President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he is abandoning his reelection bid following weeks of mounting pressure from Democratic leaders such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former President Barack Obama. There is no question that Biden would still be in the race if it were not for the coordinated efforts of these elites to push him out. This small group of party figures, along with their billionaire donors, unilaterally upended the party’s 2024 ticket, removing the choice from the party’s primary voters altogether.

To be clear, I am sympathetic to arguments that many of the primary voters who cast their votes for Biden this year and last now support replacing him at the top of the ticket, as several polls in recent weeks have indicated. But the fact remains that any candidate who takes his place, including Vice President Kamala Harris, will have never received a single vote to serve as a presidential candidate. The only people who will have decided that Harris, or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, or California Gov. Gavin Newsom, or whoever it ends up being, is fit to run for president are the same people who decided Biden wasn’t. 

That’s not democracy in action; it’s a coup.

Democratic elites have deprived their voters of any real say in this election cycle and have from the start. The only reason Biden even made it this far was because Democratic leadership made sure he went unchallenged in the primary cycle. And the one Democrat who decided to challenge him anyway, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), was forced out of House leadership.

Make no mistake: An open Democratic National Convention is not a substitution for a robust primary. The voters and constituents to whom the party must be beholden will not get to determine who represents them at the ballot box this November. That decision will be made in backroom deals by, you guessed it, party leadership and influential donors. Starting to see a pattern?

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If voters had had real options in the primary, there is a very good chance Biden would not have won and the party would be in a much stronger position than it is now. As it stands, Democrats are in turmoil, former President Donald Trump is leading in critical swing states by leaps and bounds, and voters are likely so tired of the chaos that they’ll punish Democrats for forcing it on them in the first place.

And I hope they do. The Democratic Party has shown nothing but contempt for the people it’s supposed to serve. Democrats deserve to lose, and if they do they’ll have no one but themselves to blame.