On a trip home to Ohio soon after starting at Yale Law School, JD Vance stopped for gas and noticed a woman in a Yale T-shirt. When he asked about it, she said her nephew attended the Ivy League school — and asked whether Vance did, too.

“I had to choose: Was I a Yale Law student, or was I a Middletown kid with hillbilly grandparents?” Vance recalled in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

If he admitted going to Yale, he and the woman “could exchange pleasantries,” Vance wrote. But if he denied his Yale ties, the woman would deem him one of “the unsophisticates of Ohio [who] clung to their guns and religion.” An unbridgeable gap would open: The woman would move to “the other side of an invisible divide,” Vance wrote.

His fear in that moment has since become a theory he often repeats: that America is a divided nation, split between liberal elites and regular, conservative people. It was a keynote theme of his best-selling book, which earned national acclaim, became a movie and paved his way to the U.S. Senate — and, this summer, helped him earn the vice-presidential nod from Donald Trump.

I have heard the arguments and I've seen the polls, and still I remain convinced that forcing Joe to step aside amounts to sheer madness. I will attempt to lay out here as carefully as I can why I think that is the case.

First, let me say that all Democrats, as well as many independent / unaffiliated voters, want and feel an urgent need to defeat Trump. But I think a lot of people are desperate for a kind of certainty about the outcome in November that is simply unavailable -- to anyone. No option, no path, is perfect, and none has any guarantee of success. Each possible path has its own set of benefits as well as risks/downsides, none of which can be quantified with any degree of certainty. Is that scary? Of course it is, but such is the world we are living in at the moment.

What's more, I think that those who are trying to push Joe off the ticket have not thoroughly considered all of the benefits that come with keeping him on the ticket, and at the same time are not being honest with either themselves or the rest of us about either the downside risks or, in some cases, the practical, legal realities involved in forcing him out. So let's take a look at some of these, shall we?

The most common argument made by those advocating for a change in the ticket is this: "If Joe's the nominee, we will lose in November." And they make this argument with a degree of certainty that I don't think they have any intellectual right to assert. NO ONE knows what is going to happen in November, irrespective of whom the Democrats nominate. Yes, I know: "but the polls." But polls have often not been good predictors of political outcomes. (I would think that we would have learned that lesson in 2016, but I digress.) So I am simply not persuaded by the argument that keeping Joe as the nominee necessarily means Democrats will lose in November.
Most of the national polls I've seen continue to indicate that the race is still a dead heat, and that Trump really didn't benefit all that much from Joe's poor debate performance. What definitely has helped Trump and hurt Biden is the ongoing debate over casting Joe aside, so to those who are arguing in favor of ditching Joe, I say congratulations -- you have managed to make what was always going to be a difficult fight that much harder. I hope you're proud of yourselves.

Casting Joe to the curb means forfeiting the significant advantage of incumbency, in a race in which it is critically important to preserve every advantage we have. Depending on who the replacement nominee is, it could also mean forfeiting the roughly $100 million war chest his campaign has amassed. The only way that war chest can be preserved is if Kamala remains on the ticket, because campaign finance laws prohibit it from being simply transfered to another nominee who wasn't on the original ticket, and the Biden-Harris campaign would be permitted to contribute only $2,000 to a new nominee's campaign.

"Great," you say, "so make Kamala the nominee." Well, not so fast, bucko. The thing is, many of the same wealthy donors who are calling on Joe to step aside are opposed to Kamala becoming the nominee. So, can those wealthy donors be relied upon to ante up to make up for what was forfeited?

And in any case, nominating Kamala would be making the same mistake Democrats made in 2016 against the same opponent: choosing a candidate based on her wide popularity within the party while ignoring the fact that she is widely disliked outside of it. And what we can never afford to forget is that Democrats cannot win national elections with the votes of Democrats only!

"So, have an open convention," you respond. But not making Kamala the nominee also carries with it another potential problem, namely that of alienating a hugely important Democratic constituency, namely Black women. In addition, there are timing issues with respect to ballot access in certain states. For example, the state of Ohio has a law that requires the party to submit a nominee's name for printing on its ballots two days PRIOR to the start of the Democratic convention. Yes, there is a provision in the law that would allow the state legislature to change that deadline, but even if the Ohio legislature -- which is overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans -- were to pass such a change, it cannot go into effect for 60-00 days after the change was passed, and that puts us in a legal gray zone. What's more, Speaker Mike Johnson has already said that Republicans are preparing legal challenges to any effort by Democrats to change the name of the nominee on the ballot. Such legal challenges raise exponentially the prospect that the election will be decided by the Supreme Court rather than by the electorate!

I believe Biden is capable of getting past the bad debate performance IF party donors and bigwigs give him half a chance. Abandoning a candidate with such a strong record of achievement, and one who has a deep knowledge of how legislation is crafted and negotiated -- a critical skill in these closely divided times -- at a time when there is no consensus on whom should be the replacement nominee and with so little time remaining before the election is, I believe, utter insanity!

This decision is being driven by panic. And rarely do decisions made in the midst of panic pan out well!