Excerpts from a new book reveal that Democrats were developing a contingency plan as early as 2023 on what to do if then-President Joe Biden could not complete his term
Despite their ad nauseam insistence that the aging commander-in-chief was in perfect health, it seems there were real concerns behind the scenes, as even former Vice President Kamala Harris’s aides worried that he “might die in office.”
Excerpts from “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” show that more than a year before Biden canceled his re-election campaign, preparations were already underway to knock him off the top of the Democratic ticket with “hush-hush talks” to plan his withdrawal.
The book by authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes is due out next week, and excerpts were reviewed by The Guardian which noted that Harris’s aides “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office.”
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“Such planning was led by Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director, Parnes and Allen report, and went as far as the drawing up of a ‘death-pool roster’ of federal judges who might swear Harris in,” the outlet reported.
According to the excerpt, Simmons “never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023, 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.”
While the book does detail some of the events that followed Biden’s withdrawal from the race, the first half focuses on “Biden’s long, painful, public decline.”
According to Allen and Parnes, a “handful of Democratic National Committee officials” drew up backup plans.
“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. 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,” the authors wrote.
“One official involved in secret talks put a fine point on the fear that Biden would not make it to election day as the party’s nominee: ‘It shows what we had to do to prepare with the unique circumstances we had, which was an 80-plus-year-old president who was running,” the excerpt continued.
“One veteran operative summed up the sentiments of Democrats who worried they would get stuck with Harris but still wanted Biden out: ‘Well, at least she has a pulse,’” the authors wrote.
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.
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