Officially, the plan to virtually nominate Joe Biden as the Democrats' presidential nominee remains on track. After a couple of weeks of pressure following Biden's non compos mentis reveal at the presidential debate, Democrats seemed to retreat from demands that Biden withdraw. After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the mutiny lost steam, mainly because Trump looked unbeatable since Saturday evening.

Now, however, the momentum to unseat Biden and open the Democrat National Convention has gained steam again. Lo and behold, Adam Schiff has now gone full Amityville Horror too, going to the LA Times to tell Biden to get out:

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who is running for U.S. Senate in California, is calling for President Biden to drop out of the presidential race, he said in an exclusive statement Wednesday to The Times.

Schiff, who is heavily favored to win his Senate race, cited “serious concerns” that Biden can beat former President Trump in November. ...

 “A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the President can defeat Donald Trump in November.”

Schiff said the “choice to withdraw from the campaign is President Biden’s alone,” but that he believes it is time for Biden “to pass the torch” and “secure his legacy of leadership” by allowing another Democrat to beat Trump.

File this under Things You Could Have Said Last November. It's not as if Biden's cognitive decline suddenly occurred on June 27, 2024. As early as April 2022, the White House had the Easter Bunny order Biden away from reporters and attendees at the annual Easter Egg Hunt. Nominating an unelectable candidate isn't a good reason to throw out the democratic results of the party's own primaries, which they rigged to protect Biden from precisely the kind of test of electability that Democrats claim they need now.

The only good reason for this demand would be a lack of competence for the job. And if he's not up to the job, why isn't Schiff demanding that Biden resign immediately?

The official plan is still on to finalize Biden's nomination, but ... even the official plan has hit a road bump today, Politico reports:

In a letter signed by the Democratic National Convention Rules Committee co-chairs Leah Daughtry and Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, the committee says it will “propose a framework for how best to proceed” at a meeting on Friday, but members will not be adopting any rules until next week.

The letter, obtained first by POLITICO, was sent to other members of the rules committee on Wednesday morning. It also says that any voting on the nomination wouldn’t begin until at least Aug. 1, a few days later than published reports had suggested voting could begin.

Originally, the virtual vote would have taken place this week or next. Before the debate, this could have even looked like a good counter-programming strategy against the RNC's convention, or at least a way to distract the media from any show of unity behind Trump. Ironically, during the week when incumbent presidents usually load up on major announcements and initiatives to make the opposition's convention look petty, Democrats can't even arrange a virtual conference call for a procedural vote.

However, organizational incompetence may not explain the delay, either. The Dump Biden movement has not petered out after all. Instead, as Politico Playbook relates this morning, new polling from Democrat analysts again urge the party to reconsider its nomination, arguing that even an open convention fight would be preferable to a Biden-Harris ticket.

And a new ticket would include neither incumbent:

The topline findings from interviews with over 15,000 voters in seven battleground states:

1. “Alternative Democratic candidates run ahead of President Biden by an average of three points across the battleground states. Nearly every tested Democrat performs better than the President. This includes Vice President [KAMALA] HARRIS who runs better than the President (but behind the average alternative).”
2. “Some of the gains are coming from winning undecideds and those previously supporting a third party. However, alternative candidates are also pulling votes from Donald Trump. All candidates continue to hold the Democratic base.”
3. “Voters are looking for a fresh face. Those more closely tied to the current administration perform relatively worse than other tested candidates.” 

In other words: not Kamala Harris.

This tends to make the DNC delay look slightly more ... deliberate. And as Duane Patterson will later cover in detail in a post this afternoon, Joe Biden didn't exactly give any reason to feel confident in his fortitude and cognition yesterday. Biden spoke to the NAACP in Las Vegas, and got lost multiple times while reading off a teleprompter ... again:

President Joe Biden continues his battle with speaking as he attempts to form sentences during his speech to the NAACP.

Anyway. pic.twitter.com/9BKpZe02pw

— Carmine Sabia (@CarmineSabia) July 16, 2024

That's just a taste of what Duane will be covering, so be sure to check back. It does provide more context for the Dump Biden movement's momentum this week. 

Its members are taking the delay as an opportunity to short-circuit the virtual vote entirely. House Democrat Lloyd Doggett publicly demanded that Biden withdraw to thwart the "Trump tyranny." He also called on the DNC to drop plans for a nominating vote ahead of Chicago's festivities and instead open up the convention to new candidates:

"My call for President Biden to step aside remains even more urgent. Our decision must consider the reality of steadily, worsening poll numbers, not just more wishful thinking. The risk of Trump tyranny is so great that we must put forward our strongest nominee."

He adds of the DNC: "Fast-forwarding the nomination process is no way to convince the many unconvinced voters in the growing number of battleground states.  Those so eager to overly protect President Biden ignore his own words inviting anyone questioning his nomination to do so at the Convention."

The only fly in the ointment for Doggett et al is that all these plans for replacing Biden would require Biden to voluntarily withdraw. He's making it clear that he won't go, and a convention effort to force him off the ballot would create a meltdown within the Democrat Party, especiall with progressives at his back. And that's where they are, thanks to Biden's sudden leap to his left on policy:

Since his disastrous debate last month, President Biden has embraced a laundry list of left-wing policy proposals, strong-armed the party's nomination process and still tried to limit spontaneous, unscripted moments.

• It's saved his candidacy — for now. ...

That's partly because of promises that Biden — long a centrist Democrat — has made to his party's progressive wing.

That's why Biden's floundering around on federal rent control -- a topic Duane will also hit n his upcoming post, and I discussed yesterday. He's reaching out to the Squad to save him, and it will probably work. But we can expect all of this chaos to roll into Chicago no matter what -- and when the Biden-Harris ticket goes down to defeat, it might take the radical progressives down with it.