrats, the potential chaos and division is reason enough for Biden to continue in the race.
One way to minimize chaos, some Democrats have argued, could be for Biden to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris when he leaves office.
“The advantage Kamala Harris has in this hypothetical is that she's already been thoroughly vetted,” said Elaine Kamark, a member of the Democratic National Committee and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “We probably know everything there is to know about her. That's not true for other people. She's been in the White House for four years. There's plenty of name recognition.”
If Biden withdraws from the race without naming a successor, the process will likely become a contest for delegate loyalty, bringing to the surface ideological and generational conflicts that have been brewing for years. The battles over Gaza, immigration and policing that were already expected to feature in the convention will now be much more important and may help determine the new nominee.
One thing Democrats should never take for granted, Cutter said, is that “Democrats can agree on anything.”
But it's far from unanimous: Kamarck said Democrats' hostility toward Trump will unite them.
“The antipathy towards a second term for Donald Trump remains the same as it was four years ago,” she said.
And some Democrats argue there are ways to minimize the long-term damage. Jeff Weaver, a strategist for Sen. Bernie Sanders' two presidential campaigns, said the party should adopt a fast-track selection process that includes party-sanctioned debates.
“If that happens, it will take all the political conversation away from us until the Democratic National Convention,” he said, “and by the time of the convention, people will have a good idea of who these candidates are.”
A new candidate could face other complicating factors. Ohio's election law requires a nominee to be finalized by Aug. 7, about two weeks before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Democrats had planned to formally confirm Biden's nomination by then in a virtual roll call vote. Unless the law is changed (and it still could be), Democrats will be forced to either finalize a new nominee by the August deadline or give up on getting on the Ohio ballot.
In other states, Republicans are already considering lawsuits to block Democrats from changing candidates' names on the ballot.
Richard Winger, a voting rules expert and publisher of Ballot Access News, said he doesn't believe the lawsuits can legitimately interfere with states' votes.
The battle for cash
The new Democratic candidate will likely inherit Biden's campaign base and the party's infrastructure and organization already built in battleground states, party strategists said.
But without sufficient funding, that alone can only go so far: New candidates will need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to run full campaigns and make themselves known to Americans in a shortened election cycle.
“Do they have a billion dollars to do it, and do they have the time to spend a billion dollars to tell this story?” said Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, who argued changing the candidate was a bad idea for the party.
The answer depends in part on whether that candidate is Harris.
Saurabh Ghosh, director of campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, said that if Harris becomes vice president, she will be able to take over Biden's campaign finance accounts, unlike the other candidates.
If the new candidate is not Harris, Biden's money could go back to the Democratic National Committee, which would be able to spend only $32 million of it on the campaign.
Several top Democratic strategists said they weren't worried about that challenge. The new candidate's coffers would likely be flooded with online contributions from rank-and-file supporters. Even better, donors who gave top dollar to Biden and couldn't give more to Harris would have a clean slate to give top dollar again to another candidate, potentially garnering a huge windfall.
And Democratic super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money but cannot legally coordinate their actions with campaigns, are almost certain to move quickly to support new candidates.
Still, Biden supporters who oppose the idea of change say starting a new campaign may not be as easy as those pushing for change think.
“You can't just snap your fingers and assume that's going to happen,” said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who has argued that Biden will be the nominee in this fall's presidential election.
Michael S. Schmidt Contributed report.
