(Bloomberg) -- Democratic donors looking to replace President Joe Biden as their candidate are advocating for an open selection process to find an alternative, a gambit rife with political risks and logistical unknowns.
“The Democratic donor base will be re-energized if there’s a fair process to pick the next candidate,” said Mike Novogratz, the billionaire founder of Galaxy Digital Holdings. If Democrats pick a centrist through a nomination process, “there are a tremendous amount of donors who will cut checks,” he said in an interview.
What a process to pick an alternative looks like is far from clear, and some Democrats warn that settling on anybody but Vice President Kamala Harris will protract the party’s infighting and alienate Black voters supportive of the first woman of color on a presidential ticket.
Another key reason some Democrats want her to ascend as nominee: Since she’s already in the No. 2 slot on the ticket, she can retain access to the campaign’s bank accounts. Other candidates would have to start fresh to mount a challenge to Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has the financial backing of major contributors, including billionaires Elon Musk and Paul Singer.
Still, factions of donors are dreaming up strategies for a brokered Democratic National Convention next month and sketching out blitz primary plans that would involve celebrities, like Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift, introducing potential candidates to voters. They’re also pulling delegates into hastily organized virtual calls to explain what their options are if Biden bows out of the race.
The conversations about finding a Biden alternative took on a new urgency in recent days as pleas grew louder for the president to step aside as the 2024 Democratic candidate. Top lawmakers and party officials have shared concerns about the possibility of sweeping election losses for Democrats in Congress and the White House if Biden continues his campaign.
Those close to Biden described a rising sense that the end of his bid might be near, but with the president in isolation at his Delaware beach house due to a Covid-19 infection, it was difficult to discern how exactly Biden was processing the latest developments, according to people familiar with the matter.
Defiant Biden
Biden’s team insists he will be the party’s nominee. Campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon said in an interview with MSNBC on Friday that Biden is more committed than ever to defeating Trump in November.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to take all of us unifying and moving forward,” she said.
In the weeks since Biden struggled in a debate with Trump, some donors have threatened to withhold millions of dollars from the campaign in an effort to prompt a change. Donors, including Novogratz, have begun raising money for an alternative if one should emerge.
“It’s important that there’s a process that creates legitimacy,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares of the Leadership Now Project, a group of business leaders that called for Biden to “pass the torch” in the first week after the debate. “There’s a variety of ways to do it.”
If Biden were to step aside, he could request that the delegates — 99% of whom are pledged to him — switch their support to a replacement he favors. That would most likely be Harris.
Even a nod from Biden, however, could still lead to an open convention, because delegates are under no obligation to honor his wishes and other candidates could also place their name into the nomination process with the support of at least 600 delegates.
Clock Ticks
Time is running out, however, as the party is firming up plans to nominate Biden through a virtual roll-call vote in August, ahead of the DNC. The convention’s rules committee is meeting Friday to begin hashing out what such a process might look like.
The DNC is scheduled to begin Aug. 19 in Chicago, and a change in candidates after that would run into problems with state ballot deadlines.
An advocacy group, Pass the Torch, is hoping to nudge Biden to make that decision soon by running ads urging him to step aside on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and other shows the president is known to watch.
“We’ll be going up on his favorite programs,” Aaron Regunberg, one of the group’s committee members, said in a statement. “We plan to stay up until we hear the announcement that he’s going to do the right thing and step aside.”
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