The effort to replace Joe Biden appears to be dead after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

 

Joe Biden. Fox News/AP.

The effort to replace Joe Biden as the 2024 Democrat nominee appears to be dead after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Fox News. Biden's ally's say that the assassination attempt has "blotted out the sun" and makes the push politically impossible. Biden addressed the attack yesterday and called Donald Trump to offer his condolences. Another ally said that Biden was not going to abandon the race during this moment. The assassination attempt has also stalled out Biden's campaign with advertisements being pulled and staffers told to not comment on social media. 

My Comment:

I think that this probably is the end of the effort to remove Joe Biden as the candidate. The attack on Trump has sucked all the energy out of the room as nobody wants to be the guy that says "yeah, the assassination attempt was a problem, but what really matters is replacing Joe Biden!" I can't imagine that Biden gets replaced right now. 

Part of it is because you don't want to replace your candidate when he is POTUS and dealing with a major political crisis. I'm no fan of Biden to be sure, but the fact is that he's in charge right now and the last thing he needs is an attack on his candidacy. The fear is that if you do distract him in some way, he will botch the moment and make things even worse than they already are. 

And it's not like Biden is screwing this up to a major degree. Biden is at least saying the right things and isn't making any obvious mistakes. I do think he deserves a lot of blame for the state of politics right now, but it's not like he's actively making things worse during this crisis. He's certainly behaving better than a lot of the folks on social media right now, that's for sure. 

Could the "remove Biden" effort come back? It's possible but there is not a lot of time to do so. I am guessing that by the time the Trump assassination is out of the news it's going to be too late. The Democrats have their convention in about a month and given that both the Republican convention and the assassination happened this week, by the time both of those events are over, Democrats would only have a couple of weeks, maybe three at most, where the news cycle could come back to them and they could make a push. 

I also think there is quite a bit of resignation on the Democrats side. Some of them are actually asking themselves the "are we the baddies" question in the wake of the attack. And even the ones that don't understand that a Trump assassination attack helps Trump quite a bit and it's going to be almost impossible for the Democrats to win now. Politicians that survive an assassination attempt where they are actually wounded tend to do very well. It happened to Ronald Reagan and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and I think everyone expects it to happen now for Trump. Like I said yesterday, people are going to want to vote someone who gets shot in the head for his beliefs and comes up fist raised and yelling "fight". 

If you are going to lose anyways, why not stay the course? Indeed, the Trump assassination attempt gives them a lot of mental cover to accept Biden's defeat. They can now say "it's not our fault that we lost, it was Trump getting shot". And the candidates that could replace Trump? They aren't going to want to ruin their political futures in a cause that seems lost.