Biden’s off-ramp should he bow out of the 2024 contest

President Joe Biden is running for reelection in 2024 and is all but assured the Democratic Party‘s nomination as long as he stays in the race.

But what if he doesn’t?

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Biden is currently facing growing dissent regarding his handling of domestic and international issues. The White House and Biden’s campaign have stressed “Bidenomics,” the summation of his economic priorities, as the core pillar of his reelection pitch, yet prices remain elevated, and inflation has outpaced wage growth for the better part of his three years in office.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in particular is splintering around the president’s support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks. This has led to plummeting support for Biden among Arab and Muslim Americans in critical battleground states, like Michigan, and nationwide protests, including outside of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in November.

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Furthermore, Biden would be 86 by the time his potential second term would conclude, leading voters of all political persuasions to question both his physical and mental ability to perform the duties of office.

Still, despite the negative headlines, the president has emphatically stated his desire to win reelection, if only to prevent former President Donald Trump from regaining the presidency.

However, should Biden drop out of the race before the convention in August, no matter the reason, any delegates he secures at state primaries and caucuses would become unpledged, leaving those same delegates responsible for selecting a new nominee.

Josh Putnam, a political consultant at FHQ Strategies, told the Washington Examiner that Biden could wield some influence on the delegate process if he drops later in the primary season.

“Those delegates would still be free at the convention to vote for whomever they please but would potentially be more likely to take some direction from the president [if he has a preference],” Putnam, whose expertise includes delegate selection, said. “That could/would theoretically cut down on the potential for a ‘free-for-all’ in Chicago,” where the Democratic National Convention will be held.

“But it all hinges on when Biden is no longer in the race. Basically, how much of primary season happens without the incumbent in the contest?” Putnam continued. “All of this, of course, assumes that much or all of this happens after filing deadlines have come and gone, meaning that no other candidates will officially enter the primary phase of the race.”

So who are the other hypothetical options?

The president himself suggested in early December that “probably 50” Democrats would be capable of defeating Trump in 2024, yet there are truly only a handful of potential candidates with the national name recognition and political operation necessary to even sniff a victory in November of next year.

That short list includes Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Dean Philips (D-MN), Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), J.B. Pritzker (D-IL), and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

All of these candidates, save Phillips, who is opposing Biden in the Democratic primary, are backing Biden’s 2024 run but have some type of infrastructure that could make them attractive to unpledged delegates at the convention.

Harris has been the natural choice to succeed Biden dating back to 2021 despite some public stumbles over the past three years, yet Newsom, Whitmer, and Pritzker have all stood up super PACS over the past year capable of supporting future runs. 

Newsom has boosted his national name recognition ever further after squaring off with Republican presidential primary hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in late November.

Booker, a presidential primary candidate in 2020, still has more than $10 million cash on hand from his previous run, while Khanna, who chaired the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has the strongest progressive bona fides of the bunch and recently debated Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

Still, nearly a dozen veteran Democratic operatives tell the Washington Examiner that, under no circumstances, will Biden drop out of the race, leading to a delegate free-for-all at the convention.

“It’s an interesting thought experiment, and one that very possibly previews our party heading into 2028, but this just isn’t going to happen,” one operative stated flatly. “President Biden will be our nominee, and I expect the full party, regardless of disagreements about Israel, to rally around him to defeat Trump.”

“Biden will be the nominee because we’ve seen this story before,” a second operative added. “We saw what happened in 2016 when some people weren’t jazzed about Secretary Clinton, and that let Trump walk in the front door of the White House. We won’t make that mistake again.”

“If it isn’t Biden, we lose. It’s just flat out too late to jump ship, simple as that,” a third operative bemoaned.

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Biden himself has sought to reassure both Democratic voters and donors in recent weeks of his will to run again, not to mention his physical and mental fitness compared to Trump.

“Trump just talks the talk. We walk the walk,” he told a crowd in Las Vegas on Friday. “He likes to say America is a failing nation. Frankly, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I see shovels in the ground, cranes in the sky, people hard at work rebuilding America together.”