There is no existing Democratic nominee, so there’s neither a procedural nor a legal problem if it isn’t Joe Biden.
As rumblings on the left for President Biden to end his reelection bid grew louder, Republicans became more overt in trying to keep the incumbent as their opponent. Former president Donald Trump’s campaign manager described the calls for Biden to stand aside as a “coup.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), during an interview Sunday, suggested that such a move would somehow be illegal.
“Every state has its own system, and in some of these, it’s not possible to simply just switch out a candidate who has been chosen through the democratic, small D, democratic process over such a long period of time,” Johnson said on ABC News’s “This Week.”
“Fourteen million Democrats voted to make Joe Biden the nominee,” Johnson continued. “So it would be wrong and, I think, unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the backroom and switch it out because they’re — they don’t like the candidate any longer.”
In June — even before the presidential debate that accelerated calls for Biden to withdraw from consideration — the Heritage Foundation went so far as to draft a memo making a legal case against Biden being replaced. It argued, for example, that Wisconsin “does not allow withdrawal [from the ballot] for any reason besides death.”
But as election law expert Rick Hasen noted this month, there’s a huge asterisk here — one that applies to any effort to suggest that Biden is the party’s committed candidate for president.
Biden isn’t the Democratic nominee at all, in Wisconsin or anywhere else. He’s not being removed from the ballot because he isn’t on the ballot.
