Forcing Biden out, despite primary wins, means powerbrokers will replace voters

By Gary Abernathy

The Harris-for-Biden switcheroo is bad news for primary voters, good news for backroom deals going forward

The legendary smoke-filled rooms and powerbroker agreements will become standard procedure again thanks to the precedent set by the deal to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris. (Photo by Pascal Meier on Unsplash)

Democrats will kick off their national convention tonight with an ode to President Joe Biden that will portray him as a man who put country above self, who sacrificed his own ambition and checked his ego at the door for the greater good of defeating Donald Trump and preserving democracy.

With the assistance of the far-left (formerly mainstream) media, Biden will be hailed as a national treasure. Cheers will resonate and tears will flow in the convention hall in Chicago.

Of course, the truth is entirely different. Biden clung to his re-election campaign. He sank his claws into his candidacy until it was ripped from his grasp by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Democrat donors and news media reporters and editorial boards. Biden only gave up the fight under threats of abandonment and embarrassment.

But give up he did, and let’s be clear about that. When Trump balked at going through with a debate against Vice President Kamala Harris that was originally scheduled with Biden, it was astounding how many in the media parroted Harris’s mantra that Trump was pulling out of the debate. What? Biden pulled out of the debate. Biden pulled out of the whole race! How did Trump have any obligation to go through with a debate originally negotiated with the Biden campaign? The fact that Trump eventually caved and agreed to do it is confounding. He should have held out for an entirely new schedule of debates negotiated from scratch.

This week’s convention will hail Harris as a conquering hero, a feminist icon, and a civil rights pioneer. She’ll be described as all those things and more.

What’s been largely lost in the Harris-for-Biden swap is the historic precedent it sets, and how the game has been changed for both Democrats and Republicans in the years to come. To understand it, let’s take a clear-eyed look at what happened in Biden’s case.

Biden naturally coasted through the Democratic Party primaries. His poll numbers against Trump weren’t great, but they certainly gave him a 50-50 chance of winning. His cognitive deficiencies were on clear display during the June 27th CNN debate with Trump. But that’s not what led to the Democrats’ panic. Biden’s follow-up public appearances, though not particularly strong, tamped down talk for a while of dumping him.

The panic set in for real only as Biden’s poll numbers began to drop, especially in the swing states, where Trump’s lead was steadily widening. Only then did the drumbeat to make a switch get significantly steadier.

And so – with the primaries over but the delegates not yet officially casting their votes – the plan was hatched. Biden was pressured out of the race, and Harris was sharp enough to guilt delegates and other party officials into backing her nomination. No one loved Kamala Harris, but no one in the modern Democratic Party – considering the identity politics on which it has been built -- could afford to be seen as not getting behind a woman of color who was already the sitting vice president. Even though Harris was clearly the weakest of all viable Democrat alternatives to Biden, the die was cast.

But what does this mean going forward? It means that even after a Republican or Democrat candidate has run the primary gamut and come out victorious, party officials will be keeping a close eye on polling. If the candidate who won the primaries appears to be faltering come June, July or August – any time before delegates officially cast their votes – a switch will be made. The precedent has now been set.

The switch from Biden to Harris has nothing to do with Biden’s cognitive decline or his decision to put country over self or his patriotic desire to keep Trump out of the White House. It has only to do with the fact that it began to appear that Biden could not win. No one would have cared how much his age had caught up with him, or how steep was his decline – which has been evident during his entire presidency – if his poll numbers were strong.

In 2016, when Trump became the presumptive nominee following his strong showing in the primaries, there were calls for GOP delegates to go to the convention and nominate someone else. In April 2016 – even well before the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape emerged – Washington Post columnist George Will, still a Republican at the time (he announced two months later that he had left the GOP to become “unaffiliated”), urged RNC delegates to say to hell with the primary voters and choose somebody else.

“A convention’s sovereign duty is to choose a plausible nominee who has a reasonable chance to win, not to passively affirm the will of a mere plurality of voters recorded episodically in a protracted process,” Will wrote dismissively of the primaries, while incorrectly predicting a resounding Trump defeat at the hands of Hillary Clinton.

Thankfully, voices like Will’s were ignored as party leaders and delegates – many of whom were not thrilled with Trump – recognized the arrogance of ignoring the votes of millions of Republicans to choose another nominee more to their liking.

But now, thanks to the Harris switcheroo, party leaders and delegates on both sides will be much more open to such a plan. If a scandal emerges, or poll numbers just don’t seem particularly strong, alternative scenarios will be much more seriously considered. A candidate who does not perform well in the primaries but suddenly gains traction in polling come July or August will become the hot topic of conversation among both party officials and media types. “Maybe we should abandon Candidate A for Candidate B, even though Candidate A won the primaries.” Hmmm.

All of which makes the primaries less important and puts the influence back in the purview of the party powerbrokers in their legendary smoke-filled rooms (even if there are fewer actual smokers these days).

To be sure, party conventions were much more fun when the primaries were less important and when the nomination was still up for grabs when the conventions opened. But they were decided by backroom deals made between relatively few power players – just the type of thing the parties moved away from in the last few decades through a primary process that empowered average voters over entrenched political insiders.

Thanks to this year’s shameless maneuver by Democrats to replace a candidate – a sitting president, no less – who won the primaries but was at risk of losing the general election, that kind of manipulation will become standard procedure going forward. Goodbye choice of the voters. Hello backroom deals.

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