WI: Barack Obama Drops Joe Biden From the Democratic National Ticket During 2012 DNC

If this counts as current politics, could it be moved to Chat? I wasn't sure because my POD takes place in the early 2010s.

I remember back in early 2011 there being speculation that then President Barack Obama would drop then Vice President Joe Biden from the Democratic National Ticket and replace him with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for no specific reason. Let's say some sexual harassment scandal(s) breaks out against Biden in early 2011, and the circumstances are bad enough for Obama to view him as a liability. Obama doesn't ask Biden to resign immediately, but he also doesn't ask him to run for re-election as his vice presidential nominee, instead nominating Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. How differently would the US Presidential Election of 2012 have gone if Biden was expected to leave in disgrace on January 20th, 2013? Would there be a falling out between Biden and Obama over this decision? Is such a scandal an advantage for Republican nominee Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to capitalize on? Does Romney still select Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, or does he select a woman, such as New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte? If the Obama-Clinton Ticket win in 2012, how differently would Obama's second term have gone? I imagine there would have been some degree of tension between Vice President Hillary Clinton and her successor as Secretary of State John Kerry. Would an Obama-Clinton victory in 2012 strengthen or weaken Clinton's position to run for President in 2016? Would Former Vice President Joe Biden challenge Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016 instead of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders?
 
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I think it would strengthen Clinton's ability to run in 2016, regardless of whether she actually won or not; it would be much easier to associate herself with Obama's legacy and manage to make a convincing argument out of that. Now, whether they would win or not is a different story. I don't think that vice presidential scandals really play a key role in swaying the people, and opposite Obama is still a gaffe ridden Mitt Romney. I think the Democratic Party manages to hold on to the Oval Office by the skin of its teeth, though HRC might have an easier time actually winning the 2016 election.
 
It's a closer election, but if Romney campaigns the same way as OTL, Obama still wins.

Romney was going to lose in 2012 barring some massive mistake on Obama's part. Clinton was widely admired in 2012, so when all is said and done I don't think ditching Biden would have that much of an impact. Obama still wins, maybe by not as big a margin but he wins a second term.

2016 is a different story. Without the controversies that followed Clinton as a private citizen, and with a closer association with a popular incumbent, she probably wins.
 
trump wins a few more electoral votes and the PV gap is 3 million instead of 6 million for HRC. Why? the gop's establishment would have 2.5 years of raging against HRC already whipped up by the time turmp comes on the scene so he's in a better place.
 
2016 is a different story. Without the controversies that followed Clinton as a private citizen, and with a closer association with a popular incumbent, she probably wins.

Yeah and the GOP would be radically different without president Trump. Possibly with a more libertarian/moderate direction overall. (Alias the outlook from 2012).

Of course the 2018 Senate Class would be a democartic bloodbath and their would be no blue wave in the house.
 
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Yeah and the GOP would be radically different without president Trump. Possibly with a more libertarian/moderate direction overall. (Alias the outlook from 2012).

Of course the 2018 Sneate Class would be a democartic bloodbath and their would be no blue wave in the house.

I mostly agree, but remember that the mods don't like it when we bring in current politics. That belongs in chat.
 
Yeah and the GOP would be radically different without president Trump. Possibly with a more libertarian/moderate direction overall. (Alias the outlook from 2012).

Of course the 2018 Sneate Class would be a democartic bloodbath and their would be no blue wave in the house.
Now now, why would they do that? The macron-romney-clinton niche is already taken up by the democrats. If you want a GOP that's a hybrid of centrist/european type "left libertarian"/neocon interventionist you need a POD pre-Bill Clinton imo.
 
I like the notion that Hillary as an active pol, a VP, is not going to receive as much partisan bludgeoning from the GOP than she did as a retired SoS whose intentions on 2016 were assumed, but not 100%. Yeah, nah. :D I guess you could assume Benghazi is butterflied, but then you could do that with any early 2012 POD. Servergate will still be in full flow.

I think dropping Biden (I'm ignoring the OP's scenario, because I don't think you need to invent anything to make that happen) vastly increases the chances of a Bernie nomination. Seriously. There's no restraint on Biden from his bestie The Chief to defer to Hillary; I think even as a still-administration 2013-2015 SoS he likely runs, and he's only going to damage Clinton. Analogous to us injecting another establishment big hitter in 1984 degrading Mondale in the big industrial states while Hart still picks up the Yuppie vote.
 
Romney was going to lose in 2012 barring some massive mistake on Obama's part. Clinton was widely admired in 2012, so when all is said and done I don't think ditching Biden would have that much of an impact. Obama still wins, maybe by not as big a margin but he wins a second term.

2016 is a different story. Without the controversies that followed Clinton as a private citizen, and with a closer association with a popular incumbent, she probably wins.
Clinton was thought of as someone whose political race was run in 2012, which is part of the admiration.
 
I like the notion that Hillary as an active pol, a VP, is not going to receive as much partisan bludgeoning from the GOP than she did as a retired SoS whose intentions on 2016 were assumed, but not 100%. Yeah, nah. :D I guess you could assume Benghazi is butterflied, but then you could do that with any early 2012 POD. Servergate will still be in full flow.

I think dropping Biden (I'm ignoring the OP's scenario, because I don't think you need to invent anything to make that happen) vastly increases the chances of a Bernie nomination. Seriously. There's no restraint on Biden from his bestie The Chief to defer to Hillary; I think even as a still-administration 2013-2015 SoS he likely runs, and he's only going to damage Clinton. Analogous to us injecting another establishment big hitter in 1984 degrading Mondale in the big industrial states while Hart still picks up the Yuppie vote.

I think your Biden running scenario makes a lot of sense, to the point where there's probably no way this switch happens without the complete backing of both Clinton and Biden. Obama doesn't want to be responsible for creating a rift in the party, and all the narratives would lead straight back to him. So actually I think the OP is onto something by creating a little scenario here. Health problems work, too. Something to get Biden to step off the stage and into a nice Rehoboth beach house for the rest of his days.

But I also think you're right that, however it's done, it sets off the circumstances that led to Bernie's run several years earlier. No matter what, this looks like an attempt to anoint a successor, and anti-establishment faction is going to be all the more fired up. It might be enough to peel off some other possible candidates besides Bernie. If people are expressing real reserve or even anger at the prospect of an engineered succession as far back as 2014 or earlier, someone's likely to take advantage of that. Especially once we see how the midterms shake out.

Honestly I don't know that there's all that much more the GOP could do to get ready to oppose Clinton in 2016. It's hard to imagine what that looks like. If you're already spending a billion man-hours on a campaign to oppose a candidate and you want to spend more, you start to run into diminishing returns pretty quickly. Two billion hours isn't likely to win you three million more votes. I doubt it wins you an extra hundred thousand.
 
Obama dumps HRC and picks Sherrod Brown, wins handily, and in Ohio, Kasich goes full Blagojevich and sells Brown’s Senate seat. The general assembly picks a supervillain as a compromise, Kasich goes to jail, and the supervillain (not Trump; maybe a lesser-known Wexner) beats HRC and turns into Mr. Burns.

Hey, why the hell not?
 
I think your Biden running scenario makes a lot of sense, to the point where there's probably no way this switch happens without the complete backing of both Clinton and Biden. Obama doesn't want to be responsible for creating a rift in the party, and all the narratives would lead straight back to him. So actually I think the OP is onto something by creating a little scenario here. Health problems work, too. Something to get Biden to step off the stage and into a nice Rehoboth beach house for the rest of his days.

Big O has to be re-elected before he can comfortably indulge himself thinking about a successor, or party ructions. Or anything like that. I think that's the route you get this happening; Obama looking in a much worse shape around the time this decision is being made. (So a flap, if not structural impairment. But a flap big enough to need to shake up the race, McCain/Mondale-like. A 'We need Bubba giving his big speech about the economy at the DNC'-style thing.)

It's more plausible given what we now know about Obama later going on to have a preference (Though fk knows why) for her later on IMO. I don't think you need Biden to go Full Trump for this to happen.
 
Big O has to be re-elected before he can comfortably indulge himself thinking about a successor, or party ructions. Or anything like that. I think that's the route you get this happening; Obama looking in a much worse shape around the time this decision is being made. (So a flap, if not structural impairment. But a flap big enough to need to shake up the race, McCain/Mondale-like. A 'We need Bubba giving his big speech about the economy at the DNC'-style thing.)

It's more plausible given what we now know about Obama later going on to have a preference (Though fk knows why) for her later on IMO. I don't think you need Biden to go Full Trump for this to happen.

Well he doesn't need to go full T-word to be considered a losing proposition on a Democratic ticket within that same category of behavior, either. And health concerns would be another very valid avenue. But I don't think you're wrong; if Obama is doing this because he's in that much trouble and thinks he needs it, then it's not a completely crazy decision to make.

Depending on the circumstances that make him look vulnerable, passing the torch to Clinton could then proceed more smoothly than OTL or more rocky. There are a set of outcomes where she looks like she saved the ticket in 2012, a set where she looks like a drag, and a set where no narrative dominates and people draw their own conclusions. Corresponding to that, you could have a cake-walk to the nomination in 2016, a loss/much harder fight, or something similar to OTL. Which is a long way of saying, you'd probably still need to lay out a bit of a scenario to determine what exactly is going to happen.
 
I agree, there's a range of narratives that could come out of that. Though I don't think a media/Beltway narrative of Isn't She Lovely necessarily helps her. That's a recipe for 2008 complacency, IMO.

And a lot of her supporters IOTL believed in 2014 that she was already an electoral titan, becuz OMG look at those numbers for a retired SoS. Therefore displaying a cruel unfamiliarity with the reality that ex-politicians are the most popular ones, and their status is highly subject to the ex part remaining constant...
 
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