Why Biden's replacement would almost certainly be Kamala Harris

Stop trying to make Gavin Newsom happen. It's not going to happen.

You know American politics is having a real normal one when you’re spending your Fourth of July wondering if the sitting president and presumptive Democratic nominee will drop out of the presidential race. As my 538 and ABC News colleagues explained in this January (!) article, Joe Biden doing so at this point would mean the Democratic Party would choose a new nominee at a contested convention.

That’s led to a lot of creative wishcasting about who could replace Biden as the nominee. I’ve seen people throwing out names like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, even Sen. Sherrod Brown (this person apparently wants to hand Republicans a free Senate seat¹).

But, to borrow one of our favorite phrases from the 538 Politics Podcast, these are all West Wing fan fiction. If Biden steps aside, Vice President Kamala Harris is the only politically feasible replacement. When I said that on Twitter, though, a lot of people were still insisting it could be someone else, so I thought it would be useful to enumerate the reasons why Harris is such a lock.

1. She’s the vice president. It’s literally her job to be Biden’s designated successor. Even if you’re a Newsomniac, you have to at least admit that she’s the first name on the list.

2. She’s the non-chaos option. One hesitation many Democrats still have with replacing Biden is that it would open Pandora’s box—a messy nomination fight would open up before or at the convention that would bring all the rifts in the party out into public view. But Harris is the one option who could potentially avoid that: As the vice president (see #1), she has the ability to clear the field in a way that a random governor doesn’t. Any effort to coalesce around, say, Sen. Raphael Warnock would be met with resistance among some faction of the party. Harris might cause some grumbling, but delegates (who are almost all currently pledged to Biden, don’t forget) would probably get in line, especially given the fact that…

3. Biden would probably endorse her. Biden likes Harris, and he quietly already came very close to endorsing her as his successor when he said in his commencement address at Morehouse College, “I have no doubt a Morehouse man will be president one day—just after an AKA from Howard.”

4. It’s politically untenable to pass over a Black woman. Black voters and women are two of the most important parts of the Democratic base. To pass over a higher-ranking Black woman for a governor who is white, male, or both would be incredibly insulting to many Black voters and people who want to see the first female president, and it would lead to a ton of outcry, which in turn would lead to a flood of news stories about Democratic discontent with the new nominee. The whole point of replacing Biden would be to avoid those kinds of stories!

5. Democratic voters want Harris. From a lower-case-d democratic standpoint, it’s not ideal to have 3,949 party insiders choose a presidential nominee rather than millions of voters. But to the extent convention delegates would care about public opinion, they can be fairly confident that Harris would be Democrats’ preferred nominee if it were put to a nationwide vote. That’s because Harris leads in almost every poll of a hypothetical national Democratic presidential primary that doesn’t include Biden. There have been four such polls conducted since the debate, and Harris averages 36% in them. Her closest competitor, Newsom, is at 18%.

6. Other potential candidates haven’t been thoroughly vetted. When Harris became Biden’s running mate in 2020, she went through a rigorous vetting process designed to root out any skeletons in her closet—the last thing a presidential campaign wants is to name a running mate who it later turns out is the subject of a huge scandal. So Democrats can be fairly sure that what they see with Harris is what they’re getting. By contrast, none of the other potential Biden replacements have gone through such intense scrutiny, so it’s possible there could be damaging stories lurking out there about them.

7. Harris would have access to Biden’s money. At the end of May, Biden’s campaign had $91.6 million sitting in its bank account. Because Harris is Biden’s official running mate, she would be able to use all that money for her own presidential campaign. However, if Democrats picked a new nominee, they would have to start fundraising virtually from scratch.² The defunct Biden campaign would be allowed to transfer only the standard transfer limit of $2,000 to the new campaign.

1. If Brown resigns from the Senate, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine would appoint his replacement.

2. Although if Democrats nominated a senator like Brown or Warnock, they could use the money from their existing federal campaign account for their new presidential campaign.