What is a blitz primary?

The phrase “blitz primary” has been flying around Democratic Party circles this week as concerns over President Joe Biden’s fitness to serve a second term refuse to die down in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump late last month.

Since the president’s hoarse and frail appearance on the CNN debate stage in Atlanta on June 27, which the White House attributed to a cold and exhaustion from his recent overseas travels, his party has been in panic mode, holding frantic discussions about whether Biden can still be depended upon to beat Trump in November or whether he should drop out and make way for a younger successor.

A blitz primary, as proposed by Rosa Brooks and Ted Dintersmith, a Georgetown University law professor and venture capitalist respectively, would be a means of realizing that end.

The label simply refers to a swiftly organized selection process to find a replacement candidate to occupy the party’s presidential ticket in the incumbent’s stead, a far faster and slicker alternative to actual primary season, which takes months and sees the states vote one-by-one in interminably plodding fashion.

Biden, of course, won the conventional Democratic primaries at a canter earlier this year but was barely challenged by anyone other than Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips and kooky self-help guru Marianne Williamson and did not escape the process untainted, suffering a huge protest vote in Michigan in late February when 100,000 people marked “uncommitted” on their ballot papers in opposition to his handling of events in the Middle East.

Any primary at this stage would, by necessity, need to be executed in time to reach its climax at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago –