Will Democrats Drag Joe Over the Finish Line?

Blatantly plagiarizing a phrase describing his son’s laptop, Joe’s debate from hell has Democrats bewitched, bothered and bewildered regarding whether to dump him on their 2024 ticket now, or wait to bait and switch him after the election providing Donald Trump doesn’t remove him first.

Unless Joe can be pressured to leave, it won’t be easy to kick Joe under the bus unless he can be pressured to exit voluntarily.

Axios’s Mike Allen has stated that the White House determination to barge ahead in keeping the president in the race despite universal doubts regarding his fading debate dexterity and failing judgment is “one of the greatest gambles in the history of politics.”

William Galston of The Wall Street Journal agrees, observing: “The Biden campaign gambled on an early debate to put voters’ questions about the president’s age and capabilities to rest. The world watched as this bet backfired spectacularly.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board echoed this opinion, stating: “President Biden’s halting, stumbling debate performance Thursday night showed all too clearly that he isn’t up to serving four more years in office. For the good of the country, more even than their party, Democrats have some hard thinking to do about whether they need to replace him at the top of their ticket.”

The Journal then poses an inevitable question regarding why it took so long to reach this conclusion of unfitness to run again.

Stating that they and many others had warned them otherwise, they rhetorically asked, “But did they really think they could hide his decline from the public for an entire election campaign?”

Noting that Biden had “struggled to articulate policy specifics, statistics and rebuttals, often stumbling or misspeaking,” even the excruciatingly liberal New York Times editorial board has asked him to drop out of the race.

In a separate editorial, the board wrote: “[T]he greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election. As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble.”

The uber-left Washington Post editorial board went even so far as to write a suggested concession speech impersonating Joe, stating: “My season of service is nearing its close. But it is the natural course of things — as evident as the progression from spring to summer, from fall to winter. This is why I have decided to withdraw from the campaign for president of the United States.”

If Joe were persuaded to withdraw before the election, it will leave his party with arguably an equal or larger problem named Kamala. This would occur either whether Biden withdrew before or after the Democrat’s national nominating convention.

Whereas dropping out before will raise the prospect of an open convention in which delegates would be free to abandon commitments made to Biden during the primary elections and to back a new nominee, the vice president, notably running to become the first Black woman president, will be difficult to displace.

If he were to withdraw after the convention, according to DNC rules a special meeting of the Democratic National Committee would decide the party’s presidential ticket, with the same very likely outcome.

Although Harris polls even lower than Joe in most surveys, many Democrats fear that selection of any other known nominee will sidestep an entitlement candidate and potentially anger a key demographic voting block they need to win.

The New York Times opines that if Biden were to step aside and be replaced by Harris she could be eligible to inherit the party’s campaign money which currently stands at $212 million.

“If another candidate were to become the nominee, the process could become more complicated, potentially requiring the funds to be transferred to the DNC. or an independent group.”

On the other hand, the Times also reports that if Biden doesn’t drop out, a Democrat-supporting donor organization called the Next Generation PAC is working to raise as much as $100 million in new money that could be used to help down-ballot congressional candidates.

Gideon Stein, a donor and operative with deep connections in Democratic politics, reportedly said in the article that his family was withholding $3.5 million in planned donations to nonprofits and political organizations active in the presidential race unless Mr. Biden stepped aside.

Stein also told the Times that virtually every major donor he had spoken with believed that “a new ticket is in the best interest of defeating Donald Trump.”

A Democrat mutiny against Biden is reportedly also occurring in the U.S. House with at least 25 of his party’s members reportedly set to call for him to forego his reelection bid.

All of this presents Democrats with an dilemma — whether to dump a president well past his prime for an unsophisticated vice-president as their party’s best terrible 2024 candidate choice.