A poor debate performance has fuelled Democrat unease about Mr Biden's candidacy.

The first presidential debate is done and the aftermath has not been good for the incumbent, Joe Biden.

Some Democrat politicians and operatives reportedly texted CNN commentators with hopes that Mr Biden, 81, would step aside. Some floated the possibility of going to the White House and publicly stating concerns about him remaining as candidate.

But if Mr Biden were to drop out, it would be a free-for-all. There is no official mechanism for him or anyone else in the party to choose his successor, meaning Democrats would be left with an open (Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago from August 19-22.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    the TL;DR is that the party can’t just replace Biden.

    The Democratic Party can run whoever it wants. The primaries and party nomination are party-internal processes. They could say “now the rules are we choose a random US citizen”. They don’t have to do a primary at all. Some parties don’t. There was a point in time in US history when primaries weren’t a thing, and parties were quite happily doing their thing back then.

    kagis for a starting date

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_election

    The direct primary became important in the United States at the state level starting in the 1890s and at the local level in the 1900s.[17] The first primary elections came in the Democratic Party in the South in the 1890s starting in Louisiana in 1892.

    The United States is one of a handful of countries to select candidates through popular vote in a primary election system;[12] most other countries rely on party leaders or party members to select candidates, as was previously the case in the U.S.[13]

    EDIT: As a good example, the Libertarian Party – though much smaller than the Big Two – is the next closest. Under their rules, they participate in primaries, but they treat the primary simply as a way to obtain the preference of the electorate; the primary doesn’t bind the party, under their rules.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Libertarian_Party_presidential_primaries

    The Green Party has a mix of conventions and primaries, depending upon state; a random member of the electorate may-or-may-not directly vote to select their party’s candidate.

    https://www.gp.org/2024_nomination_process

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      I’d add that I don’t at all agree with some of the people in this thread, who are on the left end of the spectrum and mainly seem to be hoping that the Democratic Party will select someone further left than Biden because they personally would prefer a further-left candidate. In the American electoral system, voting is FPTP. That means that you tend to wind up with two large, big-tent, fairly centrist parties (which approximate party coalitions in parliamentary systems), and the smart move for each to win general elections is to run a centrist candidate.

      A Big Two party can nominate someone out on the fringes, but then they will cede the general election to the other party if the other party runs a centrist candidate.

      In fact, a major argument against primaries is that they may tend to choose a suboptimal candidate for the general election, since they tend towards electing candidates towards the center of the political party, and that that a more-winning strategy for a party is to choose someone not at the center of their party’s views, but between that and the center of the general electorate, and that the party members are more-likely to make use of strategic voting than are members of the electorate that votes for their party’s candidate.

      I watched a very similar discussion play out on British political forums over the past decade or so. Due to Labour changing some internal party policies that lowered the bar to party membership, party voting changed. Some left-advocacy groups organized a campaign to get people on the left side of the Labour spectrum to become members, to act in the party candidate selection process, and as a result, Jeremy Corbyn – who is on the left end of the Labour spectrum – was chosen as Labour candidate. There were people who were absolutely convinced that running Jeremy Corbyn would be a stupendously winning strategy because they personally were politically closer to Corbyn and couldn’t imagine why anyone else would vote against him. I watched Tony Blair give a talk where he pointed out that unless a political party wins elections, it doesn’t get to have political power, and that while he was a centrist candidate, he actually won elections and that Labour had mostly been out of political power for an awfully large portion of recent British political history. Sure enough, Labour proceeded to run Corbyn twice and were clobbered in two elections. Now they’re back to the comparatively-moderate Keir Starmer and based on polling, are looking at having strong results in the imminent election.