Thread by @DanaHoule

1/ Democrats cannot nominate anyone except Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. It's impossible.

If the Biden candidacy ends, so does the Biden campaign. It's not transferable. Anyone else other than possibly Kamala Harris would have to start from nothing. That's can't be done.

2/It's possible I'm missing something, but I don't think so. Here's why the Democrats can nominate Joe Biden, or possibly Kamala Harris, but nobody else.

There's only one candidate with a 2024 presidential campaign committee registered with the Federal Election Commission

3/Some of the "stuff" of the Biden campaign can probably be transferred to the DNC (and maybe state parties), but most of it can't. Another candidate can't just take over Biden's campaign.

So, think about it.

A new nominee would not have a campaign. Like, not a tax ID...

4/Not a bank account, not a website or address. There would be nothing. They would start out largely paralyzed for weeks.

First and most obviously, there would be no staff. And there would be no HR process for hiring staff, no payroll process. So a new campaign trying to...

5/...rapidly expand would have to focus on staffing. They could probably hire people from the Biden campaign, but not all would want to work for the new candidate.

Among the first people needed would be compliance and legal staff, because a new campaign would be immediately...

6/...challenged on ballot access and all kinds of other stuff. Compliance would be needed to deal with the massive influx of immediate cash and to be sure everything meets FEC rules.

But to get cash they'd need banking/accounting as well. So that needs to be set up...

7/And since most of the money would come in online, they'd need to immediately set up a web operation robust enough to handle to load, and secure enough to handle the obvious cyberattacks that would happen. So they'd need contracts for servers, support staff, etc...

8/This new campaign would also be immediately inundated with calls and emails from press, potential volunteers and donors, other campaigns/party orgs, orgs inviting the candidate to events, etc.. So they would immediately need staff for press, scheduling, political, etc

9/Some of these people could probably slide over from the DNC or state parties. But that leaves holes at the DNC and state parties.

But let's say they could immediately staff up. Where does everyone work? Office leases prob can't be automatically transferred to the...

10/...new campaign, so all of those would need to be renegotiated, and some may not be available to the new campaign. They'd also have to deal with utilities.

Then, how does everyone communicate? As we know from 2016, security breeches can be fatal. So it's not something...

11/...that can be tossed together in a day or so.

But let's say all the staff and infrastructure can be conjured from the ether. What about the data? Some could probably be transferred, but some of the lists would probably need to be purchased at fair market value from...

12/...Biden/Harris 2024. The new campaign would be starting out with no email lists, no volunteer lists, no fundraising lists, etc.

They'd also be starting with no contracts with vendors. All those contracts would have to be negotiated (think of the staff time needed to do...

13/...all of that at once). Some vendors wouldn't sign with the new campaign, so they would need to be replaced.

There's also the issue of advertising. The Biden campaign has already reserved tens of millions of dollars of TV ad time from the last few weeks of the campaign...

14/...when the inventory is low and what's left is expensive. The new campaign probably wouldn't be able to get the same volume, or get it at the same price. There would be similar problems with digital, with mail houses, etc.

Then there's voter/targeting data. A lot of that...

15/...is probably used through the DNC. But what about the plans on how to use it? Analytics/targeting would need to be recalibrated for the new candidate, who would not have the same traits/strengths & weaknesses, etc as Biden/Harris.

As for money, well, there are a lot of...

16/...challenges there as well. A new candidate who hadn't recently run for President (which, since Dean Phillips doesn't count, is anyone) wouldn't have much of a finance committee. They'd have no events scheduled/booked. And they wouldn't have any fundraising agreements...

17/...with other campaigns, state parties, etc.

But let's say all of that is in place. What's the plan? The new candidate would start without a campaign plan or budget. They'd have done no polling. No data work. No research. No policy.

Then they'd have to vet and choose a VP.

18/So, even if we live in a fantasy world where there would be no issues with ballot access/state laws, DNC delegate/nomination rules, the political chaos of Biden not running and the first woman & African/Asian-American VP being passed over, the new candidate being untested...

19/...in a primary season and thrown in to the craziest campaign in modern US history, the ceding of the advantages of incumbency, the fact that they'd unexpectedly have to effectively abandon their day job...in the fantasy world where none of those problems would exist...

20/...it would still be impossible--if I'm correct that the Biden campaign is not transferrable to anyone but Harris (and even that would be challenged--it would still be impossible for Democrats to replace Joe Biden unless they tried to win without a campaign.

Now, some may...

21/...point out that Trump didn't have much of a campaign in 2016. That's true. But by July he had all of the legal/financial arrangements needed to have a campaign. He had a lot of the physical infrastructure. The RNC wasn't in chaos the way the DNC would be if Biden...

22/...is replaced. Plus, even before he ran for President he had nearly complete name recognition. And despite the help of the Russians and James Comey, he lost the popular vote. So Trump's campaign doesn't show campaign apparatus doesn't matter.

23/So what does all of this mean?

It means unless he quits that Joe Biden is the nominee, and that if it's not him, anyone other than Kamala Harris would be starting from nothing & be completely overwhelmed & ineffective & would almost certainly lose.

24/It means talking about replacing Biden is a fantasy, bc it's impossible, & continuing to talk about it like it's a possibility is stupid & destructive & people who want to win should stop it, & everyone else should be shut down because they're making shit up that's not real

25/Correction: TV reservations would prob be OK bc they’re from the Biden/Harris-DNC joint committee.

But I may have understated the problems w state ballot access. It may be impossible to get anyone else’s name on some ballots except Harris (& I’m not even sure RE her)

@JamesSurowiecki …especially if it doesn’t happen in the next few weeks

I don’t know that stuff well enough to expound on it, but I have a little experience on ballot access; it’s a morass. 51 sets of rules, different requirement, different timelines, etc

I think a problem in some places…

@JamesSurowiecki …is that the electors need to be nominated by a particular date, & some of those are before the DNC