President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he is abandoning his reelection bid following weeks of mounting pressure from Democratic leaders such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former President Barack Obama. There is no question that Biden would still be in the race if it were not for the coordinated efforts of these elites to push him out. This small group of party figures, along with their billionaire donors, unilaterally upended the party’s 2024 ticket, removing the choice from the party’s primary voters altogether.

To be clear, I am sympathetic to arguments that many of the primary voters who cast their votes for Biden this year and last now support replacing him at the top of the ticket, as several polls in recent weeks have indicated. But the fact remains that any candidate who takes his place, including Vice President Kamala Harris, will have never received a single vote to serve as a presidential candidate. The only people who will have decided that Harris, or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, or California Gov. Gavin Newsom, or whoever it ends up being, is fit to run for president are the same people who decided Biden wasn’t.