Biden isn't leaving the 2024 race, but how would Democrats pick a nominee if he did?

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley recently suggested, without evidence, that President Joe Biden will soon be leaving the 2024 race in the wake of a scathing new report from prosecutor Robert Hur that described Biden has having notable memory issues, which he denies.

«You can't tell me that everybody in the Democrat Party is not trying to figure out what they do,» Haley claimed on the trail on Monday.

The president has forcefully defended his record and fitness for office, and no high-profile Democrat has called for him to end his reelection campaign, with the vast majority of the party having rallied behind him.

"[Donald] Trump is going on 78, and the president is 81 years old… It's the same. They are old, older folks, that are our choices, and that's what this nation wants," Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman told reporters on a Friday call organized by Biden's campaign. He called Hur's account of Biden's memory a «smear.»

But if the president were to, hypothetically, withdraw from the race or find himself unable to run due to a health-related crisis, high-level Democrats could not simply find someone else to replace him at this point in the election cycle, as Haley or other observers have suggested, according to experts and party rules.

Depending on exactly when Biden were to withdraw from the race, in this scenario, his replacement would first be up to primary voters or, later, Democratic convention delegates or party members themselves.

«It depends on when this disaster happens,» Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and member of the Democratic National Committee, told ABC News.

If Biden were to die «in the middle of June when all the primaries are over, then it is only the delegates that