On the afternoon of July 21, the Democratic Party effectively stole an election. Fully 87% of the vote in this year’s Democratic presidential primaries — 14.4 million of the ballots cast — were discarded, sending shockwaves through the political landscape.
These voters’ choice for president will not be on the ticket in November. President Joe Biden is no longer the presumptive Democratic nominee.
This unprecedented move raises serious questions about the integrity of our elections, the role of political elites, and the fundamental democratic principle that voters choose their representatives.
For context, our presidential primary system functions a lot like the Electoral College. Voters cast ballots for delegates, who ultimately meet and vote for office seekers. Now, in public perception, these two acts are inseparable. When voters cast a ballot for president, they believe they are voting for the candidate, not electors. Likewise, voters in primary elections believe they are selecting candidates rather than delegates.
But in 2024, a select group of elites and Democratic Party insiders decided that Democratic primary votes don’t count. Technically, this situation mirrors faithless electors in the Electoral College, where electors can theoretically disregard the candidate they are pledged to. In short, the democratic process appears undermined when the outcome is removed from citizens and placed in the hands of a few individuals’ decisions.
More than simply ending his election bid, President Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Although we do not yet know what labyrinth of gamesmanship will ensue, two things are likely. First, voters will have little to no say in whom the Democratic nominee will be. Second, Harris is now poised to become the nominee — even though about 40% of Democrats say either she would not make a good president or they are unsure if she would. In fact, in her only presidential primary election, she received just 844 votes, receiving 0 delegates.
So, how will the left install Kamala as the presidential nominee and disenfranchise millions of Democratic primary voters in the process? A look back at party history paints a potential path forward.
Although unheard of in the last 50 years, political parties have a long history of selecting candidates behind closed doors. As recently as 1968, Democratic Party elites selected Hubert Humphrey as their nominee for president. Humphrey had not competed in any primaries and was widely regarded as the less popular candidate. To clinch the nomination, Humphrey relied on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s delegates transferring support to him after Johnson dropped out of the race.
In response to the disenfranchisement of Democratic voters by party elites, the Democratic Party created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to investigate what happened. In essence, the Commission found:
“Meaningful participation of Democratic voters in the choice of their presidential nominee was often difficult or costly, sometimes completely illusory, and, in not a few instances, impossible.”
The recent decision to replace Biden with Harris on the ballot echoes the same system of elite rule decried by the commission in 1972. Today, instead of Chicago politics and state party bosses, former President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries worked “behind the scenes” to oust the presumptive Democratic nominee, making the voters’ choice of their nominee completely illusory.
The prospects for Biden’s reelection campaign were poor and had been declining for some time — stemming from widespread concern about Biden’s cognitive fitness, spurred in part by special counsel Robert Hur’s Feb. 8 assessment, and a diverse range of actors noting Biden’s insufficiencies. Yet, Democratic voters — and Americans of all political affiliations — were repeatedly told Biden is physically and mentally fit, and to claim otherwise was ageist and conspiratorial. After the presidential debate, the party ended efforts to rebut concerns about Biden’s lack of fitness, making this manipulation of voters all the more blatant.
However, Democratic Party elites are no strangers to this type of election interference. Many believe the Democratic National Committee “derided” Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. Revelations from leaked emails, according to the New York Times, include efforts to generate negative press and schedule debates to disadvantage Sanders. But those subtle violations of party neutrality pale in comparison to the current situation.
The move to discard millions of votes and replace President Biden with Vice President Harris as the presumptive nominee calls into question the integrity of Democratic primary elections. If they are willing to throw out Democratic votes in a Democratic primary, how far would they go to throw out Republican votes in a general election?
To restore faith in our elections, which is more important: Who becomes the Democratic nominee or how they became the nominee? Paying lip service to overused buzzwords like transparency and accountability is meaningless without a clear process that protects the integrity of U.S. elections. Otherwise, the party risks transforming its primaries into the stuff of banana republics.
The actions of July 21 may have removed an unfit candidate from the ballot, but they did so at the cost of declaring void the votes of millions of Americans. Democracy relies on the principle that the people — not party elites and Washington insiders — choose their representatives, and any deviation from this idea threatens the core of our political system.