Which means that if the Democratic Party is destined for a reckoning with its ticket — as now seems increasingly likely — it will have to come during the next set of presidential primaries. Come 2024, Joe Biden will be nearly 82 years old — nearly a decade older than any president has ever been at any point in any term — while Harris, with four years of cackling ineptitude under her belt, will likely have become an even more septic proposition than she presently is. Given the threat of a returning Donald Trump or an “even worse than Trump!” figure such as Governor DeSantis, it isn’t too tough to imagine the drumbeat from the have-to-win-this-most-important-ever-election crowd growing so loud that switching to an alternative, unsullied set of nominees seems like the most prudent choice.

It is less easy, however, to imagine this actually working. Aside from the obvious challenge of explaining to their identity politics-obsessed base why it is just so inspiring! to have Kamala Harris as VP, but it wouldn’t be at all inspiring to have her continue in the role (or become the president herself), a Democratic Party that sought to substitute in another set of candidates would be attempting to sidestep one of the ironclad rules of modern politics: that when an incumbent president is subject to a serious challenge during the primary, that president goes on to lose the general. It happened in 1992, after Pat Buchanan took on George H. W. Bush; it happened in 1980, after Ted Kennedy took on Jimmy Carter; it happened in 1976, after Ronald Reagan took on Gerald Ford; and, in 1968, the mere prospect of it happening forced LBJ to retire and helped Hubert Humphrey to lose.