This Is Who Will Decide Who The Democratic Nominee Will Be If Biden Drops Out Of 2024 Race

5 months ago

On "Forbes Newsroom," presidential historian David Greenberg spoke about what could happen at the DNC if President Biden drops out of the 2024 race.

Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:

https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript

Stay Connected
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com

Transcript

00:00Busy times. As I said to you before we started recording, I feel like I've lived a year in the last week.

00:06But let's talk about where we are right now. As we are recording this,

00:10top Democrats are calling on President Biden to drop out of the presidential race.

00:15What is the precedent for something like this to happen after so many voters have voted in the primaries?

00:22Really there is none. The primary system as we know it sort of started in 1972.

00:30There were primaries before that going all the way back to the early 1900s.

00:34But only in the 70s did they become the binding method for choosing the party's nominee.

00:42And since then, no one has ever dropped out after winning, which Biden, of course, won.

00:48He ran pretty much unopposed. There was a kind of token opposition in the form of Dean Phillips,

00:54an admirable Minnesota congressman who warned that Biden was not in good enough health

01:02or sort of at the top of his game strong enough to beat Trump in a rematch.

01:08But at the time, of course, people stuck with Biden, trusted in Biden and voted for Biden.

01:15So we really are in uncharted territory. You have to go back to the years before the primaries

01:23were the method for selecting nominees. And back then, that was done by the delegates.

01:30Party leaders in each state, governors, state senators, that sort of thing,

01:37who would decide our state's going for Kennedy, our state's going for Adlai Stevenson.

01:42And they would decide who the nominee was, not the voters at large.

01:48So are we in a situation now where if President Biden drops out of the race, it's down to these delegates at the DNC?

01:57That's exactly right. So right now, the delegates are bound. They're pledged to vote for Biden.

02:04But he can release them from that. He's the only one who can do that.

02:08That's why people have been waiting on Biden to say, I'm ready to step aside,

02:14which, as we're talking right now, he still hasn't done, although it's looking like that's at least more of a possibility

02:22than it seemed a week or two ago. So we will have a sort of strange and unfamiliar situation

02:30where roughly 4000 people will get to decide who who they want the nominee to be.

02:37And if there's one person nominated, then it'll be easy.

02:42If there's several people nominated, it'll be whoever gets to 50 percent of the delegates first.

02:48You may have to have several ballots before one person clears 50 percent.

02:53Of course, we're dealing in hypotheticals here. But just to continue down this hypothetical path,

02:57if President Biden drops out, he's on a ticket with Vice President Harris.

03:01So would he say or could he confer his delegates to Vice President Harris?

03:07Or do the delegates literally just get to be on the DNC floor and say,

03:12I want Bernie Sanders back or I want Hillary Clinton back or what happens there?

03:18Yeah, the delegates get to decide. I mean, Biden can put his thumb on the scales by saying,

03:23I endorse Vice President Harris. And if he does that, it would likely be in concert with other party leaders

03:31to try to create a fait accompli, the sense that she is the handpicked successor

03:38and that most of the delegates would therefore go along.

03:42It's also the case that, you know, it changes from convention to convention.

03:47But each year the rules specify how a nomination is made, how many signatures or votes you need to be a full fledged nominee.

03:59That is, you know, nominated to be the nominee. So you might not have more than one candidate.

04:07But if it's a truly open convention, as we call it, then, you know, in the past,

04:12sometimes people have from the floor, you know, on the second day of the convention,

04:16third day of the convention, we still don't have a nominee.

04:19Someone new is put into the mix and that scrambles everything.

04:23I don't think we're likely to go that route this year, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

04:30So anything is possible, it sounds like.

04:34Well, certainly there's a broad range of possibilities.

04:37I mean, right now, what I'm hearing is that there's a sense that Harris should be the nominee

04:45if it's not Biden. But there's a lot of other people who look at her polling and say she's not that strong against Trump.

04:54Shouldn't the party put forward the person who would be the best, strongest nominee?

04:59If we're going this unprecedented route of asking, let's face it,

05:05a successful one term president who's proven himself capable of beating Trump for asking him to step aside

05:12after having won all the primaries, we should only take that extraordinary measure in order to get the best candidate out there.

05:21And depending on, you know, your analysis, that may or may not be Vice President Harris.

This Is Who Will Decide Who The Democratic Nominee Will Be If Biden Drops Out Of 2024 Race

Category

Transcript

Recommended