> Does the Democratic party have anyone in the wings who is more likely to win than Harris?

No idea if he’d be interested but Mark Kelly would be a great candidate to try and win independents.

The fundamental problem is that nobody but Biden won the primary. The time to debate over and vote on an alternate has come and gone, and this (along with his decision to run at the last minute in 2020) are things I don’t know I can ever forgive him for.

At this point the VP has the most legitimacy as a successor and given the situation we’re forced into she’s unambiguously the option. That doesn’t make it good, but it makes it better than all the other terrible options that involve a free-for-all between candidates with no opportunity for voters to weigh in.

The best possible outcome at this point is for the establishment to quickly and unanimously get behind Harris. Again, it’s not necessarily a good outcome. But it’s the best available to us thanks to Biden waiting for the last possible moment (again) to come to this realization.

It's a disgrace that the party that was able to turn Obama from an unknown junior Senior speaking at the 2004 DNC to winning the Presidency 4 years later, now has done zero to promote more candidates over the last 4 years when Biden ran on being a single term President.

Basically, the DNC's options are the people who failed to get through the primaries in 2020 against Biden and maybe Whitmer or Newsom.

I just do not see Harris getting the middle/undecided, and it's 2016 all over again, if not worse, because SCOTUS has the deck stacked if it's even close.

The polling before this announcement was showing Harris with better numbers vs. Trump than Biden had, at least.

Polling whom? Democrats? As we have seen many times this century, getting the popular vote does not mean you win the presidency.

I believe Harris would still have access to the $240M Biden/Harris campaign fund too.

I honestly didn't have much faith in that polling. The media was scrambling after the debate to propose a different narrative and many in the party that were turning on Biden were promoting Harris.

The polling seemed too convenient. I don't have a link handy, but the best poll process I saw after the debate did show Harris doing better than Biden, but she was still worse off than a few of the other Democratic potentials.

Harris at least has legitimacy as having received votes as the vp, and extra scrutiny given Biden's age. The optics of pushing her out would be tragic.

Whose optics? Its only relevant to the people that would only vote for her. I'm no political strategist, but they'll have to undo the (untrue) opinion that she was in charge of the border, which is one of the Dem's primary losing issues right now. If the Republican's can pin that vision into swing voters minds, true or not, she stands no chance to win. I am unsure if that is a fair prediction but that is why I generally hope they can find someone else.

She was on the ticket, so the optics would be of pushing out a qualified, experienced, already-in-place vice president and woman of color because...reasons that are definitely not racist wink wink would be the Republican ad.

I think Pritzker is excellent, but does anyone outside Illinois even know about him? Plus, he needs some Ozempic to get him looking sharper.