The Democratic National Committee (DNC) may nominate President Joe Biden nearly a month before its August convention to end calls for him to drop out of the race.
Party officials are considering an early nomination when the convention’s credentialing committee — a body that manages convention procedures — meets virtually on July 21, according to a Bloomberg report Monday afternoon. The party’s convention begins on August 19.
Democrats already planned an early virtual roll call vote to put him on the ballot in Ohio, which had a deadline earlier than the Democratic convention. The vote is no longer needed — Ohio Governor Mike DeWine in May signed a law waiving the requirement as in years past — but Democrat leaders altered the rules to allow the advanced nomination, anyway. Now, it could be used as a tool to stop infighting over the president’s candidacy.
The idea could silence Democratic voices pushing for the president to end his bid for a second term after a troubling debate performance Thursday night. The president frequently stumbled over his words and sometimes failed to string together coherent sentences to answer questions from CNN moderators and respond to attacks from former president Donald Trump. Even Vice President Kamala Harris admitted in a post-debate interview with CNN that “there was a slow start” that was “obvious to everyone.”
Since then, many top Democratic commentators and left-leaning media outlets have called for Biden to step aside. The editorial boards of the New York Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution both called for Biden to drop out.
DNC Communications Director Rosemary Boeglin denied the mid-July meeting could be used to nominate Biden early.
“This is false,” Boeglin wrote in a social media post on Monday. “We’ve said for weeks that the DNC would hold a virtual roll call in the lead-up to our in-person convention as a result of the OH GOP’s bad-faith attempts to keep Joe Biden off of their general election ballot.”
But almost any effort to remove Biden from the ticket would have to include his consent, and the president has not signaled any plans to end his candidacy and free up his 99 percent share of the party’s delegates. A post-debate CBS poll showed that 72 percent of voters think Biden does not have the mental and cognitive health to serve as president.