Who Will Replace Biden as Democrats’ Presidential Candidate?
Virginia Allen / Jarrett Stepman /
Who is most likely to replace President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket now that he has stepped aside in the presidential race?
Biden announced Sunday that he was dropping out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take on former President Donald Trump.
“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” Biden wrote on the social media platform X.
Biden’s announcement that he is stepping aside came three days after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where delegates united behind Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, as the party’s standard-bearers against Biden and Harris in November.
Even with Biden’s endorsement of Harris, however, the Democrat Party has no legal obligation to support Biden’s preferred replacement for him on the ticket.
Biden’s Republican challenger, Trump, was quick to comment.
“Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve—And never was!” Trump wrote in a statement posted on Truth Social. “He only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement.”
This is, by far, the latest in a presidential campaign season that a sitting president has decided not to run.
The nation is in uncharted territory here.
Democrats already have held their primary elections across America. The result was a resounding victory for Biden in a virtually uncontested race. Their options are now limited.
The party can’t hold another primary and the Democratic National Convention, set to begin Aug. 19 in Chicago, is just around the corner.
The last time a Democrat incumbent dropped out of a reelection bid was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. But Johnson, bogged down in the Vietnam War, stepped aside with 219 days to go before the election.
In that scenario, Democrats still had time to hold primary elections. After Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination June 6 in Los Angeles as he claimed California in the primaries, the party eventually chose Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. But the party’s left flank was deeply disaffected by the Johnson administration’s conduct of the war in Vietnam.
Protests, riots, and clashes with police rocked the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which also was held in August in Chicago. Former Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, eventually won a resounding 301-191 Electoral College victory over Humphrey; American Independent Party candidate George Wallace took 46 votes in the Electoral College.
Will we see history repeat itself? The anti-Israel protesters who’ve been disrupting cities and college campuses weren’t too happy with Biden, and it remains to be seen how they will respond to a new candidate.
(Another echo of 1968: This year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the major independent presidential candidate, after the Democrats forced him out for advocating open primary challenges of Biden.)
Biden’s 3,896 pledged convention delegates are free to vote for a replacement at the Democratic National Convention. The total number of Democratic delegates is 3,949, so the president had nearly all of them. If the delegates don’t reach a majority decision with 1,976 votes on a nominee, the party’s so-called superdelegates, over 700 of them, will decide who to nominate.
Superdelegates are party leaders, and the list typically consists of officeholders and former officeholders.
That convention process leaves the field open in a limited sense. To get into the running at the convention, a candidate would have to receive over 300 signatures from delegates. Only a maximum of 50 delegates may come from individual state delegations.
Several names have been floated besides Harris as potential replacements for Biden at the top of the ticket.
A CBS/YouGov poll reported last week that Trump leads Harris 51% to 48% in a hypothetical match-up by popular vote. But Forbes reports that the Democratic polling firm Bendixen & Amandi showed Harris could beat Trump 42% to 41%.
The same survey found that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and California Gov. Gavin Newsom both trail Trump.
Here’s a rundown of the three Democrats most likely to replace the president on the ballot.
Gavin Newsom
Moments after the end of the disastrous presidential debate June 27, reporters began asking Newsom, 56, if he would become the Democratic candidate in the Nov. 5 election.
Newsom maintained then that the Democrat Party already had its candidate and reaffirmed his support for Biden. But with Biden now out, California’s governor is on a short list of possible candidates to lead the party forward.
As head of a big blue state, Newsom is viewed as a leader in the effort to advance the Democrats’ leftist agenda on issues such as transgenderism and abortion.
The California governor has been active on the campaign trail in support of Biden. Following Biden’s announcement that he will not run, Newsom called Biden “an extraordinary, history-making president—a leader who has fought hard for working people and delivered astonishing results for all Americans.”
“He will go down in history as one of the most impactful and selfless presidents,” Newsom added.
ABC News reports that Newsom polled 39% to Trump’s 42% in an Ipsos poll, and trailed Trump by about 5 percentage points in a CNN poll.
Gretchen Whitmer
Michigan native Gretchen Whitmer, 52, has been the state’s governor since 2019. She previously served in both the Michigan House of Representatives and the Michigan Senate.
Like Newsom, Whitmer has been floated for weeks as a possible pick to replace Biden on the ballot in November.
Moments after Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, Whitmer issued a statement thanking him for being “a great public servant who knows better than anyone what it takes to defeat Donald Trump.”
“My job in this election will remain the same,” Whitmer continued, “doing everything I can to elect Democrats and stop Donald Trump, a convicted felon whose agenda of raising families’ costs, banning abortion nationwide, and abusing the power of the White House to settle his own scores is completely wrong for Michigan.”
Trump called Whitmer a “terrible governor” during a campaign rally Saturday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a week after an attempt on his life at a Pennsylvania rally. The Republican nominee added that he would “like to run against her.”
Trump, like many Republicans, has criticized Whitmer for the extensive COVID-19 lockdown measures she implemented during the pandemic. The Michigan governor lifted restrictions on the size of gatherings and required use of face masks in June 2021.
In 2020, law enforcement foiled a plot against Whitmer, charging six men in federal court for conspiring to kidnap the governor.
Kamala Harris
At this point, the most likely person to replace Biden on Democrats’ ticket is Harris, 59.
Before she became vice president, Harris served as a California senator and as the state’s attorney general. She ran in the 2020 Democrat presidential primary but bowed out of that race with low polling numbers before the first state voted.
Biden picked her as his running mate even though she essentially called him a racist in a primary debate.
After their election in November 2020, Biden appointed Harris in February 2021 to investigate the “root causes” of illegal immigration from Central America. Since that time, a historic number of illegal crossings has occurred at the southern U.S. border, mostly by migrants from Central and South America.
The inside track to Democrats’ nomination likely goes to Harris for a few significant reasons besides just polling data.
First, Harris’ endorsement by Biden, which would presumably have some influence over the president’s own delegates. Endorsements from other party elites are rolling in too.
That list now includes former first lady, senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who ran against Trump as the Democrats’ nominee in 2016 and lost. (The Clinton campaign secretly financed the origin of the fruitless Trump-Russia collusion investigations.)
Bill and Hillary Clinton announced Sunday that they would back Harris for the nomination next month.
Notably, former President Barack Obama did not, as the New York Post reported, saying only that Democrats would pick an “outstanding nominee” at their convention.
Also not picking a side in public: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the Post noted.
The second significant reason Harris takes the nomination is that she more easily gains access to over $91 million raised by the Biden-Harris reelection campaign.
In a timely commentary for Fox News published Friday, Heritage Foundation legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky does an excellent breakdown of what would happen to the Biden campaign cash should the president drop out of the race. It’s worth a read.
In short, if Harris is the nominee, she gets all the money banked by the Joe Biden for President Committee. Another candidate would have only limited access to that money.
“Biden for President would be limited to giving no more than a $2,000 contribution to the new presidential nominee’s campaign committee,” von Spakovsky writes.
The Biden for President committee could give its money to the Democratic National Committee, which could then use the money “to support their federal, state, and local candidates,” von Spakovsky explains.
However, due to spending limits in the law, the Democratic National Committee could contribute only $32.4 million to an alternative nominee’s campaign.
“A party committee could make independent expenditures regarding the presidential campaign, but it could not make unlimited coordinated expenditures of the newly transferred funds,” adds von Spakovsky, Heritage’s expert on election law.
Even with those advantages, there’s no guarantee that Harris will get the nod when the Democratic National Convention gathers in Chicago.
Another candidate, even a dark horse, could emerge in what has certainly been one of the most chaotic presidential races in American history.
Ken McIntyre contributed to this report.