What Happens if Biden, Trump become incapacitated during election season?

Yes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are likely to be the next presidential nominees and no, the Vail Symposium did not need to fly Dr. Elaine Kamarck into town to tell people that.

Kamarck was the Vail Symposium’s first presenter of the winter season Wednesday and used that point to make a joke about her field of expertise, something she calls “the invisible primary” and how it can be a good indicator of who the next presidential nominee will be. The invisible primary begins in the winter before the election year, when candidates start receiving media mentions, raising money, attracting social media followers and appearing in early state polls.

Kamarck is the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and uses those four fields — mentions, money, social media and polls — to track who is leading the invisible primary. In all four of those areas, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are well ahead of any would-be competitors.

That left little to discuss regarding the invisible primary; it’s “a race for No. 2” at this point, Kamarck said, but the No. 2 candidates in both parties could turn out to be important should anything happen to Trump or Biden.

“Let’s suppose we get rolling into the season and, because both of the frontrunners are old guys and things could happen to them — they could die, they could have a stroke, they could be incapacitated in some way or another — the question is: What happens?” Kamarck said. “How do we pick a nominee of each party?”

Kamarck, who is also a member of the Democratic National Committee, then went through the various permutations of what would happen in those scenarios based on when those theoretical incapacitations would happen.

‘Stupid hats’

With Trump and Biden all but decided as their parties’ nominees, the next 12 months could prove to be, in Kamarck’s words, “an incredibly boring year.” And she says she expects that’s what is in store.

But if something happens to one of those men and they can no longer serve, an opposite outcome will ensue, Kamarck said, with the election season suddenly becoming “incredibly exciting.”

In the event of a death or incapacitation of a frontrunner or nominee, the next step in the process depends on when the event happens. And forces are already in motion that could shape the outcome of such an event, as many states determine who will be on the ballot this month.

The Republicans will likely see several candidates pay their fees, submit the required number of signatures and meet the filing deadline to appear on ballots in many states throughout the country, Kamarck said.

For the Democrats, however, this is not the case.

“The Democratic Party might have nobody on the ballot but Joe Biden,” Kamarck said. “So that is the first problem.”

If Biden drops out between the December filing deadline and mid-June, when the primary season wraps up, Democrats might not be receiving a ballot with a viable second option. So what would happen in that case?

“Ground warfare,” Kamarck said, “fought caucus by caucus by caucus in basically somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 caucuses all over the United States.”

Those caucuses will determine who the party’s delegates will be, and those delegates will select the party’s nominee at the convention.

“Those people will, in fact, act in the convention the way people did from 1831 to 1968,” Kamarck said.

The party’s new frontrunners would show up to the convention and speak directly to the delegates, soliciting their votes. And those delegates would arrive at the convention “not as people who wear stupid hats and cheer, but as people who are actually making decisions, who have agency,” Kamarck said. “And that’s something that we haven’t seen in a long, long time.”

For an idea of what that might look like, Kamarck recommends finding videos of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson speaking at the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles.

Should something similar transpire in 2024, “I promise we will all be glued to our televisions,” Kamarck said. “We will not be able to stop watching this; this will be the best reality show to ever happen.”

Hypothetical post-convention tragedy

Of course, with the Republican National Convention scheduled for July, and the Democratic National Convention scheduled for August, that still leaves plenty of time for tragedy to befall the parties’ chosen candidates before the November election.

It’s something Kamarck often thinks about as a member of the Democratic National Committee, for it’s the parties’ national committees who decide the nominees if the candidate drops out after the convention.

If that happens, the chair of the party will call their committee into a special session and the committee members will elect a nominee.

“That would be pretty cool, for me, but I’m not sure it would be pretty cool for the whole country,” Kamarck said. “I think it would be quite a mess with a lot of anxiety going there.”

Kamarck said a common misconception regarding that scenario is that the vice president would automatically become the nominee. But it’s important to remember that candidates are not required to select their running mates before the convention. In 1980, Ronald Reagan selected his running mate, George H. W. Bush, at the convention, not beforehand, and Bush then, eight years later, followed suit in doing the same, selecting Dan Quayle at the convention.

But even if something were to have happened to Bush after becoming the president-elect, there was still no guarantee that Dan Quayle would have become the nominee. In that case, it would have come down to a body that people tend to forget is comprised of real people: the Electoral College.

“Electors to the Electoral College, they are real people, and they have agency in some instances,” Kamarck said.

When the Electoral College meets to certify the president-elect (usually about six weeks after the election takes place,) if the president-elect is no longer able to serve at that point, the Electoral College can pick a president of their choosing, Kamarck said.

“Probably most of them would go into the meeting and they would elect the person on the VP ticket,” Kamarck said. “But there’s no guarantee of that.”

For a fun, fictional scenario of what can happen in that instance, Kamarck recommends the book “The Electors” by Roy Neel, who received an education in this possibility while serving as Vice President Al Gore’s Chief of Staff in the 1990s.

“It’s really fun because (Neel) puts out a scenario which is accurate in law and in constitutional history,” she said.

Finally, if the Electoral College has already met and certified the next president-elect, but that president-elect has not yet been sworn into office, “then the Constitution finally steps in,” Kamarck said. “At that point, the 20th Amendment to the Constitution says very clearly, if the president-elect can not be inaugurated, the vice president should be inaugurated.”

The Vail Symposium’s next event is scheduled to take place Dec. 19 in Avon. That event will examine the nation of Qatar, asking how that country — which is friendly to Iran, a rival of American allies United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and a major funder of Hamas — has become a trustworthy intermediary in disputes where hostile nations will not negotiate directly with each other. The event is scheduled for 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Eagle River Presbyterian Church.