As news broke that President Joe Biden would exit the 2024 presidential election, Republicans cried foul.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) criticized Biden’s decision to step down, claiming the Democrats might “run into legal impediments” if Biden isn’t at the top of the ticket. On ABC, he said: “It would be wrong, and I think unlawful, in accordance to some of these states’ rules, for a handful of people to go in a back room and switch it out because they don’t like the candidate any longer. That’s not how this is supposed to work.”
HuffPost pointed out that Johnson failed to cite a legal doctrine to back this up.
And so far, there’s not much of a legal case to be made by Republicans, as Biden had not been officially selected as the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee.
There doesn’t seem to be anything in the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1, concerning presidential elections, that is violated by Biden stepping aside. There’s nothing in the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would make this illegal, either.
States have also not printed their ballots on which presidential candidates’ names will appear. Antonio Fins with the Palm Beach Post, as posted on Yahoo, noted that Florida has its primary for non-presidential races on Aug. 20. Several other states similarly conduct their non-presidential primaries in August or September, according to the Federal Election Commission.
This means that general election ballots simply cannot be printed for many more weeks, as those states don’t yet know who will have qualified for their general elections.
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This unexpectedly shorter presidential election season — at least between the two new opponents in Donald Trump and Kamala Harris — may seem strange, even unmooring to many Americans, particularly for anyone who’s of a Generation X, millennial or Generation Z vintage.
But, in fact, the 2024 U.S. presidential election appears destined to in part resemble American presidential elections before the 1970s, when national nominating conventions were more than made-for-television formalities, where a party’s “presumptive” nominee had — for better or for worse — not been determined weeks or months earlier.
Before the modern nomination process began in 1972, when statewide electoral contests began to eclipse state conventions as the “primary” means of selecting delegates, candidates were selected at national party conventions.
Starting in 1856, the first year there was both a Republican and a Democratic Party in the same election cycle, there have been 86 national party conventions held or about to be held.
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Over the years, only three of these party conventions took place in May. Thirty have been conducted in June, 29 in July, 21 in August and three in September.
For conventions in August and September, late in the game, Republicans outnumber Democrats for holding these August and September meetings, 13-11. This year’s Democratic Party convention in Chicago, scheduled to begin Aug. 19, would be within these normal time limits.
With the Trump vs. Harris matchup beginning just 106 days removed from Election Day on Nov. 5, the United States will also walk a small step closer to other advanced democracies, which tend to have shorter election seasons.
I analyzed the most recent presidential and parliamentary elections of 20 different advanced democracies from Europe, North America, Asia, Oceania and the Middle East. These countries include France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, Australia and Austria.
The average number of days for an election is 75.8 days.
If Biden’s replacement is formally chosen on Aug. 22, 2024, the final day of the Democratic National Convention, it will be 75 days until the election.
When Speaker Johnson claims, “That’s not how this is supposed to work,” what is happening in 2024 is a different process than the endless election cycles that have recently dominated the American process that often exhaust the average American voter.
That does not make it illegal.
HuffPost reports that the Heritage Foundation, behind Project 2025, which Donald Trump both has never heard of and also manages to strongly disagree with, will likely be filing lawsuits in several states over the change in candidates.
Sadly, filing endless litigation over elections does seem to be a more disturbing trend in modern presidential elections in America.
But from a constitutional standpoint, as well as an historical one, little seems to stand in the way of a Trump-Harris presidential race — quick as it may be by modern political standards.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.
