This news week will surely go down in history: Attempted assassination! VP nominee JD Vance! Classified documents case dismissed! Biden has COVID! So it’s entirely understandable if a story about the Democratic National Committee (DNC) holding a rules meeting didn’t exactly grab your attention.
You may have seen references to the DNC’s extremely unusual and controversial plan to formally nominate Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee via Zoom call, weeks before the scheduled party convention. Amid everything going on, it may turn out to be the most important story of the week — maybe of the election.
The story begins with yet another partial failure of one of our democratic rituals. Ohio law requires that the secretary of State be notified of candidate nominations at least 90 days before each election. Every presidential election year, this poses a problem because, by longstanding arrangement, one major party holds its convention in July and the other in August and thus risks missing the dealine. So each time, the Ohio legislature passes a law extending the deadline until September. It’s very much a tradition, and it’s been happening, like clockwork, for decades.
But this year, instead of passing a clean bill extending the deadline, Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature decided to twist Democrats’ tails by adding a poison pill that they knew Democrats would never agree to. The bill failed in the regular session, so Democrats had to come up with a work-around, which was to change the rules, convene virtually in late July or early August, and hold a roll-call vote formally nominating Biden.
Eventually, Ohio got its act together and passed a clean bill in a special session, extending the deadline to Aug. 31. The bill was signed on June 2. This meant, everyone thought, that Biden could be nominated at the convention like normal, so everyone assumed the Zoom convention idea had been dropped.
But now the DNC has decided to go ahead with nominating Biden early, claiming they have no choice. Under Ohio law, they say, the bill that passed in the special session won’t become effective until Sept. 1, thereby leaving Biden open to lawsuits from the Republicans and the Trump campaign seeking to keep him off the ballot. This, in turn, has provoked fury among Democrats, who view the move as simply a power play by the Biden campaign which, despite the president’s invitation to challenge him at the convention, will make Biden’s nomination a fait accompli.
You do have to read the tea leaves to see it, but the effort to replace Biden is still in full swing. While they are being very careful what they say publicly, it is inconceivable that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and a host of other party grandees have not discussed the issue among themselves. I’d be surprised if they were discussing anything else.
Does anyone think it likely that Adam Schiff — current representative and, soon, potential senator — decided to call for Biden’s exit on Wednesday without discussing it with party leaders first? Or that Barack Obama’s failure to offer his full-throated support to his former vice president after his disastrous debate was accidental? Of course not.
And on Thursday afternoon, leaked reports of Obama’s displeasure went public in The Washington Post.
Two-thirds of Democrats now want Biden replaced. I suspect the breakdown among congressional Democrats is similar, but they are reluctant to speak out publicly. They know that whatever they say will become a Republican attack ad, should Biden ultimately refuse to leave the race.
The ostensible reason for changing the rules — that Republicans might sue to keep Biden off the ballot — doesn’t make a lot of sense. The risk is near zero that the Ohio courts will keep Biden off the ballot after the legislature passed a special law to place him on it. Biden wasn’t going to win Ohio even before Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) was added to the Republican ticket, and he certainly won’t now. Besides, any attempt to keep Biden off the Ohio ballot could only backfire on Republicans, especially after the populist arguments they made against Trump’s disqualification.
The Biden campaign’s efforts to change the rules, then, is a tacit admission of weakness. Support or opposition to the Zoom-call nomination has become a litmus test for who is backing and opposing Biden.
An open revolt by as many as 90 congressional Democrats was quelled at the last minute through extreme measures and a promise not to schedule a vote on nominating Biden for at least two weeks.
It appears likely that a solid majority of Democrats now believe Biden should be replaced. Pelosi and other party leaders are coordinating the effort, which includes carefully calibrated public statements like Schiff’s and subtle leaks like Obama’s. Don’t mistake a lack of public posturing for a lack of action. None of this is over until it’s over.
Chris Truax is an appellate attorney and a registered Republican who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary campaign in 2008.