Democratic bosses are moving to kill off efforts to force Joe Biden from the party’s presidential ticket by rushing ahead with plans to formalise his candidacy before next month’s convention in Chicago.
The move comes while the rebellion triggered by last month’s debate fiasco – which prompted multiple calls from within the party for Biden to be replaced as the candidate – has stalled following Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
The Democratic National Committee is seeking to exploit the impasse by pushing ahead with a plan that would secure the president’s nomination by arranging for convention delegates to vote electronically in a week-long roll call starting in late July, Axios reported.
If a majority of the 4,000 delegates back Biden, it will make his candidacy technically unchallengeable when the convention starts on 19 August.
Under the plan, the electronic vote would probably start on 29 July and end on 5 August, meaning Biden will in effect secure his candidacy if he can survive the mutiny for another two weeks.
The party had initially planned to hold an early roll call to comply with election law in Ohio, which decreed that nominees had to be confirmed by 7 August to make it on to state ballots. However, the early poll is no longer necessary on those grounds after Ohio changed its law to push back the nomination deadline to 1 September.
Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, suggested that the early vote was being staged to circumvent the Ohio law, telling Axios: “We certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of Maga Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot.”
However, party insiders say the Ohio rule is not mentioned internally as a reason for holding the early ballot.
The proposal to go ahead nevertheless has angered those Democrats who are worried that widespread concerns over Biden’s age and signs of cognitive decline put him on course for a catastrophic loss to Trump in November.
“Behind the scenes, people at the Biden campaign and DNC are working to put in the fix,” Axios quoted one delegate, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, as writing in an internal email. “Put simply, they are trying to shut down the process earlier. We can’t allow it. I am asking you to ask the DNC [Democratic National Committee] to stop pushing for an early vote.”
A DNC spokesperson said no early vote had been scheduled as yet.
But the prospect was criticised by Lloyd Doggett, a Texas congressman, who was the first elected Democrat to publicly appeal to Biden to stand aside as candidate following the 27 June debate in Atlanta, when he frequently appeared confused and was ineffectual in the face of a rampantly lying Trump.
“Those so eager to overly protect President Biden ignore his own words inviting anyone questioning his nomination to do so at the convention,” Doggett said.
He was referring to Biden’s call last week to dissatisfied Democrats to “challenge me at the convention” in response to pleas for him to stand down, arguing that 14 million Democratic voters had supported him in the party primaries.
So far, 20 Democratic members of Congress and one senator have followed Doggett’s lead in publicly asking the president to end his campaign. But tellingly, none have done so since the weekend attack on Trump – since when Biden has asserted a presidential posture in a series of statements calling for national unity and denouncing political violence.
After a temporary pause on political campaigning following the assassination attempt, Biden will resume his campaign on Tuesday with an appeal to Black voters, addressing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Las Vegas and giving an interview to the BET TV channel.
He will face the delicate balancing act of vigorously targeting Trump – who he continues to depict as a threat to democracy – while being seen to stay true to his own call to “lower the temperature” by cooling the political rhetoric.
In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday, the president was forced into admitting he had erred by telling Democratic donors last week that he wanted “to put a bullseye” on Trump.
The resumption of Biden’s campaign comes as even his own congressional supporters and strategists voice concern that he may be receiving a misleadingly rosy picture of what the poll data is saying about his race with Trump.
The Washington Post reported rumblings after Biden claimed without evidence in a weekend Zoom call that he was leading within the margin of error even after the debate. In fact, several polls showed his support falling after the event and a spike among voters – including Democrats – in favour of him standing aside.
“The polling data we’re seeing nationally and on the swing states has been essentially where it was before,” Biden said during the 45-minute call with the New Democratic Coalition. “You noticed the last three polls, nationally, they had me up four points. And I mean, I don’t have much faith in the polls at all, either way, because they’re so hard to read any more.”
In fact, no polls listed by the 538 website since June has shown Biden up by four points. A New York Times/Siena poll on Monday showed him trailing Trump by three points in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania while leading by the same margin in Virginia, which he won by 10 points in 2020.
