Summer Surprise: The Looming Biden Replacement

by William Sullivan

In February, I predicted that it can’t be Joe Biden representing the Democratic Party in November, and that he would be replaced sometime in the summer before the Democratic National Convention.

The day before that article was published (but after I had written it), the Robert Hur investigation report dropped, in which Biden was described by the special investigator as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

I honestly wondered at the time if that revelation would make the subject of my article somewhat moot.  On top of the points made in the article, such as four-in-five Americans thinking he’s too old to run for a second term and his horrifyingly bad polling on the most pressing voter issues like the economy, immigration, and crime, Biden had just been deemed by his own DOJ as too mentally unfit to stand trial over his having illegally taken and stored classified documents.  There’s no way that they could continue the charade of pretending that the DNC would still intend to have him on the presidential ticket in November, I thought.

But here we are, several months later, still pretending that Biden will be on the ticket in November.  And the old man isn’t getting any better, folks.  The glitches are getting worse, whether he’s wandering away from world leaders at the G-7 or rambling more incoherently than ever.  Such recent displays led Steve Forbes to recently suggest that “the continued, painfully obvious mental decline of our commander-in-chief has revived widespread public speculation of his withdrawing.”

And though they stopped for a while, even Democrats are noticing and making similar comments again.  As his polling just hit all-time lows at polling guru Nate Silver’s website, FiveThirtyEight, the pollster suggested on X that Biden should finally consider dropping out.  “Dropping out would be a big risk,” he says, but “there’s some threshold below which continuing to run is a bigger risk.”

What’s clearer to him, he says, is that “Democrats would have been better served if Biden had decided a year ago not to seek a second term, which would have allowed them to have some semblance of a primary process and give voters a say among the many popular Democrats across the country.”

Anyone paying attention in 2016 and 2020 knows how little Democrats care about “giving voters a say” in the primary process.  As the Party has veered ever-leftward while prioritizing radical environmentalism, intersectionality, and a general Marxist economic disposition and disdain for this country and its history, the primary process in recent years has yielded a commanding advantage to hard-left socialists like Bernie Sanders as the crowded field of moderate candidates vied for the political center during the Democratic primaries.

To put it bluntly, neither octogenarian Bernie Sanders nor shrill socialist Elizabeth Warren would play in Peoria, or any of the vital swing states for that matter, and the DNC’s awareness of that fact is ostensibly why they underhandedly rigged the 2016 and 2020 primaries against Bernie Sanders in the first place.

And hard-lined leftists like Sanders or Warren would have had a huge opportunity with an open primary in 2024, not only because moderate Democrats are disaffected with current leadership, but because there is an absolute dearth of “popular Democrats” to pick up the Democrat baton.

Who, after all, are the “many popular Democrats” that Nate Silver imagines Democrats to have on the bench?

Gavin Newsom?  California is a failing state at the moment, having gone from a $100 billion surplus after federal COVID stimulus to a $73 billion deficit in just two years.  It is currently enduring an unprecedented homelessness crisis while also experiencing an exodus of high-income taxpayers.  Meanwhile, it is welcoming illegal aliens and unskilled laborers who benefit from California’s ambitious welfare state.

Pete Buttigieg was once another name sometimes mentioned as a possible replacement for Biden in 2024, hilariously.  After being the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he ran for president in 2020 on the strength of his being an articulate gay man.  While he saw some early success in 2020, he now holds the distinction of being the only Secretary of the Department of Transportation to have taken several months of paternity leave without his spouse having actually endured birthing a child amid a massive supply-chain interruption, a toxic train derailment in Ohio, and a wayward ship destroying a vital bridge in Baltimore, all while overseeing a $7.5 billion initiative which, after 3 years, has yielded exactly seven electric vehicle charging stations.

Oh, and if you think black voters are defecting to Trump at a quick pace now, try putting Buttigieg at the top of the ticket and see how that shakes out.

Kamala Harris represents a different kind of problem.  She’s not genuine, and she’s wildly unlikeable.  There’s really not more to it beyond that, and her campaign for the presidency fizzled out long before a primary vote was even cast in 2020.  And despite her checking several boxes for social credibility as a black and South Asian woman, she would arguably be a practical downgrade from Biden, if that’s possible.

Democrats aren’t interested in an electoral catastrophe with either Biden or Harris at the top of the ticket in November, any more today than they were in February.  But I believe there is a reason that Biden is still the ostensible frontrunner that lots of people are still pretending will actually be on the ticket in November.

And that’s because it benefits the DNC to not pull the plug on Biden’s campaign just yet, and to have everyone pretend for a little while longer, allowing the old man and his family to absorb all the slings and arrows spent by the opposition as long as possible, ideally right up until the Democratic National Convention in August.

There is incredible value in such deception and creating this political fog of war.  “All warfare is based on deception,” according to Sun Tzu, and a smart general will:

Set up decoys and feign confusion, and give the enemy the impression we are about to quit our position.  Then select our elite mounted troops, and send them on ahead into enemy territory under a cloak of silence.

Everyone watching Biden is certainly confused about what Democrats are doing.  Greg Gutfeld, in what seems like a moment of exasperation while talking to Marie Harf on the June 12 episode of “The Five,” said that he’d actually rather vote for Hunter Biden than Joe Biden:

At least Hunter Biden has a brain.  Joe Biden… you cannot believe for a second that Joe Biden is gonna be the nominee.  You look at him.  You saw him on at the Juneteenth thing… [Harf interrupts, saying “100%, he will be” the nominee] He can barely speak!

Yet all the energetic attacks by conservative media and pundits, not to mention millions and millions of dollars of RNC attack ads, are directed at this decaying decoy that is being strategically placed in front of our eyes.

It certainly appears that Democrats are “ready to give up their position” by running Joe Biden in November, and losing the election.

But I don’t believe it.  It’s still hard to imagine that Biden won’t drop out of the race just before the convention in late August.  I expect that he’ll cite a need to focus on family, particularly given his son’s criminal trials, and will bow out.  He can then pardon Hunter before leaving office.

To capitalize on the ruse, however, Democrats have very few “elite mounted troops” to deploy.  But arguably, there are two.

Michelle Obama might qualify, but the going wisdom suggests that she’s not interested.  I’ve never truly counted her out, though.  Replacing Joe and passing over Kamala as a black woman will carry a bit of outrage that Michelle Obama’s nomination would easily overcome.

However, Michelle Obama has never governed or served in any political office, and besides being put in high-paying make-work jobs (her job earning $317,000 as a diversity consultant before becoming first lady doesn’t count), she has no previous experience suggesting executive leadership.

But there is a candidate that few are talking about, and who is well-positioned to replace Biden.  And that candidate would be J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois.

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