That time Democrats talked about dumping their nominee

A look back at when Hillary Clinton had pneumonia

Sometimes we are doomed to repeat history even if we do learn from it. As you may recall, Hillary Clinton attended a 9/11 memorial event in New York City in September 2016, shortly after she’d been named the Democratic presidential nominee. Getting into a car afterwards, Clinton stumbled and began to fall. This was caught on camera. It was soon revealed that she was suffering from pneumonia. And what made this worse was that Donald Trump had been telling voters for weeks that Clinton looked ill, and this only confirmed his accusations.

Rather than restate things, I’m going to quote liberally from Donna Brazile’s 2017 book Hacks, because the perspective of the acting head of the DNC is really quite appropriate here. You may be surprised how familiar this all sounds.

First, Brazile comes to grips with the possibility that the party’s nominee may not be physically up to the task, and wrestles with her own power to remedy the situation:

[T]he Democratic Party charter gave me some power they could not control: the chair of the party has the ability to replace the candidate. I had not seriously considered doing it but, after this stumbling Sunday, many others in the party were.

Donald Fowler Sr., Donnie’s dad and a former chair of the DNC, was quoted in Politico insisting that the DNC should call the officers of the party together to develop a contingency plan immediately. He wanted us to name her replacement just in case. “Now is the time for all good political leaders to come to the aid of their party,” he said.

Brazile is uncomfortable with this conversation but sees it as maybe a way of solving several problems:

Amid this tornado, I thought not just about Hillary’s health but about her anemic campaign…. Perhaps changing the candidate was a chance to win this thing, to change the playing field in a way that would send Donald Trump scrambling and unable to catch up.

Trump had done things that for a different candidate would have ended his campaign, and yet he sailed through the outrage with that smug and condescending grin on his face. He was someone who had upended the rules, thumbed his nose at the keepers of decency and standards, and made his supporters feel great while he was doing it.

Then Brazile wrestles with the issues of personal obligations, coalition management, and electability:

My thoughts turned personal. Replacing the candidate was a bold move, but it was one that Hillary would never forgive me for. How could I do that to her? She had been my friend for decades, and the women of the Democratic Party, the women of the whole country, had been waiting nearly a hundred years for this chance to elect a woman as president. I thought of what Madeleine Albright said at a campaign rally in February, that there was a “special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” She had said that before, but it felt powerful to me that evening. If I worked to replace Hillary as the candidate, more than Hillary would scorn me. Most of my women friends would, too.

But what if we lost? What if we lost to Donald Trump? I would never be able to live with that.

Suddenly word gets out that Brazile is considering coming up with a way of replacing the nominee. Alternate candidates begin offering their names, including Joe Biden!

The next morning, Monday, September 12, I snuck into the office through a back door. Reporters were camped out on the steps of the DNC. Journalist David Shuster had reported that a meeting on the future of Hillary's candidacy was imminent, although I had not called one. When I got to my desk I found I was the most popular person in the Democratic Party.

First I heard from Joe Biden’s chief of staff, asking if I had time to speak with the vice president a little later that day. Gee, I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about? I got an email from Martin O’Malley, whose campaign never really did get off the ground. Once you run, though, you get that bug. I was guessing he just wanted to let me know that he was still breathing and in very good health. I got a call from Jeff Weaver, Bernie’s campaign manager, asking if I had a moment to chat with Bernie. Of course I did. I always had time for a chat with Bernie.

Brazile admits she thought a lot about a replacement ticket, rather favored a Joe Biden / Cory Booker combination, but ultimately decided she couldn’t go through with dumping Hillary Clinton. And of course, a day or so later, the point was moot; Clinton was on the mend.

We can speculate about how a Biden/Booker ticket would have done against Trump and Pence that year, but of course that contest wouldn’t have been held in a vacuum. It would have happened after the DNC fired the first woman presidential nominee in history for having a curable short term illness quite literally behind closed doors. Maybe that ticket would have done better, or maybe it would have been the ticket of a demoralized party, in which many political active women felt completely betrayed and lost a lot of their enthusiasm for voting. In other words, the replacement ticket could have done considerably worse.