There are less than five months before the election, yet talk about replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket persists. There is no way to sugarcoat this for the Democrats: they are in trouble. The media has been speculating since the early months of his presidency about who might replace him, but the situation for Biden might be worse than that. There may be a coup in the works.
Biden thinks that he’s the Democrats' best chance of winning in November, and his handlers would sooner do everything to pretend that he is capable of handling the presidency. But Biden’s problems aren’t exactly the kind you can sweep under the rug. He’s out there in public all the time, and we see his cognitive decline almost daily. And Americans feel they were better off under Trump.
According to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), there’s talk in Washington, D.C., that Democrats will ultimately replace Biden.
“[A] lot of people realize that Joe Biden is likely not going to be the nominee,” Luna told Jesse Watters on Thursday. “Which is from what we’re hearing on Capitol Hill, Representative [Kevin] Kiley had reported that Kamala Harris [is] actually eyeing a run for California governor because of it.”
“Right, that’s the backup plan. So you are hearing also in D.C. that Joe Biden isn’t going to be the Democrat nominee?” Watters asked her.
“Correct,” Luna told him. “It appears that our colleagues are trying to put guardrails on a 2024 presidential election with President Trump and also what you are seeing is according to our polling, you know as well as I do that they have been trying to really paint Republicans as anti-woman and they’re trying to push an abortion crisis right now with the election and I don’t think that’s a case. A lot of the American people know that really this is a states' rights decision and so I think that they know that they’re losing. It’s very evident at this point.”
There’s no question that Biden’s prospects in November don’t look good. His approval ratings are terrible. He’s behind in most national and battleground state polling. He’s bleeding support from key Democrat-voting demographics. Nate Silver is sounding the alarm, and Democrats want the older liberal justices on the Supreme Court to retire so Biden can pick younger replacements. Reliably blue states appear to be competitive this year. Even the Trump trial and verdict backfired on the Democrats.
Related: There’s Something Fishy About FiveThirtyEight’s Election Projection Model
So it doesn’t surprise me at all that there’s talk in D.C. that Biden won’t be the nominee. But absent a coup in the Democratic Party, how is that going to work? Biden is convinced he’s the only Democrat who can win. He’s not going to step aside willingly. Even if party leaders were somehow able to convince him to step aside, we’re so dangerously close to the election that there’s almost no time for a replacement to wage an effective campaign. And who would that candidate be?
If the party puts Biden out to pasture, Kamala Harris will feel entitled to the nomination, and she will fight to be the party’s nominee. She might be the only candidate worse than Biden for the Democrats.
If Democrats were really concerned about Biden, they should have tried to get rid of him sooner. Perhaps they did try and it didn’t work. In that case, if they couldn’t convince him to step aside a year ago, or months ago, what luck will they have now? Any sort of coup against Biden would be risky, and the closer it happens to Election Day, the worse it will be for the Democrats.
