The Democratic Party's presidential replacement process was quickly called into question by prominent tech voices like Elon Musk, David Sacks and more.
Sacks, co-founder of Craft Ventures and a supporter of Donald Trump, said the Democratic Party launched a "coup" on Biden. After Biden dropped out of the race, the president endorsed Harris, and several other major Democrats followed suit.
"President-elect Biden was in no danger of being deposed on January 6, 2021, but he was actually deposed as Democratic Party nominee on July 21, 2024, despite his repeated insistence that he didn’t want to go. This wasn’t a voluntary abdication; it was a political hit, with Nancy Pelosi as the button. That’s a coup in my book," Sacks wrote on social media.
Musk asked on his social media platform, X, "shouldn't the nominee be decided by a party vote?"
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Others have also taken issue with how Harris quickly rose to power after Biden dropped out, including New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
Stephens, in a column headlined "Democrats Deserved a Contest, Not a Coronation," wrote, "The one thing the Democratic Party is not supposed to be is anti-democratic — a party in which insiders select the nominee from the top down, not the bottom up."
"It’s also a recipe for failure. The whole point of a competitive process, even a truncated one, is to discover unsuspected strengths, which is how Obama was able to best Clinton in 2008, and to test for hidden weakness, which is how Harris flamed out as a candidate the last time, before even reaching the Iowa caucus. If there’s evidence that she’s a better candidate now than she was then, she should be given the chance to prove it," he said.
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Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy also took issue with Democrats hand-picking their nominee, after millions of voters supported Biden. He posted about the issue on social media several times.
"There is no way Kamala would have been the nominee if Joe Biden dropped out before the Democratic Primary and had to run vs other candidates," Portnoy wrote in a post on X. "The people who control Joe also control Kamala and just subverted democracy with pure election fraud and theft."
Portnoy said in another video posted to social media that Harris was not a viable competitor for the nomination in 2020.
"She was so disliked and such a bad candidate, she didn’t make it through the first f---ing primary, and I guess she’s never going to have to get a real vote, because she’s been handpicked on purpose by the people who have been running Joe for the last two to three years, and now they’re going to try to run her and trot her out," he said.
Actor Rob Schneider called out the Democratic Party on social media over the nominating process as well.
"Democrats do every single thing they claim the other side is doing…," he wrote on social media, referencing the party's many references to a "threat to Democracy."
Eric Weinstein pointed to a popular argument from Democrats like Biden, who repeatedly told his voters that "democracy is on the ballot."
