Why is Joe Biden still in the presidential race? In the days since his disastrous debate performance last week, pressure on the 81-year-old incumbent to step aside has continued to mount, forcing the candidate and his defenders to put forth elaborate rationales for why the only option is the status quo. One that has gained traction among Biden’s supporters is that the campaign war chest, about $240 million, is his alone—or, at best, could go only to Vice President Kamala Harris.
On Sunday, Rob Flaherty, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, sent an email to the president’s supporters arguing that a contested convention would be “chaos,” all of which would be “in service of a nominee who would go into a general election in the weakest possible position with zero dollars in their bank account.”
The point of arguments like this is to make you think, Well, I suppose the party’s hands are tied. That’s not true. And Biden’s supporters know it’s not true. Ultimately, nothing is holding back a change of candidate besides the people who don’t want to see one happen. No law or regulation prevents Biden from retiring and even endorsing whoever he truly believes is the strongest candidate. The choice is entirely up to Biden. Whatever comes next is up to him.
So what would happen if Biden were to relinquish the reins? The Stetson University law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy told me that the Democratic National Committee could get all of the Biden-Harris cash and dispense it as the organization sees fit for use on behalf of another candidate. The Federal Election Commission is clear, she explained, that “a candidate’s authorized committee may transfer unlimited campaign funds to a party committee or organization.”…
Other superficially decisive arguments have been floating around—for instance, that at least in some states no Democrat besides Biden would be able to get on the ballot at this point. This claim is also not true. The UCLA legal scholar Richard Hasen told me that if a candidate were to be replaced, “this is a good time for it to happen, before there’s been an official nomination.” That’s because, according to Hasen, state laws typically say that for major political parties, whoever is nominated at the convention is who goes on the ballot. “I don’t know how there’s a state law that locks Joe Biden in at this point as the Democratic candidate,” the state-election-policy lawyer John Ciampoli recently told the nonprofit newsroom NOTUS. “How can a state make someone a candidate when the party hasn’t made him their candidate yet?” After the convention, and particularly once states begin to print ballots, the logistics become far trickier….