Democrats Plan Virtual Nomination For Biden Ahead Of Chicago Convention

Democrats are planning to nominate President Joe Biden as the party’s candidate for the White House in 2024 by a roll call vote weeks before the Democratic convention.

The ploy would avoid complications that could leave Biden off the ballot in Ohio. It would also avoid a potentially embarrassing protest by Biden’s critics within the Democratic Party if his nomination were to take place at the convention.

The nominating process will mimic the process used in 2020 when the nominating was done virtually because of COVID-19. The early nomination will allow Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party’s official nominees in time for Ohio’s ballot deadline for candidates, which falls on August 7, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison has attacked Republican lawmakers in Ohio for not extending the ballot deadline for Biden as the legislature has done for candidates in previous years.

“Democrats will land this plane on our own,” Harrison told WSJ. “Through a virtual roll call, we will ensure that Republicans can’t chip away at our democracy through incompetence or partisan tricks.”

The law that put the rule in question in place was originally passed 15 years ago on a bipartisan basis. At the time, Democrats held a majority in the state House.

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Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has pushed back against Democrats’ attacks. LaRose wrote for WSJ on Monday that the Democratic Party has left no room for him to help them legally, and it has refused to deal with Republican lawmakers in Ohio to score the deadline extension needed to nominate Biden at convention.

“Unable so far to get a legislative fix to the problem they created, Democrats have flipped the script. They used to say refusing to enforce election rules was a threat to democracy; now refusing to bend the rules is a threat,” LaRose wrote.

The roll call nomination could also save the president and Democrats from embarrassing protests over Biden’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas. A vocal group of Democratic activists have pressured the administration to take a hard stand against Israel’s war, and Democratic officials are preparing for at least some of that angst to play out as protests during the Democratic convention August 19-22.

One such protest group, the Coalition to March on the DNC, has applied with the city of Chicago for a permit to protest the convention multiple times, but without getting approval. The group withdrew a request for a permit recently in protest over actions authorities took against an anti-Israel protest camp at DuPaul University.