Even before President Joe Biden announced in a letter on X Sunday that he would step down from his re-election bid in 2024, Democrats were floating the idea of a 'blitz primary' as a way to choose a replacement.
Their proposal aims to answer three main questions: Who will choose candidates? How would they campaign? How will a nominee be chosen?
A good number of Democrats favor making Vice President Kamala Harris the nominee without a primary process, since she was already on the ticket and she fulfills the intersectional preferences the party seems to have.
Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks and venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith disagree, and put out a six-page memo saying her selection without a primary might "set her and the Party up to fail."
They think an open primary would be “the best opportunity in years, if not decades, for the Democratic Party to reclaim its role as the party of the people — and to reinvent itself as the party of the future.”
At the end of the process, they think, “Millions of once-disengaged voters re-engage, grateful for a fresh alternative to a Biden/Trump rematch.”
What Brooks and Dintersmith don't seem to realize is that for Democrats, an open primary is a huge risk compared to coalescing behind one candidate right away, even if that candidate is the generally unpopular Kamala Harris.
Of course, an open primary is the right thing to do unless Biden wants to step down as president now and make Harris an incumbent for the next 100-odd days until the election.
There is some speculation that Biden is incapacitated or in much worse shape than we all thought.
Why else would he post his resignation on X, on a Sunday, and disappear from public view? He has COVID; maybe he took a turn for the worse.
Former Fox News host Todd Starnes has asked these questions and speculated that something fishy is going on with Biden's resignation.
As of Saturday, he was still saying he wasn't stepping down. What changed in 24 hours?
At age 82, anything could happen to take his health from declining to much, much worse. And if that is what happened, the decision to step down might have been far from his own.
