Joe Biden’s abysmal debate performance has revived talk about the possibility that Democrats will replace him on the ticket. The common refrain among every fake media head, from CNN to MSNBC, was that high-level Democrats are in full-on panic. Given moments like the following, we can fully understand why:

While the left is panicking, many on the right have embraced the conspiratorial theory that the Democrats set Joe Biden up for this debate performance in a sneaky way to usher him out of the presidential race. To be sure, anything is possible. Our position at the moment is more simple: the Democrats simply screwed up by not getting rid of Biden a year ago, and now they are stuck and are unable (or at least extremely unlikely) to be able to get rid of him. It is difficult for us to appreciate, but many of the Democrat elite actually believe the propaganda of the mainstream media, and out-of-touch donors and the like probably believed the media’s lies, downplaying Biden’s cognitive decline. For once, the Dems may have gotten screwed by their own propaganda machinery!

Another reason as to why the Dems didn’t get rid of Biden a year ago was put forth by commentator Scott Greer. Greer’s theory is that the Democrats’ strong performance in the midterms made it politically impossible for there to be a primary challenge to Biden. For a man in rapid cognitive decline, the timeline between the midterms and the debate last night can be an eternity.

Greer:

The midterm results ensured no one serious ran against Biden in the primary. Democrats felt Biden was reasonably popular after 2022 and could easily win again. The problem for them is that he’s significantly declined–physically and mentally–since the midterms. But the only way to have replaced him was to beat him in the primary. They failed to do that

 

Ironically, a strong midterm performance may have ended up devastating the Democrats’ chances of a presidential win. Even if the Democrats desperately want to get rid of Biden, there are a number of severe pitfalls that would make this exceedingly difficult. Revolver News’ Darren Beattie outlined a number of them in a tweet, largely repeating many of the points made in a must-read Revolver piece on the same issue.

Darren J. Beattie:

There’s a lot of talk about replacing Biden—and nothing is impossible. But the mechanics of it at this stage are far more involved and difficult than people imagine. Also consider the following factors

1) Biden does not want to give up power. With mounting legal troubles for his family, he’s likely more interested in clinging to the pardon power than ever

2) If you read the Revolver piece, it goes into detail as to how the DNC procedures for removing him are not simple or easy—Biden has his own loyalists stacked in there. There are also ballot issues at this late stage in the game that are considerable

3) While many on the left finally realize Biden is a major liability, it really is too little too late. Even aside from the difficulties above, the Democrat elite would have to arrive at a consensus replacement. Who would that be? Kamala is a non-starter—they all hate her. So they need to come to a consensus candidate who isn’t kamala harris and deal with the fallout to passing over a woman of color heir apparent. Yet another aggravation on top of Israel-Palestine that already has the base incensed

4) Even if they come up with a consensus candidate and are able to persuade Biden to leave, there’s the problem of media preparation. The media is an amazing consensus manufacturing machine but such things require TIME and RUNWAY. That’s the problem with it being too late—think of how much preparation went into conditioning the public mind for covid and everything that came after. This late in the game there’s just not enough time and runway for the consensus machine to kick into gear effectively.

This is not to say that there under no circumstances will be an effort to replace Biden. There could very well be, and it is more likely now than it was a week ago, though the likelihood of them actually replacing him is far less than people imagine even now. All of the steps and hurdles involved in replacing him would be uncertain and have their own risks, and give the public the impression of chaos that has to be weighed against the negative public impression of Biden’s cognitive condition.

Beattie added an additional complication:

Oh yeah and one other thing. There is a severe intergenerational rift in the Dem party exacerbated by the Israel Palestine conflict. I know most right wing media thinks of Biden as some Hamas agent, but the left base thinks of him as obsequious to Israel and have had intense protests to that effect.

For all of Biden’s faults, however, his clear lame duck legacy status is a temporary band aid holding together the party— if he goes, the party will have a very difficult time navigating the intergenerational rift which will come to the fore with full force. And that’s the last thing Dems need right before an election…

It is worth re-reading the Revolver piece in full, but we will simply repeat here the important point about what it would take for the DNC to forcibly remove Biden.

Revolver:

Okay, so nobody else is snatching the nomination under the current rules. But political parties aren’t the government. They can actually rewrite rules on the fly, and that includes changing how a party picks its nominee.

To attentive political observers, then, it may seem like the DNC is the obvious place to put in the fix. Didn’t they do that in 2016 for Hillary, protecting her while undermining Bernie Sanders at every opportunity? So, if the party feels doomed under Biden, why not do the same thing and start juggling the rules to allow a convention switcheroo?

The bylaws of the DNC do explicitly mention that the DNC’s powers include filling a vacancy on the national ticket; such a vacancy is to be filled by “voting … in accord with procedural rules adopted by the Rules and Bylaws Committee and approved by the Democratic National Committee.”

That word is key: vacancy. As long as Biden is around and running, no such vacancy exists. Changing this process means changing the party rules. And that means going to the committee named above: the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee.

Technically, the DNC has many hundreds of members, but the actual nerve center of the party is this committee, small enough to fit into a single D.C. hotel room.

The roughly 30 members of the Rules and Bylaws Committee are far from famous. You’ve heard of Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Gretchen Whitmer, but have you heard of… Frank Leone? Ken Martin? David McDonald? But anonymous or not, this is the body with the power to change how the Democrats pick their nominee.

And this body, as it happens, is stacked in Biden’s favor. Membership in this critical committee is controlled by the chairman of the DNC, Jaime Harrison, formerly chair of the South Carolina Democrats. Harrison owes his position to being chosen by Joe Biden, and as expected of him, he’s filled Rules and Bylaws with reliable Biden backers. A year ago, over loud protests from some sections of the party, the Rules and Bylaws Committee executed Biden’s request to reshuffle the Democratic primary calendar to reduce the prominence of states that are “too white.” They demoted Iowa and New Hampshire (the states where Biden bombed) and elevated South Carolina (the state that rocketed him to the nomination in 2020).

The presence of so many Biden political allies implies, on the flip side, a lack of allies for anyone else. If there really were a viable plot to install Gavin Newsom specifically, it would help to have Newsom political allies somewhere high up in the Democrat Party apparatus. But instead, such allies are missing. That’s no surprise, because he’s not the one who controls the Rules Committee.

In short, the DNC is not some independent actor on the left. It is a body substantially controlled by Joe Biden. Expecting it to change course in order to save the Democrats is like expecting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to be derailed by the membership of Mar-a-Lago.

We suspect that the reality of how difficult and impractical it would be to remove Biden at this stage will sink in and the left will stop panicking out lout. Of course, nothing is impossible, and we can’t rule out entirely a major effort to push Biden out. With all of the hurdles described above, an effort to forcibly remove Biden is likely to do almost as much harm as good, introducing chaos, uncertainty, and the possibility for all sorts of things to go wrong. There is simply not enough time to do it the right way.

All of this is to say—the Democrats are absolutely screwed.