The Democratic Party had big plans dating back to January 2023 — and they didn’t include the scenario of then-President Joe Biden staying for a second term.
The upcoming book, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” dove into how the Democratic Party was planning for a time when Biden would be unfit to remain president or die before his first term was over, per Mediaite. The party was ready to replace Biden a full 18 months before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
The Guardian has viewed the book, written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and has offered some insight. The book will be released Tuesday.
But Biden is only one part of the book, which looks at the “Biden, Harris, and Trump camps during the 2024 battle for the White House, arguably the most consequential contest in American history.”
“Democratic officials staged ‘hush-hush talks’ to plan for Joe Biden’s withdrawal as the party’s presidential nominee as early as 2023, says a new book,” per The Guardian.
“More startlingly still, the book also reports that aides to Kamala Harris, the vice-president who assumed the nomination then lost to Trump, ‘strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office,’” The Guardian reported.
The plan also went to far as to form a “death-pool roster” of federal judges, who could swear in Harris should the need arise.
Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director, Simmons “never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023,” the authors wrote, “but he advised colleagues that he should be notified immediately if something happened to Biden, because he had worked out an entire communications strategy. And he left the spreadsheet with another Harris aide.”
The Democratic Party also planned every contingency should there be a need.
“They wanted to make sure the party was ready for every possible circumstance: if Biden launched his campaign and then stepped aside before the primaries; if he won a bunch of primaries and then could not continue,” Allen and Parnes wrote. “If he secured enough delegates for winning the nomination but dropped out before winning a floor vote at the convention, and if he left a vacancy at the top of the ticket after taking the nomination.”
