There may be a better replacements for Joe Biden than Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom for the Democratic ticket, should it come down to that. And they may even defeat Donald Trump going away.
DEMOCRATS HAVE A DEEPER BENCH than many people appreciate. In particular, there are two leaders from swing states who can provide generational change, a fresh start, and a far more serious threat to Trump than Biden can: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock.
Whitmer, 52, is one of the most experienced, exciting, and winning Democrats in the country. She is as tough a candidate, and leader, as the Democrats can find, and she was vetted as a potential VP pick in 2020. Warnock, who has won pluralities or majorities in five elections in three years, is the cerebral 54-year-old senior pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. He grew up in public housing, went through a messy divorce—no longer disqualifying in the age of Trump—has small children, and was the top small donor fundraiser from either party in 2022. The dramatic stakes of his election gave him national name recognition: Less than 10 percent of Warnock’s individual donations came from within his state.
Young. Dynamic. Diverse. Competent and experienced. Broadly appealing. Can mobilize core voters. Would deliver two battleground states. Those are seven big boxes already checked.
There are other benefits: Such a ticket would take away the core self-justification of the No Labels project, would seriously dent West’s vanity run, and would circumvent the ever-expanding Hunter Biden issue.
Does a potential Democratic primary have to be messy? E.J. Dionne, columnist at the Washington Post, predicts “ideological Armageddon” if Biden steps aside. But this scenario would be infused with an unprecedented urgency. Properly appreciating the stakes of Trump’s return to power could inspire more pragmatism from primary voters than elites and pundits expect—the same kind of pragmatism that pushed many to embrace Biden during the 2020 primary. And maybe primary voters can unite more quickly and less fractiously if they understand the overwhelming need to put democracy over power and ideology in 2024.
There is the unavoidable question of how Kamala Harris might affect a Dem primary if Biden cancels his re-election bid. While Biden can be supportive of his VP, he cannot simply appoint her to be his successor because voters choose nominees; presidents do not. While Harris has a more established national profile than Whitmer or Warnock, pragmatism might drive key members of the Democratic coalition away from her. For example, black voters may rally to Harris—or they might not. Consider the fact that elected black democrats, and black voters, backed Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama in 2008 because they didn’t think Obama could win. They only gravitated to the first-term senator once he won Iowa and became viable in polling. A dozen years later they backed old, white, moderate Joe Biden in the 2020 primary because they wanted to defeat Trump, and they felt he had the best chance of doing that.
One of two things will happen in the coming months. Biden can either announce he has changed his mind about running for re-election and the party can hold a primary—or he can stick to his present course and risk a crisis in which he would need to ask the party to unite behind Harris at the eleventh hour.
Every Democrat who can help the party defeat Trump next year should be placing this goal above all else: It must come before personal feelings, political differences with other members of the broad anti-Trump coalition, or even plans to preserve their own viability for the 2028 race. And that goes for Whitmer, too, perhaps most of all.
If Trump beats Biden next year, there won’t be another free and fair election. Democrats can treat this like the emergency it is or risk it all.
A.B. Stoddard is a columnist at The Bulwark, and a guest host on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel.
