Democratic officials staged “hush-hush talks” to plan for Joe Biden’s withdrawal as the party’s presidential nominee as early as 2023, says a new book.
Citing two unnamed sources, authors Jonathan Allen’s and Amie Parnes’s account adds another twist to the torturous saga over the then president’s age and fitness that was not resolved until a disastrous debate against Donald Trump precipitated his exit in July 2024.
More startlingly still, the book also reports that aides to Kamala Harris, the vice-president who assumed the nomination then lost to Trump, “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office”.
Such planning was led by Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director, Parnes and Allen report, and went as far as the drawing up of a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear Harris in.
Simmons “never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023,” the authors write, “but he advised colleagues that he should be notified immediately if something happened to Biden, because he had worked out an entire communications strategy. And he left the spreadsheet with another Harris aide.”
Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House is Allen and Parnes’s third campaign book after studies of Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and defeat by Biden in 2020. The new book is published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Parnes and Allen describe questions about Biden’s fitness that grew throughout the 2024 election cycle. Trump and Republicans seized on Biden’s age while Biden and White House aides vehemently insisted he was fit for another four-year term.
Already published extracts of Fight have concerned events after Biden withdrew: Harris’s frustration over being unable to distance herself from Biden, an unpopular president, and her team’s failure to land an interview with Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster whose three-hour chat with Trump came to be seen as a pivotal moment.
But Parnes and Allen devote the first half of their book to Biden’s long, painful, public decline, leading to his historic decision to step aside while in office and eligible for a second four-year term.
Part one of Fight is called The Unmaking of the President, a nod to The Making of the President 1960, Theodore H White’s seminal book on John F Kennedy’s win over Richard Nixon. Part two is called What It Took, a reference to Richard Ben Cramer’s classic on the 1988 election – in which Biden plays a prominent part as a young Democratic senator whose first presidential campaign crashed and burned in public.
When he dropped out in 1987, Biden was 44. In 2020, when his third presidential run ended in victory over Trump, he was 77. In 2023, after two years as the oldest president ever inaugurated, he was past 80 – and showing it.
“A handful of Democratic National Committee officials already had considered contingency plans,” Allen and Parnes write. “In hush-hush talks starting in 2023, these officials gamed out Biden-withdrawal scenarios, according to two people familiar with them.
“They wanted to make sure the party was ready for every possible circumstance: if Biden launched his campaign and then stepped aside before the primaries; if he won a bunch of primaries and then could not continue. If he secured enough delegates for winning the nomination but dropped out before winning a floor vote at the convention, and if he left a vacancy at the top of the ticket after taking the nomination.”
According to Parnes and Allen, the “hush-hush” planning was focused on what party rules said would happen in any such scenario “and how they might need to be changed, if the president no longer had the desire, or the ability, to run”.
“One official involved in secret talks put a fine point on the fear that Biden would not make it to election day as the party’s nominee: ‘It shows what we had to do to prepare with the unique circumstances we had, which was an 80-plus-year-old president who was running.”
Biden remained determined, egged on by family including his wife Jill Biden and legally troubled son, Hunter Biden, and by veteran aides. Parnes and Allen describe tensions between such factions but also chaotic preparations for what turned out to be the only Biden-Trump debate. That 80-minute meeting took place in Atlanta, Georgia, on 27 June. Biden’s performance – stiff, confused and weak – has gone down in history as perhaps the most catastrophic of all time.
Still, it took nearly a month for party pressure to build to a sufficient pitch to force Biden to relinquish his grip on power.
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In a particularly striking passage, Parnes and Allen describe a donors’ reception hosted by Phil Murphy, then governor of New Jersey, on 29 June 2024, two days after the debate disaster. Biden reportedly needed to have florescent tape fixed to the carpet, “colorful bread crumbs [that] showed the leader of the free world where to walk”.
“He knows to look for that,” one aide explained.
At the same event, Biden reportedly needed an autocue for “unscripted” remarks and then spoke haltingly in a Q&A with Murphy.
“He didn’t look well,” the authors write. “He didn’t sound vital.”
Such moments only increased party pressure. Allen and Parnes report an extraordinary conversation between Biden and Barack Obama, to whom Biden was vice-president between 2009 and 2017. In doing so, they quote Obama but present Biden’s thoughts in italics, indicative of close sourcing, perhaps from Biden himself.
“What is your path?” Obama asked.
“What’s my path? Biden thought as he listened to Obama. What’s your fucking plan?”
Such high drama is ultimately matched with brutal pathos. Parnes and Allen report how Obama and other party grandees eventually came to back Harris as the only alternative to Biden.
“One veteran operative summed up the sentiments of Democrats who worried they would get stuck with Harris but still wanted Biden out: ‘Well, at least she has a pulse.’”