The Courier-Journal (Louisville)
Kentucky megadonor wants Joe Biden out
Christy Brown in favor of Dem ‘blitz primary’
One of Kentucky’s wealthiest Democratic givers is joining the ranks of party mega-donors across the country who are pleading for President Joe Biden to step aside as the nominee in the 2024 election.
Philanthropist Christy Brown said she has long admired the 81-year-old incumbent, who has for weeks been resisting calls from within his party to quit the race.
But in a new op-ed released Sunday, she said Biden cannot overcome dogged questions about his age and capacity after an abysmal June 27 debate performance against former President Donald Trump.
“For sure the debate brought all of the realities to a fore for me,” Brown told USA TODAY/The Courier Journal in an exclusive interview Saturday.
“To be perfectly honest, it’s embarrassing I guess, as a 77-year-old, that I really had not given adequate reflection to the age question as I now realize that I should have.”
Democrats, she said, should hold a “blitz primary” should President Biden give up the nomination.
Brown, heiress to the Brown-Forman Corp. fortune, is a fundraising juggernaut, having poured millions into local, state and national Democratic campaigns along with other liberal causes.
During the 2023 gubernatorial race, for instance, Brown helped rake in more than $1 million for Gov. Andy Beshear, which shattered the state’s single event record, according to Kentucky campaign finance records.
Brown’s call is bound to spotlight stark contrasts within the Democratic Party over what to do with Biden’s candidacy with less than 115 days until the election.
More than 4 in 10 Democrats − 41% − said Biden should be replaced as its standard bearer, according to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll this month.
Political observers have noted how the national intra-party war has fallen
along class and racial lines with mostly white donors, strategists and pundits demanding Biden exit the race.
The president has lashed out at those critics and cast them as party “elites” while leaning into his core supporters, particularly within the African-American community.
“Have him step down because of a debate? A lot of people have messed up debates,” 61-year-old Bowling Green, resident Johnalma Barnett, who is Black, said in an interview.
“I’d rather look at what he’s done as president,” she added. “I could care less about the debate.”
Other big-name Ky. Democratic fundraisers doubting Biden
Brown isn’t the only deep-pocketed Democrat with Bluegrass State roots nervous about the president’s chances.
In separate op-eds this month, actors George Clooney and Ashley Judd, who were born and grew up in Kentucky respectively, have urged Biden to bow out due to trepidation at Trump returning to power.
Clooney’s column went as far as to name-drop Beshear as one option the party should look toward for a potential replacement.
Brown told USA TODAY/The Courier Journal she spoke with Judd recently about other matters and hadn’t communicated with Clooney, who was born in Lexington, about the nomination. She said her call for a new nominee shouldn’t be looked at as an attempt to catapult Beshear into the White House either.
“I really am not equipped to compare his skill sets with whoever else could be in that pool,” she said.
“I would like to see him mature his skills in his home state, for sure,” Brown added. “I am very pleased that he is continuing to serve as governor of Kentucky now, and I would like to see him continue that and mature his skills.”
A spokesman for Beshear’s PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, Beshear denied having conversations with the White House regarding his potential candidacy — but he has not outright rejected the possibility of stepping up to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Beshear parried questions about the prospect by saying he would only leave Kentucky’s governorship if he felt like he “could help the Commonwealth even more through some other opportunity.”
But, asked if his wife would make a good first lady, he quipped, “Wow. If she was ever asked, she’d make an absolutely fantastic one because there’s nothing she can’t do.”
A ‘blitz primary’ to replace Biden
Instead of backing a preferred heir to the 2024 nomination, Brown and Tod Sedgwick, a former U.S. ambassador to the Slovak Republic, who co-authored the Sunday op-ed, are endorsing the idea of a “blitz primary” at the Democratic National Committee convention in August.
The unconventional strategy — hatched by Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks and venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith — would involve Biden backing out this month, according to a memo shared with USA TODAY/ The Courier Journal.
It would recruit “six dynamic young leaders” with weekly forums hosted by cultural icons such as Oprah, Tom Hanks and Taylor Swift. The winner, according to the memo, would be chosen by DNC delegates through rankedchoice voting before the Aug. 19 convention in Chicago.
“Democrats need a candidate who can energize America, and turn back this threat,” Dintersmith said in a July 10 post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Quite regrettably, Joe Biden can’t. A “blitz primary” will galvanize America, produce a dynamic nominee, and save our democracy.”
Brown and Sedgwick, who served with Biden in the Obama administration, said they would ultimately support the president should he stay in the race but that Democrats need to be bolder to defeat Trump.
“It’s exciting how deep the bench is within the Democratic Party, and I think that we the powers to be ... all need to be looking carefully at all of those folks, and create a pool,” she said.
‘Loud mouths’: Rank-and-file Dems back Biden
Former U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, who represented Louisville in Congress for almost two decades, said it’s a toss-up when it comes to ditching or keeping the president as the nominee.
“Either path is risky,” he said. “If you twisted my arm, I would prefer to see another candidate.”
As far as a so-called blitz primary idea, Yarmuth said there are “pluses and minuses,” chief among them is alienating an important part of the Democratic base if Vice President Kamala Harris is not chosen to replace Biden.
But on the pro side, Yarmuth said, “I think the excitement ... would be a huge positive and anyone who would come out of that process would have, I think, a huge positive boost.”
Many who work at the party’s grassroots level, however, say without a clear plan for a replacement the plans being hatched by megadonors and pundits are too risky.
“I don’t think that the Democratic Party wants (Biden) to step aside. I really don’t,” Barnett, the Bowling Green voter and DNC delegate, said. “I think you have a few people with loud mouths, but most of the people are like, there’s not enough time to put someone else in there.”
Roz Welch, vice chair of the Louisville Democratic Party, is heading to Chicago next month as a DNC delegate. She thinks the proposals would thwart the party’s internal democratic processes and raise thorny legal questions.
“The conversation of how do we get a new nominee brings a lot of uncertainty into this race that doesn’t need to be there,” she said. “It only creates the division that doesn’t unite us.”
Welch also doesn’t see any legal or procedural pathway for another candidate, even the popular Beshear, to replace Biden.
“I think (Beshear) does some great things,” Welch said, adding she’d be glad to see him make a presidential run in 2028. “We’re talking about four months from now.”
The debate over how to handle the Biden problem reflects a “huge chasm” within the party, said Lyndon Pryor, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League.
“I think you know, at least from the voices that I’ve seen, a lot of the people who are making these calls for the president to step side, a lot of them have the luxury of wealth and whiteness, to be quite honest,” he said.
But for Black people, poor people, women and others from marginalized communities, “this is not a game.”
“This is not something that we can afford to be tinkering around with and playing as if it is some sort of reality competition show,” he said.
Even those who believe the Democratic Party needs shaking up in general, like longtime Frankfort election lawyer Anna Whites, say the party should not swap horses in the middle of the stream.
“I have real concern about the future for my children, my grandchildren, my young friends and I want to, in this situation, try very carefully to make sure we don’t make a mistake,” she said.
“And so I would like to stick with the name people know, because I think that this is a leader people will feel confident in going out to the polls for.”