Kamala Harris starts in driver's seat as Biden's 2024 replacement — but it's no guarantee

Now that President Joe Biden has announced he won’t run for re-election, he has endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be his successor as the Democratic presidential nominee.

But it’s not up to him, though Biden’s endorsement is the latest in several very powerful factors leaning Harris’ way.

While Biden won virtually all of the delegates to next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago and was the party’s presumptive nominee, he relinquishes that title by stepping aside and has no direct power over choosing whom those delegates will officially nominate.

That’s because the convention delegates, the people who actually pick the Democratic Party’s nominee, are not bound by any law or party rules to back the candidate they’re pledged to support. They only have to “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”

Follow live updates on Biden’s election withdrawal

Biden can and likely will still hold enormous sway over the delegates who were preparing to nominate him. But those delegates are free to make up their own minds, both in terms of whether to back Harris and who they want to be the party’s vice presidential nominee, too.

At the moment, it’s even unclear exactly when Democrats will meet to select their nominee.

They had been planning to formally nominate Biden during a virtual roll call vote in the first week of August in order to avoid a potential legal issue around a ballot access deadline in Ohio. But the party may now have to change course if Democratic delegates are not prepared to ratify her nomination so quickly.

That process will be governed by the Democratic National Convention rules committee, which has almost 200 members and is chaired by Leah Daughtry, a longtime