Why is the DNC accelerating Joe Biden’s nomination?

The fight over whether President Joe Biden should remain Democrats’ presidential nominee has moved to a new phase, centering on whether the party should accelerate his official nomination through a virtual roll call as early as next week — or wait to do the honors in person at their August convention.

Biden supporters want to move forward quickly with the virtual roll call, saying the plan has been set and approved for weeks — long before the presidential debate in June — and is necessary because of Republican moves in Ohio that once threatened to keep the president off the state’s ballot.

But Ohio lawmakers moved to close that loophole in late May. With Biden’s spot on the ballot now secured, Biden’s critics say, a virtual roll call process now amounts to an attempt to ram through his nomination.

Who’s right? That depends on how safe you think Biden’s Ohio ballot spot is — and whether you think the party needs more time to decide on who should challenge Donald Trump.

Ever since the jaw-dropping presidential debate on June 27, Democrats have had a heated internal fight over whether Biden should stay on the top of the ticket, given his alarming performance and seeming deteriorating health. Dozens of lawmakers and activists have called on the president to consider stepping aside ahead of the Democratic National Convention scheduled for August 19 in Chicago.

Biden thus far has hotly rejected any suggestion he back out, but has also been unable to quiet questions and concerns from fellow Democrats and the press. 

The push to hold a virtual roll call ahead of the convention began in late May, when Ohio Senate Republicans tried to squeeze last-minute unrelated amendments to a bill ensuring Biden would appear on Ohio’s November ballot. Since then, though, Ohio lawmakers passed a “clean” bill to protect Biden’s ballot spot, rendering the need for a virtual roll call less necessary.

In light of the debate around Biden’s candidacy, some lawmakers and DNC delegates have urged the party to abandon its virtual roll call plan and wait until next month to select the presidential nominee in person.

California Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman circulated a letter on Monday among his House Democratic colleagues calling on the party to hold off on a virtual roll call process and wait until the convention. “To try to squelch debate and jam this through is a power play of the highest order,” Huffman told the New York Times. The newly formed Pass the Torch group also released a statement on Monday blasting the virtual roll call as an “unjustified push” to ram through a Biden nomination. 

“The Democratic Party is having a conversation on the most important topic imaginable – what is the best path forward to defeat Donald Trump and win control of Congress. Stifling this debate and prematurely shutting down any possible change in the Democratic ticket through an unnecessary and unprecedented ‘virtual roll call’ in the days ahead is a terrible idea,” said Pass the Torch activist Aaron Regunberg.

The question at hand, now, is whether Democrats should trust that Ohio Republicans are truly done playing games, and whether the November ballot issue is really resolved. The new Ohio law takes effect August 31.

The Biden campaign, DNC chair Jaime Harrison, and Ohio Democratic Party Chair Elizabeth Walters have all said Ohio Republicans should not be trusted, and they insist the stakes are too high to risk the GOP backtracking somehow later this summer. They say the fact that the law is not already in effect creates an opportunity for misbehavior. 

“Trusting the Ohio GOP to do the right thing for voters is like trusting an arsonist to put out a fire,” Walters said in a statement to Vox, pointing to a $60 million corruption scandal involving the state’s House Republican speaker from 2023, and heavily gerrymandered maps the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional seven times. 

“This election comes down to nothing less than saving our democracy from a man who has said he wants to be a dictator on ‘day one’ — so we certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot,” Harrison of the DNC told Vox.

Republican leaders in Ohio, meanwhile, say the ballot nominating issue is now moot and blasted Democrats for trying to gin up more panic.

“The issue is resolved in Ohio, and Democratic activists should stop trying to scapegoat Ohio for their party dysfunction,” said Ben Kindel, a spokesperson for Ohio’s Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Kindel shared with Vox a legal advisory LaRose sent to all Ohio County Board of Elections directors and board members on June 3 affirming that the deadline for political parties to certify their presidential and vice-presidential candidates is now September 1 — well after Democrats’ convention in Chicago. 

A spokesperson for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine also told Vox that the new Ohio law would ensure that any nominee selected at the DNC’s August convention would appear on the November ballot. “The new law is structured so that it will take effect in time for it to serve as legal instructions for the Ohio secretary of state to prepare the ballot,” the spokesperson, Dan Tierney, said. “Every single Democrat member of the General Assembly voted in favor of [the bill].” 

Biden campaign allies reject the idea that the DNC is doing anything other than sticking to the plan party leaders decided on more than a month ago. 

But the party has failed to explain how Ohio Republicans could actually prevent a Democrat from appearing on the November ballot now that a law has been passed to ensure it. By pushing through a cautious early vote with no clear legal justification, Democrats risk fueling more distrust among voters they’ll need to win November. Axios reported on Tuesday that a Democratic official briefed on the party’s plans said DNC leaders “rarely mention” Ohio internally as the reason to push forward with an earlier nominating date.

“It’s disingenuous for the Biden-aligned forces to be making arguments that seem to reference the Ohio law, but whose actual purpose is pretty clearly to allow for the president’s renomination as early and with as little drama as possible,” said Daniel Schlozman, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist who recently co-authored a book on weakened political parties.

“That’s what, in other contexts, we would call misinformation,” he said. “Ever since 1968, reformers have argued that party processes should be open. For much longer than that, the convention has been the apex of party authority, with the national committee just the continuing body between conventions. The virtual roll call violates both of those core principles without a compelling justification.”

How the virtual roll call came to be

Ohio election law requires political parties to confirm their presidential candidates 90 days before the November election, but that date this year — August 7 — falls well before the DNC’s scheduled convention. This isn’t the first time Ohio lawmakers have had to pass special legislation to get around this problem; they did so also in 2020 for Donald Trump and 2012 for Barack Obama. 

Alabama also has a similar 90-day-rule rule, and this past May Alabama lawmakers unanimously approved a bill to ensure Biden would appear on the ballot. 

LaRose flagged the nominating deadline issue in early April. And by mid-April Ohio Republicans, who control the state legislature, agreed to pass a bill ensuring Biden would appear on the ballot. On May 7, an Ohio House committee passed a bipartisan bill out of committee to fix the problem, extending the nomination deadline to August 23. Republican House Speaker Jason Stephens praised it at the time, noting it helps both parties.

“Just four years ago, we had this issue,” Stephens told Ohio Capital Journal on May 8. “The party in power in the White House usually goes last for the convention, so hopefully this will take care of that issue.”

The problems came after, when some Senate Republican lawmakers tried to squeeze in controversial amendments to limit outside spending to state and local ballot measures — a move many experts believe was in response to Ohio’s winning abortion rights ballot measure last year. (Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights raised three times as much as anti-abortion opponents.) 

The proposed Senate amendments — which Democrats blasted as unrelated “poison pills” — would have prevented political spending from outside the US, required more campaign finance disclosures, and made it harder overall for groups to collect petition signatures. Even though Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected another Republican proposal last August that would have made it harder to place measures on the ballot, many GOP elected officials claimed outside spending was to blame for that result. 

By May 23, the nominating deadline issue was still not resolved, and DeWine publicly urged the legislature to reach a compromise. “Ohio is running out of time to get Joe Biden, sitting president of the United States, on the ballot this fall,” DeWine said during a press conference. “Failing to do so is simply not acceptable. This is ridiculous; this is an absurd situation.” DeWine also then endorsed the idea to ban foreign spending from state ballot measure campaigns. 

On May 28, amid all this chaos, the Democratic National Committee made its decision to hold a virtual roll call vote by August 7, so they could resolve Ohio’s nominating deadline problem without relying on Ohio Republicans to address it. By June 4, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted to move forward, and the full DNC membership finalized approval for the virtual roll call process on June 20.

The DNC has two more scheduled meetings to finalize this process — this coming Friday and this coming Sunday. Both meetings will be streamed on YouTube, and the virtual roll call could take place soon after that, as early as Sunday. The last possible date it could be held is August 7.

“We look forward to nominating Joe Biden through a virtual roll call and celebrating with fanfare together in Chicago in August alongside the 99 percent of delegates who are supporting the Biden-Harris ticket,” DNC Chair Harrison told Vox.

According to party rules, the Democratic Party could still replace Biden with someone else should he choose to voluntarily step aside after the August convention, but it would be a contentious process so close to Election Day. The new nominee would be selected by the 435 members of the Democratic National Committee, rather than the nearly 4,000 pledged convention delegates.