These 4 Democrats could replace Joe Biden if he drops out of 2024 race

The four names most mentioned as potential replacements to President Joe Biden on the 2024 presidential ticket have had plenty of interactions with Texas over the last few years.

From past presidential campaigns, political fundraisers and public policy events, the top names have all visited the state and sounded like they were warming up in the bullpen in case Biden steps aside.

READ MORE: Here are 3 takeaways for Texas voters from the first Trump-Biden presidential debate

While Biden has refused to pull out of the race, the pressure to do so has only increased in the days since his troubling debate performance where he stumbled over words, lost his train of thought and looked older than in past public appearances. On Wednesday, he reassured staffers from his reelection campaign that “no one’s pushing me out.”

But if Biden were to withdraw, here are the most likely replacements and a Texas Take on each of them from the last four years.

Like the other names that have been floated, Harris, 59, has brushed off the idea of running for the White House and has stood firm behind Biden.

During a CNN interview after the debate, the vice president and former U.S. senator from California said he had a bad start to the debate but suggested some pundits were already overreacting.

But given her role in the White House, it did not take long for her name to come up as a possible replacement. Her name is already on the ballot as the vice president.

Harris has had plenty of Texas interactions and has had a high profile on one of the most important issues on the minds of Texas voters: the border. Early in his administration, Biden tapped Harris to lead the messaging on the border, and she traveled to Central America to dig into the “root causes” of migration. But when border crossings soared in the next two years, Harris became a target of the right for not making much progress.

Harris campaigned frequently in Houston in 2019 when she was running for president and has made several trips to Texas since. In late 2023, Harris was once again in Houston, holding a discussion session about how the Biden administration was helping expand health care to underserved communities. 

And later at a political fundraiser, she took aim at Texas abortion laws in a pitch to Democratic donors to stand by the Biden-Harris campaign as they were headed into 2024.

“This election is going to be about a fight for our democracy and all that we hold dear,” she said that night in the River Oaks. “None of us can afford to passively sit by and watch what we have been witnessing happen without being active and taking a stand to fight for all that we hold dear.”

She specifically talk about an attack on “the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body” being on the ballot in the 2024 presidential election. 

It didn’t end there, later Harris weighed in again on Texas restrictive abortion laws that ban the procedure under almost any condition, including in cases of rape and incest. After the Houston Chronicle reported an increase of raped women giving birth in Texas, Harris reached out to the Chronicle to respond.

“Women across our nation should not be subject to extreme and oppressive laws that dictate what they can do with their bodies, including and especially after surviving a violent crime,” Harris said.

Like Harris, the Michigan governor has been quick to make clear she’s not jockeying to replace Biden.

“I am proud to support Joe Biden as our nominee and I am behind him 100 percent in the fight to defeat Donald Trump,” she told Politico in a statement after the publication speculated that she would be a top potential choice.

Whitmer, 52, was just in Texas last month speaking to the Texas Democratic Convention, where she gave a strong defense of the Biden administration, highlighting their work on infrastructure and bringing down the price of insulin, among other issues.

“In four years, they brought America back from a deadly pandemic and out of a deep recession,” she told Democrats in El Paso about the Biden administration’s victories.

But Whitmer, who became governor in 2019, also deftly outlined her own Democratic credentials, telling the crowd about how she was responding to threats to overturn Roe v Wade even before it happened and by signing legislation after to provide more protections for women.

“We repealed our 1931 ban on abortion and we enshrined protections for IVF, birth control and surrogacy into our state law,” she told the Democratic crowd in El Paso. 

Biden’s transportation secretary was fast to tell MSNBC interviewers on Friday that he would not support efforts to remove Biden from the ticket in 2024.

“Joe Biden is our candidate and our president because he is the best person to lead this country forward,” he said.

But the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and 2020 presidential candidate keeps getting mentioned on lists as a potential replacement should it get to that point. And he’s been in Texas quite a bit, not just during his 2020 presidential campaign, but also for other speeches and ribbon cuttings tied to his position with the Biden administration.

In April, Buttigieg, 42, was in Dallas touting the administration’s infrastructure program, and before that he was in Houston touting port improvements that he said were a key part to the rebuilding of America’s manufacturing base.

But beyond being a cabinet official, what keeps Buttigieg name on the short list is what made him a surprise 2020 president candidates. As a former mayor from a red state, Buttigieg has been comfortable making the Biden administration’s case to Fox News and other conservative audiences in a way few other Democrats can. 

During a speech before the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin in 2022 he touted the ability to reach Republican audiences and at least make his case to them, even if it doesn’t always mean he’s going to win them over.

It had echoes to his 2020 presidential campaign.

“We’re going to need a president who prioritizes unifying the American people and bringing us together,” Buttigieg said during a speech in Houston, right before the Iowa Democratic caucus that he would narrowly win over U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

On Thursday night, Newson was quick to defend Biden saying it was “unhelpful” and “unneccessary” for people to talk about replacing him.

“You don’t turn your back because of one performance,” the California governor and former San Francisco mayor told MSNBC.

But it is easy to see why Newsom’s name has come up. He’s not only the leader of the biggest Democratic state in America, but he’s also spent time over the last two years jousting with Republican governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas.

He put up billboards in Florida countering that state’s abortion laws and in Texas took out full page newspapers ads, including in Houston, where he said California had done more to counter gun violence than Abbott.

It’s hardly Newsom’s first scrum with Texas. He blasted Abbott’s border security tactics during a speech at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin in 2022 and has continually claimed that his state’s tax rates, while tougher on the rich, are better for working class people than Texas.

Following that same Texas speech in 2022, Newsom, 56, was pressed by Politico about why he wasn’t challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination.

“Why? Out of reverence for the incumbent president of the United States, Joe Biden,” he said. “Out of respect for one of my oldest friends, former Californian and colleague, Kamala Harris. You just begin with those two, and you move on to, I’m focused on other things.”

This story includes material from the Associated Press.