Why So Many Republicans Believe Biden Won’t Be The Democratic Nominee

Leslie Dellinger, a 41-year-old entrepreneur from York, South Carolina, wants to see Donald Trump defeat the Democratic presidential nominee this November — she’s just not convinced the nominee will be Joe Biden.

Instead, Dellinger — one of the few thousand people who showed up to a Donald Trump rally the day before the South Carolina primary — believes Democrats may swap Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris, who Dellinger says is “not even a little bit qualified” to be president.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to remove him and put in Kamala Harris and have her run,” she said.

Talk to almost any Republican at a grassroots event and you’ll hear some version of this theory: that Democrats will end up nominating someone besides Biden at their August national convention. Some believe there’s even a nominee-in-waiting to replace the 81-year-old president — who hasn’t suggested he intends to step aside, despite mounting concerns about his age and health. Their predictions for who this person might be range from the plausible — California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who many see as a likely candidate in 2028 — to the totally ridiculous, like former President Barack Obama.

This conspiracy, though, has some grounding in the real concerns that Democrats whisper about in private, and the grim warnings beginning to surface in polls of the election eight months away. A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll released Thursday found Trump beating Biden in seven key swing states that helped Biden defeat Trump in 2020. Respondents largely found Biden to be too old, while many considered Trump, the likely GOP nominee, to be dangerous.

Trump has helped to legitimize the notion that he won’t be facing Biden in November, even as polls show