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Joe Biden’s failure in the first electoral debate against a more confident Donald Trump could change the face of the presidential campaign in the United States. The pressure in these hours is enormous and now it is no longer a question of studying the words and gestures of the eighty-one-year-old president to understand his readiness or have the comfort of knowing that he is present to himself. Now we have certainties and the TV comparison in this sense has been ruthless. It is said that the Democrats are in a panic but the problem now is what Biden himself wants to do, he would need a step back to quickly look for a replacement. The deputies asked on condition of anonymity. Mark Buell, a major donor to the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party, says it openly: the president should seriously consider whether he is the best person to be the candidate. “Do we have time to get someone else in?” Buell asks.
The most obvious choice would be Vice President Kamala Harris, although there is no automatic in her favor. If we exclude Michelle Obama, who has done nothing but deny her interest in any kind of race, three state governors emerge: California governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Illinois governor JB Pritzker, the entrepreneur and philanthropist (none of them, however, performed better against Trump than Biden, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll conducted on the seven contested states that will decide the challenge).
A new candidate can only be reached if Biden withdraws, and delegates at the August 19 convention in Chicago are free to choose another name. According to the rules of the Democratic National Committee, there is no mechanism by which other party leaders can exclude Biden. There are delegates to consider; Biden won 95 percent of the nearly 4,000 delegates who pledged but are not legally bound to vote for him. Some note, however, that the delegates were selected out of loyalty to Biden and would therefore be unlikely to turn their backs on him unless he asked them to.
Should the president decide to step aside, a competition with uncertain outcomes would be started. At this point, superdelegates – elected officials and party leaders – could have a leading role, voting at will without any constraints in the event of an open race in which none of the contenders has won a majority.
Kamala Harris could be favored by two circumstances: the first and most important is money. At the end of May, the Biden campaign and the party had raised – Bloomberg calculates – 212 million dollars, a treasure that would go to Harris if she took Biden’s place because the two constitute a ticket. Every other candidate would have to start from scratch and at that point there would be very little time. The other circumstance that could help Harris is Biden himself with a possible endorsement that would influence the delegates in favor of her deputy. Working against Harris are the polls that put her even further behind than Biden and suggest that the Democrats should look elsewhere.
