Joe BidenThe struggling debate performance left Democrats so panicked that some began looking for an alternative to replace the 81-year-old president as the party’s standard-bearer.
Biden has given no indication that he plans to drop out of the race, and his campaign has flatly rejected the suggestion. But that has done little to silence critics who openly question whether Biden is the right person to take on Donald Trump, a figure the president — and his party — see as a grave threat to American democracy.
In the unlikely scenario that Biden decides not to run, the most likely choice to replace him would be his 59-year-old vice president and running mate, Kamala Harris. But it wouldn’t be automatic — and other candidates would likely challenge Harris, who has suffered her own low approval ratings, for the nomination.
Some Democrats are already looking beyond the vice president to other possible candidates: Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois, Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Governor Wes Moore of Maryland.
Related: Joe Biden made a mistake during the debate. But who will ask him to resign?
It’s a sign that Democrats haven’t fully embraced Harris as Biden’s heir.
“Just discussing Biden’s resignation while the Vice President is COMPLETELY ignored… is a serious look at how we view the importance, capacity and gravitas of women of color,” said writer Tanzina Vega on X.
Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, is the highest-ranking female elected official in U.S. history and the first Black and Asian American to serve as vice president.
Democrats, traumatized by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016, rallied behind Biden in 2020 over a younger, more diverse and progressive field of candidates, including Harris. As a candidate, Biden promised to be a “bridge” to the next generation of Democratic leaders, which was interpreted by many as a commitment to serve one term before passing the baton to Harris.
But when the time came to make a decision, Biden argued that he was still the Democrat best positioned to defeat Trump.
Over the past three and a half years, Harris’ groundbreaking vice presidency has divided Democrats. Negative press, some of it self-inflicted, compounded by sexist and racist attacks, and a challenging policy portfolio weighed on public perception of the former California senator. Nearly 50% of voters have an unfavorable opinion of Harris, according to the polling average of 538, compared to the roughly 40% who view her favorably, numbers similar to Biden’s.
Despite a rocky start to her term, Harris has slowly eased into her role, especially since becoming the administration’s leading voice on abortion rights. On Monday, Harris marked two years since the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade with a fiery warning that Trump would not hesitate to further restrict women’s reproductive rights in a second term.
The vice president nodded to her background as a prosecutor, declaring, “In the case of stealing the reproductive freedom of women in America, Donald Trump is guilty.”
Harris’ clear defense of abortion rights, by far the Democrats’ strongest issue, stands in stark contrast to Biden. During Thursday’s debate, Biden fumbled an attack on Trump over Republican bans on the proceedings, bizarrely addressing immigration and raising the case of a young woman murdered in Georgia.
Shortly after Biden left the debate, Harris was the first to defend him in a pair of interviews. On CNN and MSNBC, Harris pivoted his performance, saying voters should look at the past three and a half years of accomplishments and not just the 90-minute debate. Harris conceded that Biden got off to a “slow start” but insisted he finished “strong.”
“I’m talking about the choice for November,” she said on CNN. “I’m talking about one of the most important elections in our collective lives.”
In a sharp back-and-forth, CNN host Anderson Cooper asked Harris about the calls for Biden to resign.
“I’m not going to spend the whole night talking to you about the last 90 minutes when I’ve watched the last three and a half years of performances,” she said, emphasizing his legislative and executive accomplishments in his first term.
At a rally in Las Vegas the next day, Harris doubled down on her support.
“In the Oval Office negotiating bipartisan agreements, I see him in the situation room keeping our country safe,” she said, adding that the election would not be decided in “one night in June.”
The debate in Atlanta was the first of the election cycle, with a second scheduled for September. The Biden campaign has agreed to a vice presidential debate between Harris and Trump’s eventual running mate, but terms have not yet been confirmed.
In a hypothetical matchup against Trump, Harris performed roughly evenly with Biden, trailing the former president by six points in a Times/Siena poll in February. Biden trailed Trump by five points in the same poll. Meanwhile, the poll showed Harris doing better than Biden among black voters, but worse among Hispanic voters and men.
Biden’s age has long been a challenge to the election. But his shaky debate performance shocked even his most loyal supporters. At a meeting on Friday, Biden acknowledged his stumbles but insisted he was still the best candidate to beat Trump.
“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he said at a post-debate rally in North Carolina. “I know I don’t walk as smoothly as I used to, I don’t talk as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth.”
But mounting concerns about Biden’s mental acuity have put Harris under even more scrutiny, particularly from the right. Republicans have tried to turn Harris into a boogeyman, with Nikki Haley warning during the GOP primaries that a vote for Biden was a vote for “a President Harris.”
With the convention scheduled for mid-August in Chicago and the formal nomination process needing to take place virtually sometime before then to meet the Ohio vote deadline, many Democrats have said there isn’t enough time to replace Biden at the top of the ticket.
Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina lawmaker and Democratic commentator who supported Harris in the 2020 primary, said it was futile to wish for an alternative at this stage.
“You don’t nominate Gretch or Gavin or Wes over Kamala. Stop it,” he wrote on X, adding, “The choice is Trump, Biden or the bank. I choose Joe.”
