Several current and former House Democrats are signaling they’d be in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris replacing an 81-year-old Joe Biden at the top of a political ticket just days shy of one week after his rocky performance during a presidential debate.
Taking to the radio show “Mornings with Zerlina” on Wednesday, Representative Summer Lee (D-PA) warned Democrats that they are approaching an inflection point in their decision about whether or not to alter course.
“If our president decides this is not a pathway forward for him, we have to move very quickly. There’s not going to be time for a primary. That time is past,” Lee said. “The vice president is the obvious choice. She’s sitting right there.”
Lee also pointed to the political ramifications of excluding Harris, given that Black women have high rates of voter turnout.
“We’re so willingly going to push aside an entire demographic, and I think that it would be very dangerous to do that, personally,” she warned.
That came after comments by Representative Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), a trusted Biden ally who helped deliver the former vice president the Democratic presidential nomination last year. Clyburn, in his interview Wednesday morning with NPR political correspondent Asma Khalid on Morning Edition, declined to question the president’s sustainability but said he would support Harris as nominee if Biden withdrew.
“I want this ticket to continue to be Biden-Harris,” Clyburn said on “MSNBC Reports.” “This party should not, in any way, do anything to work around Ms. Harris. We should do everything we can to bolster her whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.”
Ex-Representative Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) who ran against Biden for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination also wrote an op-ed in Newsweek headlined “Kamala Harris Should Be the Democratic Nominee for President in 2024.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre shot down talk of Harris leaving the ticket during a press briefing Wednesday, but she did not provide specifics about what was discussed at their two-hour one-on-one lunch.
“One of the reasons why he picked the vice president … is because she is indeed the future of the party. And he’s very proud to have partnered with her and continue to partner with her and delivering an unprecedented record for the American people,” Jean-Pierre said.
On Tuesday afternoon, the crisis boiled over as Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) became the first sitting House Democrat to declare that Biden had no choice but to abandon his bid if he were concerned with US Senate.
Should he choose to, however, Harris’s supporters point out that she would need to take over the Biden-Harris campaign.
Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) are just some of the other names being floated as potential replacements for Biden.
