Could the Democratic Party substitute Biden as their presidential candidate?

Having won the overwhelming majority of delegates in the primaries, which have concluded, incumbent President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are the presumptive presidential nominees. Their position at the top of their party’s ticket for the Tuesday 5 November 2024 general election will be confirmed at the Republican and Democratic national conventions taking place in July and August, respectively.

However, questions have been raised about the ability of both Trump and Biden to serve another four years as president. Both men are getting up age, which ever one is elected will be the oldest ever elected to the US presidency, and there are concerns about possible mental decline in the two candidates.

This has fomented talk of either one of them possibly being replaced as their party’s presidential nominee. While not impossible before the national conventions, it is extremely unlikely. Furthermore, at least within the Democratic party, members are becoming annoyed that such talk has continued to persist with the primaries over and the national convention just over a month away.

Could the Democratic Party substitute Biden as their presidential candidate?

Simply put, without either Biden or Trump offering to step aside before their party’s national convention, which neither has indicated that they would, a hostile takeover by delegates would be impossible in the case of the Democrats or Republicans. That’s because the pledged delegates that they won during the primaries are bound to vote for their candidate on the first ballot at the convention.

That vote typically decides who the nominee is, and both have the majority needed. While Democratic rules do give delegates a little wiggle room stating that their vote must “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them,” it would require that they defect en masse.

Even if either Biden or Trump decided to step aside, it would throw their respective conventions into chaos. The vote would go to the delegates on the floor of the convention with the various factions jockeying to get their preferred standard bearer chosen as the nominee.

Questions arose as to whether the parties could ditch their candidate after the national convention was held in 2016. Hillary Clinton had a fainting episode when visiting a 9/11 memorial service and the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape that caught Trump on a hot mic talking about groping women both happened after the two were formally nominated.

Then-RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said that “no such mechanisms exist” and that it would be “impractical” to remove Trump from the ticket when prominent Republicans and GOP lawmakers in Congress said they could not support their party’s nominee after the tape was made public.

Donna Brazile, who was the interim DNC Chair during the 2016 general election, thought about replacing Clinton but quickly realized that she would need the then-candidate’s support and would only add to the internal strife in the Democratic party that it was experiencing that year.