Substacks
If Not Biden, Then Who? Peter Savodnik
On the record, everyone important in the Democratic Party is behind Joe Biden.
“The question everyone’s asking is: ‘Who can pull together the raucous and rowdy Democratic Party coalition in a way that allows that coalition to beat the coalition pulled together by Mr. Trump,’” said Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic strategist and fundraiser in northern Virginia. Melhorn insists the perfect—the only—candidate who can do that remains Joe Biden.
“Master Yoda is exactly what you need to protect against the Dark Side,” added Melhorn, who works closely with Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn who has become one of the party’s biggest donors. “As Joe Biden gets older, he’s like Master Yoda.”
Jamie Patricof, a movie and television producer in Los Angeles, added that debates are not that important. “If it were, then Hillary Clinton would have been president,” Patricof told me. “I trusted Joe Biden to be a great president, and he has delivered on that. I trust him to know if he can do it again.”
So those are the kind of things prominent Democrats will say publicly. Privately, it’s a different story.
I spent the weekend speaking to more than 20 Democratic activists, strategists, and donors who insisted the party needs to shake things up—now—if it’s going to hold on to the White House. They mentioned the names of at least 10 governors and senators who they believe could beat Trump.
“Secretly, most of the donors are worried sick and would like to see someone else on the ticket,” a Democratic fundraiser who works with elected officials and donors told me. “They’re not going to speak against him publicly, but they’re very worried—they’re sending specific suggestions about who should replace him.”
The vast majority, she said, suggested Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
“Right state. Right story. A woman who doesn’t threaten men. Perfect,” a Democratic activist in Los Angeles who has worked on messaging on numerous campaigns said of Whitmer.
The governor, who is 52, won reelection in 2022 by almost 11 points—defeating a Republican Donald Trump had endorsed.
Right behind Whitmer is Wes Moore. The Maryland governor is 45, a former Rhodes Scholar who also served with the Army in Afghanistan. “Yeah, he’s incredible, just incredibly well-spoken, well-educated—the whole deal,” a Democratic consultant told me. Moore is also black, with some Cuban heritage, which Democrats hope would help counteract Trump’s huge gains with black and Latino voters over the past few years. His 2022 election was historic: Moore is Maryland’s first black governor (and only the third nationwide), and he won in a 32-point landslide.
Not only is Moore the first black governor of Maryland, but he also won in a landslide, by more than 30 points.
Andy Beshear, the 46-year-old governor of red-state Kentucky, came up in many of my conversations. “He couldn’t win Kentucky in the general against Trump,” a Democratic consultant told me, “but he doesn’t need to. He’d placate all those soft Trump voters in the suburbs—the people who will decide this election.” These are the people who voted, without much enthusiasm, for Trump in 2016, jumped to Biden in 2020, and are now up for grabs.
Then there’s Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, 51. Shapiro, like Whitmer, comes from a battleground state, and, like Beshear, he has built a name for himself working across the aisle. “Kind of bland, but maybe bland works,” one Democratic activist, in Florida, told me.
Another Democratic bundler noted that Shapiro is Jewish, adding that it’s unclear how that might play out with the delegates who would pick Biden’s replacement. Democratic delegates tend to be more progressive than Democratic voters, and the war in Gaza has inflamed tensions between progressives and supporters of Israel, which includes most Jews.
Two other possible replacements whose names have been bandied about in the past 72 hours are Senators Mark Kelly, from Arizona—“He could deliver Arizona, and that could decide it,” one Democrat said—and Raphael Warnock, from Georgia. Warnock, like Moore, is black—and he comes from Georgia, one of the key states in Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump.
Then there’s California governor Gavin Newsom, who “looks like he was plucked out of central casting for the role” of president, a Democratic bundler in California texted me. Most say that Newsom is wildly ambitious and simply waiting for the right moment to strike—and nearly everyone agrees his odds of winning the nomination are slim to none.
“You can’t be seen to be wanting this,” a Democrat close to Newsom told me. “You just have to wait until Biden gives the cue.”
In the meantime, Newsom is doing what loyal Democrats are supposed to do: aggressively pretending he has no interest in being president.
“You don’t turn your back because of one performance,” the governor declared in a brief television interview Thursday night, shortly after the debate. “What kind of party does that?” He sounded borderline offended.
Just to make sure everyone knew just how put off he was by the idea of replacing Biden, the governor retweeted the clip to his 2.1 million followers.
A Democratic bundler who knows Newsom well texted me: “Gavin represents everything cartoonish about California and politicians (he’s also facing another recall). All the plasticky stuff middle America hates.” He said the governor would “fight like hell” for the nomination—and he hoped he didn’t get it.
Vice President Kamala Harris, also from California, would definitely run, but she enjoys even less support among Democrats than Newsom does. In a matchup with the presumptive GOP nominee, Biden trails Trump by 1.5 points—and Harris by 6.6.
“Look, I want a female president, let alone a black female president, as much as any logical person wants it—like there’s nothing we want more,” a Democrat close to the Biden administration told me. “But just because you happen to be black and a woman doesn’t mean you’re the right person.” No one I spoke to voiced enthusiasm about a President Harris.
The big question facing the Biden campaign is how the debate affects the president’s fundraising numbers, Democrats said.
Alan Rosenblatt, a social-media strategist in Washington, D.C., who has worked for Joe Biden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, said that, in the immediate wake of the debate, Biden’s fundraising numbers had actually gone up. “I am seeing a surge of support for him online,” Rosenblatt texted me. In the 48-hour period following the debate, the president reeled in $33 million.
A Democratic consultant who toggles between Washington and Los Angeles said he wouldn’t read too much into that. “Something bad happens to your guy, and the small donors are enraged and send another ten bucks,” he said. “That’s tribal loyalty.” Trump, he noted, enjoyed a similar bump after he was convicted on 34 counts of trying to illegally influence the 2016 election, in late May.
The big question, the consultant said, is what the big-money donors do—the people throwing the big fundraisers in New York and California.
That would depend, in no small part, on the polls. The consultant said that he’d heard of several donors who had decided not to give to Biden’s campaign or the super PACs supporting him, and instead will spend on House and Senate races.
A poll conducted while the debate was taking place showed Biden slipping 8 points among Democratic-leaning voters. The polling conducted over the past 48 hours has been devastating: According to a new CBS News/YouGov poll, only 27% of respondents said that Biden had the “mental and cognitive health necessary to serve as president.”
All of this will remain in the realm of pure fantasy unless the current president of the United States decides to announce he is stepping aside and releasing his 3,894 delegates, whom he won in primaries across the country earlier this year.
If that were to happen, the would-be replacements would have to vie for the delegates’ support. Either a majority of delegates would rally around one of the would-be replacements—behind closed doors? On social media? On MSNBC? All of the above?—or there would be a protracted fight that would lead to a brokered convention, a convention in which the nominee is not selected in the first round of voting, in Chicago, in mid-August.
No one knows exactly what a brokered convention in 2024 would look like. The last brokered convention was in 1952, when it took Democrats three ballots before they nominated Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson for president—and Stevenson lost, to Republican Dwight Eisenhower. (The last time a Democratic nominee emerged from a brokered convention and went on to win was in 1932. That was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.)
“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Dana Perlman, a Los Angeles attorney who raised a great deal of money for Democratic presidential candidates in previous election cycles, told me. “I know I sound like an apparatchik, and I’m not.” He called Biden “the most effective” president of his life, and he was perplexed by Democrats’ “hue and cry, and rending of garments.”
Perlman added that he had known Biden for many years, and he didn’t see him backing down from the fight ahead. “He doesn’t have it in him to walk away,” he said.
As of Sunday, the Biden family was gathered at Camp David, where, according to Politico, they were variously blaming the debater’s moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, Biden advisors Anita Dunn, Bob Bauer and Ron Klain, and CNN’s makeup artists. Notably absent from that list was the president himself.
Peter Savodnik (@petersavodnik) is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Read his piece, “Welcome to the Trump Veepstakes!”
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