Dems had plan for Biden to 'die in office,' talked about candidate switcheroo in 2023, book claims

Democrats had planned for former President Joe Biden to "die in office" before the election and had staged “hush-hush talks” planning for a then-potential switch out of former President Joe Biden in the election race as early as 2023, according to a new book written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

“Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” cites two anonymous sources for the claims, and additionally tells of aides to former Vice President Kamala Harris who “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office,” per a report from the Guardian.

The question over Biden’s mental fitness as well as age reportedly weighed on a number of staffers around the Vice President. There were even plans, reportedly laid out by Harris’s White House communications director Jamal Simmons, to draw up a “death-pool roster” of federal judges to swear in if Biden met his demise while in office, according to the authors.

Simmons “never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023,” the book claims, “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.”

The authors have written two other books regarding the last two presidential elections and the new book is set to be published next week. As questions surrounding Biden’s mental acuity grew in the 2024 election cycle, ultimately mounting in Biden’s terrible debate performance with Trump, pressure from his own party led to him dropping out of the race. But people made plans before that in case Biden was not going to be the 2024 nominee, the authors claim.

The authors wrote that in 2023, “A handful of Democratic National Committee officials already had considered contingency plans” that they refer to as “hush-hush talks,” where officials "gamed out Biden-withdrawal scenarios.”

“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,” the book said. “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.”

The authors wrote in the book that the plans surrounded party rules for the election and “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, however, was still determined to run, and had been pushed to do so by family members Jill and Hunter Biden. One passage reviewed by reporters said that at a fundraiser two days after Biden had his debate disaster, the former president needed tape fixed to the carpet, “colorful bread crumbs [that] showed the leader of the free world where to walk”.

At the same event, Biden reportedly needed cues for “unscripted” comments. The authors also wrote about a conversation that reportedly took place between former President Barack Obama and Biden in which Obama asked, “What is your path?”

The authors wrote, claiming that Biden thought in his head, “What’s my path? ... What’s your f*cking plan?”