Okay. Let's talk about the rules and this Biden situation
There are party rules in place for a lot of contingencies but they only take us so far
It has now been two weeks since the first presidential debate of the 2024 general election, and while the firestorm it created on the Democratic side with respect to President Biden’s future on the ticket has ebbed and flowed, it has not gone away. And there are not any clear signs that the roller coaster will stop anytime soon. For better or worse (from a Democratic perspective), the media has (rightfully) been circling this story and Democratic members of Congress, newly returned to the capital from an Independence Day respite, are continuing to provide the sort of kindling in response that keeps a the fire going. In other words, this story is not likely to go away in the near term.
As things have evolved over the last fortnight, one facet of it all that has been kicked up in all the speculation about where things are going and how the decisions made will affect the election that is now less than ten weeks off is the set of formal party rules that shape a hypothetical late-stage replacement on the presidential ticket. And other than taking some calls from a few media outlets, fielding a number of email requests and firing off a handful of social media missives, FHQ has remained pretty quiet on that front. And the reasons for that are simple enough. Once one gets down in the weeds of the rules spread across the delegate selection rules, the call for the convention and the regulations of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, things get complicated very quickly. Those complications are compounded by the inherent uncertainty hovering over what is a unique midsummer collective action problem for the Democratic Party coalition. Talk of replacing a nominee, presumptive or otherwise, just does not come up that often. Not in the modern era of presidential nominations, not ever in American history really.
These are uncharted waters and FHQ wants to 1) be careful, but also 2) contribute helpfully to the discourse where I can; to get out in front of any haphazard thumbing through the rules and “landing” on some silver bullet solution to all of this. There are no silver bullets. There are only a number of paths this could take and some that hypothetically offer less resistance than others.
With that in mind, here is an attempted careful look at the formal rules that could come in to play over the next five plus weeks before the Democratic National Convention gavels in in Chicago.