As the general-election phase of the 2024 presidential election got underway in earnest, Democratic officials noticed an unexpected administrative problem: President Joe Biden wouldn’t be formally renominated until mid-August, which means he’d miss the filing deadlines to appear on the ballot in Alabama and Ohio.
When this happened in other recent election cycles, the problems were resolved easily: State legislators simply moved the arbitrary deadlines to ensure the major-party nominees appeared on the ballot. With this in mind, no one was especially surprised when policymakers in Alabama did exactly that earlier this month.
Will the Democratic incumbent seriously compete in Alabama? No, but the state’s voters will nevertheless have a choice.
Common sense suggested that officials in Ohio would follow suit. After all, when the Republican Party’s national ticket faced a similar problem in the Buckeye State in 2012 and 2020, state officials simply tweaked their deadline — without preconditions or much of a fuss — and it stood to reason that they’d do so again this year.
Except, that’s not at all what happened. NBC News reported:
The Democratic National Committee plans to hold a “virtual roll call” to nominate President Joe Biden before the party’s August convention — a tactic meant to spare Biden the increasing danger of being left off Ohio’s general election ballot. Biden’s campaign and the DNC announced the move Tuesday as the Legislature here opened a special session Republican Gov. Mike DeWine ordered to resolve the issue.
The original plan was for the GOP-led legislature to do the same thing it did in 2012 and 2020, which is also the same thing Alabama legislators did earlier this month. Ohio Republicans, however, chose not to.
The state’s Republican governor then called a special session to resolve the mess. “This is a ridiculous — this is an absurd situation,” DeWine recently declared.
It’d be quite easy to approve a fix, but GOP legislators are approaching the matter in a transactional way: The Republican-led House and Senate will allow Biden’s name to appear on the 2024 ballot, they’ve said, but only in exchange for unrelated changes to state election laws.
Democrats “will land this plane on our own,” DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison said in a statement. “Through a virtual roll call, we will ensure that Republicans can’t chip away at our democracy through incompetence or partisan tricks and that Ohioans can exercise their right to vote for the presidential candidate of their choice.” This will apparently ensure that Ohio voters can choose between the major-party nominees, though GOP leaders in the state Capitol are reportedly planning to proceed with their unrelated changes to state election laws, anyway. There is some irony to the circumstances. It wasn’t long ago when Donald Trump’s eligibility was challenged on 14th Amendment grounds, and Republicans were hysterical about the Democrats who believed the former president shouldn’t be on the ballot. And yet, here we are watching GOP officials in Ohio make the case that they’ll only allow Biden onto the ballot if they receive a ransom. Is it any wonder that Democratic officials got creative to circumvent lawmakers in Columbus?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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