Warning: What you are about to read is morbid. That’s because this is about, well, morbidity.
Specifically, this is about what happens if the presidential candidate of a major political party dies. Or becomes incapacitated. Or, for whatever reason, drops out of the race.
In 2024, this is more than just a hypothetical. The all-but-certain Democratic and Republican nominees will be 81 and 78 years old, respectively, on Election Day. That makes President Biden and former president Donald Trump the two oldest party front-runners in U.S. history by far.
Both have outlived the average life expectancy for men in this country. And both have committed gaffes and made missteps that raise doubts about whether they are as sharp as they once were. While Biden’s doctor has pronounced him healthy and vigorous, he looks and acts frailer than he did four years ago — an apparent decline that special counsel Robert K. Hur highlighted in his recent report on the president’s mishandling of classified material. But even before the special counsel’s assessment, most voters were saying that Biden’s age and fitness were their greatest concerns about giving him a second term; this anxiety shows up in just about every poll. Trump, while more energetic than Biden, is only a few years younger, and has a predilection for taking extended departures from rationality.
That Republicans and Democrats are raging at each other about whose candidate shows more serious signs of dementia tells you pretty much everything you need to know about why age matters in 2024. But there is another potential trapdoor for Trump: the fact that he is running for president while under indictment for 91 felony charges. It is legally allowable to campaign for president from prison, but if it comes to that, Republicans will surely be pondering their alternatives, too.
It turns out there are rules in place — albeit untested ones — to deal with the unthinkable but not implausible. But they apply differently depending on when a sudden vacancy occurs between now and Inauguration Day. Here’s how things are supposed to work under various scenarios, and who the key deciders would be:
As things look now, both Biden and Trump are likely to have accumulated enough delegates to claim their respective nominations by mid-March. But that won’t become official until their parties meet this summer for their conventions — the Republicans beginning July 15 in Milwaukee, and the Democrats starting Aug. 19 in Chicago.
So what happens if a presumed nominee, by choice or otherwise, doesn’t make it that far? Let’s start with some history: On March 31, 1968, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson made the shocking announcement that he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination for another term. Back then, only 14 states and the District of Columbia held primaries that gave ordinary voters any say in who their nominee would be. In the other states, party bosses — mayors, governors, ward leaders, local chairs and the like — controlled the levers. These local party insiders engineered things so that Vice President Hubert Humphrey got the Democratic nomination, despite not having competed in a single primary.
The turmoil of 1968 — which saw violent confrontations between police and antiwar protesters on the streets outside the Democratic convention hall in Chicago — brought a movement to bring the nominating process out of the backrooms and into the open. For their own reasons, not the least of which was generating more public interest and engagement, Republicans implemented reforms as well. By 1972, the modern system of state-by-state primaries and caucuses was nearly in place.
So were rules to govern possible eventualities that would disrupt that process. Yet it should also be remembered that the parties begin their conventions by voting on their rules — which means all these procedures could be thrown out the window should a crisis hit.
There are roughly 2,400 Republican delegates and 4,000 Democratic delegates. “These people can be teachers or labor union members or evangelical Christians or right to life activists. What they all have in common is some degree of activism on behalf of their political party, even if they generally are unknown to the public,” writes Elaine Kamarck, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management and the author of “Primary Politics,” an authoritative guide to how the nominating process works.
Most of them arrive at the convention pledged to support a specific candidate, but the current rules of both parties stipulate that convention delegates pledged to someone who is no longer running become free agents. Thus would begin a frenzied courtship of the up-for-grabs delegates.
If Trump or Biden were to step aside, other contenders would seize the opportunity to jump into the race. If, say, Biden were to drop out, it is easy to imagine that Vice President Harris would quickly declare her candidacy, along with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (who Kamarck says is already “running the best proxy campaign I’ve ever seen”) and perhaps other rising stars, such as governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois.
As uncommitted delegates ponder their options, states such as Pennsylvania, which hold their primaries late in the calendar, would go from being irrelevant to becoming important gauges of voter sentiment that could help guide the delegates. Because of that, their secretaries of state might consider proposing new filing deadlines — or even rescheduling their primaries — so that late entrants could compete. There is precedent for them to do that; in 2020, 16 states juggled their calendars, some of them multiple times, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The outcome will be a convention where the result may not be known ahead of time. In other words, it will be the kind of no-holds-barred event that nominating conventions held between 1831 and 1968,” Kamarck writes.
What happened back then wasn’t always pretty. The 1912 Republican convention was a brawl in which former president Theodore Roosevelt unsuccessfully tried to snatch the nomination from his own handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, by claiming that some delegations were fraudulently seated. The high-water mark for chaos, however, was the 1924 Democratic convention, when it took 103 ballots to come up with dark horse John W. Davis of West Virginia as the presidential nominee.
Not since the epic 1976 GOP primary battle between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan have delegates arrived for a convention with the nomination in doubt. That one got settled in Ford’s favor on the first ballot.
But all of that was before the modern forces of social media, big money and high-tech disinformation reshaped the nature of politics, bringing in new players. Republican lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, a leading Republican expert on election law, says it would not be accurate to call what could happen today an old-style “brokered” convention, because in today’s politics, it’s not clear who would play the role of broker, calling the shots the way state chairmen, ward bosses and senior elected officials once did. The wishes of establishment figures matter not at all to the populist wings in either party at the moment, and any effort by traditional forces to instill order these days might be met with only more bedlam.
The demise of Trump would create an especially large vacuum in the GOP, whose most recent platform was simply to stipulate that the party would support whatever it is Trump wants to do. As we have already seen in the primaries, when candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis failed spectacularly in their efforts to portray themselves as 2.0 versions of the MAGA original, there is no obvious heir to bring order and authority to what he would leave behind. “Are the delegates going to listen to Eric Trump?” Ginsberg asks. “I don’t think so.”
Should the party’s presidential nominee prove unable to make it to November, both Democrats and Republicans put the choice of a replacement in the hands of their national committees. Which means — surprise — the nomination wouldn’t automatically go to the running mate.
This process was used once before, in different circumstances. In August 1972 — just weeks after the Democratic convention — vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton dropped out after disclosing he had been hospitalized multiple times during the 1960s for nervous exhaustion and depression. The Democratic National Committee, which had 275 members back then, met in Washington and voted to replace him with a new nominee, Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps and an in-law of the Kennedy family.
Who are these national committee members? They are party insiders, mostly elected by their state organizations. The Republican National Committee has close to 170 members, including the party chairman, plus a committeeman and committeewoman, for each state and territory. The Democratic National Committee is much larger, with 453 members.
How they would go about selecting a new nominee is spelled out in each party’s rules. It is a pretty straightforward proposition for the DNC, whose membership is apportioned loosely according to the size of a state’s population. For the Republicans, the vote to select a new nominee can involve some complicated math. Rule No. 9 of the GOP bylaws stipulates the RNC members representing any state get to cast as many votes as their state did at the convention, but that if any state’s members disagreed, their votes would get sliced up, potentially even into fractions.
As most people know, we don’t vote for our presidents directly. In November, we cast our ballots for slates of electors, as spelled out in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. There are 538 electors in all, one for each U.S. senator and House member, plus three for the District of Columbia. How they are picked varies, but their selection is generally done at state party conventions.
After some preliminaries, they meet in their respective states on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December — this year, that’s Dec. 17 — and elect the president and vice president.
It is a rare elector who votes other than the way his state did. In fact, 29 states plus the District of Columbia require them to follow the wishes of their state’s voters. “They are not expected to think for themselves or to negotiate, which is not to say that they wouldn’t under extraordinary circumstances,” Kamarck writes.
And as we saw in 2020, with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, there were allegedly felonious schemes in at least six states to put together illegitimate slates of “fake electors.” So imagine the turmoil — and potential for double-dealing — if the electors themselves become, essentially, free agents.
State legislatures might also seek to intervene, and even contravene the will of their voters, by naming their own slates of electors. Again, what happened in 2020 should not give us any comfort. A New York Times analysis found that more than 44 percent of Republican legislators in closely contested states took steps to discredit or overturn the election result, with 11 percent supporting sending alternate slates of electors to Congress.
The odds for a post-election nervous breakdown are not to be minimized. Lies and disinformation about an election result that was far less ambiguous than one in which a president-elect would not be able to take the oath of office led to an attack on the Capitol just when Congress had convened to certify the electoral college totals on Jan. 6, 2021. The institutional guardrails held — but only barely. Would they again?
This one is easy, or should be: Under the 25th Amendment, the vice president-elect gets the job. Then he or she submits to Congress a nominee for vice president, who takes office upon receiving a majority vote by both houses.
On the brighter side, actuaries say the two most elderly presidential front-runners in U.S. history can probably go the distance. Neither Biden nor Trump smokes or drinks. Both have access to excellent health care. That means that all of these scenarios, thankfully, remain long shots, and both parties seem pretty set on these two men.
Changing leaders in unexpected circumstances, whatever the rules say, would be difficult and traumatic for both parties, and neither one has a clear alternative waiting in the wings. For now, they have narrowed their most likely choices to presidential candidates would serve as octogenarians.
The “age question” is not a new one in presidential politics. It dogged Reagan, though he was not yet 70 when he was inaugurated for the first time. Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s after he was out of office, but there continues to be speculation that he was showing signs of the disease when he was president. In 1995, as Republican contender Bob Dole reached his 72nd birthday, the cover of Time magazine asked: “Is Dole too old for the job?”
“I tell you what, I feel sharper now than I did 20 years ago,” Trump said recently. And when questions about Biden’s age have been raised, the president has retorted, “Watch me.” One thing that both of them can be sure of: Anxious voters will be doing just that in the months ahead.
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