All anyone could talk about at the RNC last week was what would happen to Biden and whether Kamala Harris would replace him, as we reported earlier this week:
“They elevated Joe Biden, for crying out loud, for the presidency, and they hid him in a basement for the last election, and what worked once will never work again. And now, everybody gets to see in full view what they’ve elected,” said Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota. “And granted, he’s certainly declined since his first day in the White House, but he’s not a lot different than he was his first day.”
Cramer, who served as a state party chair before being elected to Congress, said Democrats “have to determine what’s the least-bad option in front of them.” He added, “I have been saying up until probably a week ago that their least-bad option is to try to lift Joe Biden up and try to pitch and sell him. Yeah, I mean, he’s won an election for president before. But he’s certainly diminished, to say the least … Now I don’t think they have any option other than to try to make Kamala Harris better than she is.”
The Trump campaign, anticipating Biden would drop out against their wishes, had already begun calibrating attacks on Harris, first and foremost over the southern border:
“I think it really doesn’t matter who the Democratic candidate is,” said Nicole Malliotakis, a member of Congress from New York who sat in the president’s booth on the third night of the Republican National Convention. “It’s the Biden-Harris administration. She’s the border czar. In fact, I think it’s almost better to run against Kamala Harris because the one thing she was supposed to do is secure the border, and she’s been a complete disaster on that issue.”
The Trump campaign also plans to turn the charge that they are anti-democracy against the Democrats if Harris replaces Biden, pushing the notion that Harris was chosen by party bosses and not by the voters. On Thursday morning, at an event sponsored by Politico, Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita called any effort to replace Biden with Harris “an attempted coup.”
“You can’t step down as a candidate for president because you’re cognitively impaired while still being president,” he added.
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