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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3656 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Do the big two American parties have back-up candidates? I am assuming that Trump wins the GOP nomination and runs against Biden. What will the parties do if one of them kicks the bucket? They are both old enough that this is a real possibility.

Does it matter if this happens before or after the DNC/RNC officially names their P/VP candidates?

After poking around in the rules of the Dems and the GOP it appears that the Democrats will have a meeting of the national committee, and the new nominee will be selected by a majority vote of the committee, one person, one vote. The Republicans will do the same, but members representing each state will receive the same amount of votes their state had during the convention. The replacement will be selected by a majority vote.

In neither case is it a rule that the Vice Presidential nominee will automatically assume the Presidential nomination.

Bernie Sanders! This is the year!

No, I don’t know who is a credible candidate. I can’t even tell who’s pretending to try for the primary yet.

I can’t even tell who’s pretending to try for the primary yet.

That's easy, every republican candidate who isn't Trump and every democrat who isn't Biden is only pretending to try.

No, I mean I don’t know which Democrats have bothered to announce a candidacy.

RFK and Marianne Williamson IIRC.

Rep. Dean Phillips of MN has declared. I believe that RFK Jr is now running as an independent.

The parties have no formal chain-of-succession to the candidacy, to my knowledge. If there is one, I've never heard it discussed, which would be odd as this would be a matter of significant public interest/importance.

If they died before the convention, the convention would select a candidate using the existing procedures for dealing with a candidate who had pledged delegates dropping out/being removed/dying.

If they died after the convention, the VP candidate would be the strong presumptive choice in most people's minds. Insiders might "know" that everyone hates Kamala Harris, but actually admitting that everyone hates Kamala Harris and running someone else is probably a losing choice for the Democrats. Backing down publicly from your previously chosen candidate is a death-wish kind of move on the part of a political party, so there would be a significant cost to picking someone else. Especially for an incumbent, as Kamala would be the actual president at that time.

Past the VP, I'm not sure what happens after the convention.

Trump's death would be highly idiosyncratic, as he has no natural heir to his ideological positions. There simply isn't anyone similar to him, in terms of ideology and in terms of having the trust of "his" people. The RNC might have a real pickle trying to find a candidate who doesn't alienate most Trump superfans after his death.

I would assume that Kamala Harris would be the backup Dem.

Probably not, given people don't really like her.

Leaving aside the question about whether a VP has ever been more popular than their president2, it’s remarkable how little enthusiasm there is about the prospect of a Harris candidacy or presidency. I’m not particularly well-connected among Democratic Party establishment types — it’s just not my crowd. But between the conversations I have had with people in those circles and my “normie D” friends, I don’t think I ever heard a single person advocate that Biden should settle for one term and let Harris run instead. Hell, even in her column that did advocate for Biden to step down, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg — who I find to be a consistently thoughtful reader of progressive sentiment — conspicuously mentioned that the alternative didn’t have to be Harris, citing Harris’s poor polling.

... It’s also a pretty consistent pattern; Harris polled worse than Biden in literally every poll that I could find. And I’d note that it’s not just a matter of Harris performing worse against Trump because she’s less well-known and so more voters flow into the undecided column. Instead, Trump actually gained vote share against her, getting 46 percent of the vote against Harris as compared to 44 percent against Biden.

... However, Harris has run for president before and it didn’t go well — it didn’t go well at all. Considered one of the frontrunners5 for the Democratic nomination when she launched her campaign in January 20196, Harris wound up dropping out of the race in December, well before the Iowa caucuses. It was in the Scott Walker/Jeb Bush/Phil Gramm/Ed Muskie/Rick Perry tier of epic primary season flameouts.

Whatever process got her into the VP slot is disconnected enough from those polls that it might still apply today.

Ugh. Biden, please hold on for the rest of your term!

Is it bad that I kind of want to see a Trump-Kamala matchup?

And the backup veep?

The only way it would be Harris is if Biden dies after winning the election, at which point it would be generally expected that 'his' electors would choose Harris in December. If either candidate dies between the conventions and the election, the DNC or RNC can choose a new candidate, and again the expectation would be that states would make sure that said chosen candidate could run.

If Biden dies before the election the exact order of events depends on when in the primary calendar it happens, but I'd expect that Gavin Newsom would become the candidate. If Trump does, the field will be much more open, it's hard to say what would happen now or what the RNC would do.

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