San Antonio Express-News

In 2004, Republican primary voters in Illinois picked businessman Jack Ryan to be their nominee for the U.S. Senate.

A few months later, in the wake of allegations from Ryan’s ex-wife that he had pressured her to accompany him to sex clubs, Ryan dropped out of the race.

The Illinois Republican Party had to pick a replacement candidate. With the Democratic nominee, a young African American state senator named Barack Obama, looking like the runaway favorite in the general election, the GOP went with Alan Keyes, an African American culture warrior who had never lived in Illinois.

In the wake of Keyes’ selection, there were no angry missives from national Republican leaders arguing that the process had been a coup, an affront to democracy. No prominent Republicans fretted that the 234,000 voters who cast ballots for Ryan in the Illinois primary had been disrespected by his withdrawal and the selection of Keyes.

That’s worth remembering as we think about much of the GOP reaction to President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential contest and the rush by Democratic state delegations to anoint his chosen replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Democrat party bosses forced Joe Biden off the ballot,” said U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana. “They invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who went through the small ‘d’ democratic process and chose their nominee for president.”

Stephen Miller, a former adviser to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, said, “They just woke up one morning and said, ‘Never mind. We’re canceling the entire primary. We’re getting rid of our candidate and we’re pretending the election has never even happened and we’re going to let donors handpick a new nominee.’”

Republicans have accused the Democrats of leading a coup, and they got the phrase “Coup-mala Harris” trending on X.

But the Biden/Harris situation is basically the same thing that played out 20 years ago with Ryan and Keyes, albeit at the presidential level and without scandal.

Biden, like Ryan, was feeling pressure from members of his party to drop out of the race. In this case, it was due to concerns about Biden’s advanced age and his ability to carry out an effective campaign.

Ultimately, however, Biden, like Ryan, had the power to stay in the race. He had secured the necessary delegates to win the presidential nomination and no one could take it from him. As with Ryan, the decision to withdraw was voluntary. In the face of that voluntary withdrawal, the party has to find a replacement.

While it’s true that Biden received 14 million votes in the primaries, it’s a stretch to say that the primary process represented democracy in its purest form. No viable Democrats lined up to challenge their party’s incumbent president, so it was never clear how many of those Biden votes were truly an expression of who Democratic voters wanted as their nominee. Beyond this, no Democrats challenged Harris for the nomination after Biden withdrew from the race.

We should also consider that having state delegations pick a presidential nominee is basically the way both parties did things until the 1970s, when primaries started to become bigger factors.

Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt weren’t picked by primary voters. Presidential primaries didn’t exist in those days. They were chosen by delegates at the national conventions.

You can make a compelling case Democratic leaders should have raised concerns about Biden’s age much earlier than they did. That might have persuaded him to bow out of the 2024 race before the primaries began, opening the door to a number of potential nominees.

But you can’t call a politician’s voluntary withdrawal from an election a coup. And you can’t call the necessary replacement of that candidate an affront to democracy.