Since the moment President Joe Biden stunned the world by withdrawing from the presidential race, Republicans from top to bottom have been offering free advice to Democrats on how to pick his successor.
From Donald Trump to House Speaker Mike Johnson to the state and local apparatchiks who do the bidding of the GOP and its donors, they have been decrying the crowning of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president as being “anti-democratic” long before the 2024 Democratic National Convention is gaveled into session on Aug. 19 at the United Center in Chicago.
Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, weighed in on what the Democrats should be doing when he made his first solo campaign rally in his hometown of Middletown.
“Elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard,” Vance told the crowd at Middletown High School. “That is not how it works. That is the threat to democracy.”
And then he made a pitch to dissatisfied Democrats.
“You are welcome in the Republican Party, where we think we should persuade voters and not lie to voters,” he said. “Come on in, the water’s warm.”
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Republicans clearly had been hoping for a bloody, mean-spirited battle on the convention floor in Chicago, with any number of Democratic presidential candidates battling tooth-and-nail for the 1,976 delegates needed to be the nominee in a dog’s breakfast of a convention fight that would broadcast live on nationwide TV.
Well, they won’t get it.
By Tuesday, more than 3,000 delegates had indicated they will follow Biden’s lead and back Harris, according to an AP headcount.
And the number is growing by the hour.
It will happen not on the convention floor in Chicago, but in a virtual roll call vote — probably on Aug. 7 — that will confirm that Harris, and whoever she chooses as her running mate, will be the Democratic ticket facing Trump-Vance. Maybe by acclamation.
The timing of the virtual roll call — which was done four years ago during the COVID pandemic — is important so that there will be no question the Democratic ticket can be on the ballot in states like Ohio and Virginia, which have early deadlines for ballot access.
Republicans complaining about the “anti-democratic” nature of this process for replacing Biden with Harris simply don’t understand the rules of the Democratic National Committee, said State Sen. Bill DeMora of Columbus, who has been Ohio’s convention and delegate director for the past seven Democratic national conventions.
“The two parties have different rules for choosing nominees,” DeMora said. “They either don’t understand this or they don’t want to acknowledge it.”
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The moment President Biden announced he would not run, “every delegate technically is a free agent,’’ said DeMora, a former executive director of the Ohio Democratic Party. “They are free to do whatever they want.”
But Monday night, hours after President Biden’s decision, all 145 Ohio delegates voted to support Vice President Harris for the nomination.
“They’re free to do what they want when the official roll call takes place, but there’s no reason at all to believe they won’t vote for Kamala Harris,” DeMora said.
All of the other potential candidates for the nomination have already said they support Harris.
“The short period of time in which she got the support she needed surprised me,’’ DeMora said. “But I’m not surprised she has it.”
Most of the rhetoric coming from Republicans about the process, DeMora said, “is because they are afraid of Kamala Harris.”
“They are scared to death,’’ DeMora said. “They had planned to run against Joe Biden. Now they are confronted with a former prosecutor running against a convicted felon. A felon who is now the old man in the race.
“I don’t think this is what the Republicans had in mind.”
