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Some of the Democrats clearly think if they hot-swap out Biden, they can put in a tailored Trump-beating "Generic Democrat" who Trump isn't ready to face since he doesn't have the track record for Trump to attack, nor (obviously) the personal attributes, who will automatically get the votes of Democrats, and who will get the votes of the people who "just want a responsible adult in office". This candidate has the advantage that they don't have to win the Democratic primaries; they can be chosen solely for Trump-beating characteristics.
It might work; the Democrats are really good at this game, and being able to swap out your candidate when he looks like he's losing is a big advantage. Their biggest problem is that Kamala Harris definitely is not that candidate, and seems unlikely to go gently into that good night.
Any hot-swap is going to leave some part of the Democratic party unsatisfied: they're a year behind in the game of buy-in and consensus. "Your guy? What about my guy?" It takes more than a generic Democratic to drive turn-out and excitement, it takes someone who can actually convince voters that they are the right person at the right moment. Otherwise, people will quickly capsize and donors, voters, officials, and orgs will quickly abandon the national efforts and focus on whatever local efforts they can salvage.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans aren't just standing by rolling the dice to see if they'll decide to implode too. They're attacking, they're on the offensive. "Look at these people, they've been lying about Biden for four years, what else have they been lying about?" The new guy will have some controversies (they always do), and they'll be fresh and untested and hard to counter. (The party is circulating its talking points on the media, but in the fast-moving chaos the main story became something else, and nobody internalizes the response.)
Kamala might have a lot of problems, and might be historically unpopular -- but at least she doesn't come with these problems, and that may look attractive right now.
I think she actually does have a bunch of controversies. Nobody really cared to bring them up or make a big deal out of them before when she was just the VP, but there's no way Trump and his team are going to just leave all that ammunition on the floor. Right now the left have thoroughly demotivated their base with their support of Israel and what's happening there - appointing someone who fought to make sure non-violent and innocent prisoners stayed behind bars so they could be used for prison labour/fire camps as the representative of the left is going to be a huge demotivating factor for a lot of left-wingers as well... and I have a sneaking suspicion that Trump won't be too polite and gentlemanly to bring those up.
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Without the primary process, they don't need consensus. They need to not anger the black caucus (so they can keep the "get-out-the-vote" stuff in the cities), but what are the Democrats going to do? They're going to vote against Trump. So a new candidate without the problems for the squishies in the middle who WANT to vote against Trump (because that's the Thing to Do) but actually care about things like senility should be a winner for them.
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I wonder if they could mollify her with a spot in the historical record books as the "first woman president" by pushing Biden out early in exchange for selecting a different ballot replacement? She can dine out on that for the rest of her life, and even run again in 4 years if she wants to as "former president Harris."
It's a really good idea but I think this gets dangerously close to exposing how sausage is made to the general public. People will ask why the democratic party picked someone else over President Harris for the upcoming election, how would they respond to that?
"President Harris would like to spend more time with her family."
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Manufactured family (or health) crisis, need time to xyz, etc. As long as she's on board you just tap into whatever is left of a societal ethos about personal ethics and responsibility as more (or at least equally) important relative to public. To really mess with hearts and minds they could double bluff the "woman's role" and have her otherwise committed to something coded masculine (though admittedly being the fucking president is sort of heavily weighted for that )
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Hillary would be fuming, I love it.
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