US President Joe Biden’s poor performance in the presidential debate against his rival Donald Trump has once again raised the question of what would happen if senior Democrat Biden steps down as the party’s flag-bearer at the last moment.
Such a risky political U-turn would be unprecedented in modern American electoral history. Let’s see how replacing an 81-year-old man might be possible.
If a candidate withdraws:
To nominate a formal candidate, delegates from all 50 states attend their party’s summer nominating convention, and officially select the nominee based on primary voting.
Biden won a landslide victory in the primary, and the party’s roughly 3,900 delegates heading to the convention in Chicago this August are grateful to him.
If Biden drops out, delegates will have to find a replacement. That would mean American politics would return to the old days, when party leaders struggled to choose a nominee through haggling in smoke-filled back rooms and endless rounds of voting.
On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson made the shock announcement in the midst of the Vietnam War that he would not seek re-election.
The move turned the convention, held in Chicago that year, into a political crisis, with protesters in the streets and left-wing delegates upset by the pro-war stance of the party’s chosen candidate, Hubert Humphrey.
After the debacle, states adopted the primary process more widely and streamlined conventions, whose results were known in advance because they were determined by the primary.
If a candidate were to step down after being officially nominated at the convention, the party’s formal governing body, the Democratic National Committee or Republican National Committee, would nominate a new candidate in an extraordinary session.
– Who can fill his place? –
So far, Democrats have rallied around their nominee, at least speaking on the record, with former President Barack Obama stepping in to defend Biden.
When asked about Biden potentially stepping down, campaign communications director Michael Tyler told reporters aboard Air Force One that “there has been no conversation about that.”
The natural — but not automatic — choice to replace Biden would be his running mate in the 2020 election, Vice President Kamala Harris.
The 59-year-old, who was sent in to calm the controversy after the Democratic president’s lackluster performance Thursday night, conceded that Biden was “slow to start” the debate but that he “finished strong.”
Otherwise, any one of several strong Democratic politicians could be called — governors Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania have been mentioned.
Meanwhile, could a strong third party candidate emerge? So far, no independent candidate is posing any threat to America’s dominant two-party system.
In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot, running as an independent candidate, managed to win nearly 19 percent of the popular vote.
But in the end, due to the irregularities of the US election system, he did not get one of the most important votes: the votes of the 538 members of the Electoral College, who ultimately decide the winner.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)