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Any hot-swap is going to leave some part of the Democratic party unsatisfied: they're a year behind in the game of buy-in and consensus. "Your guy? What about my guy?" It takes more than a generic Democratic to drive turn-out and excitement, it takes someone who can actually convince voters that they are the right person at the right moment. Otherwise, people will quickly capsize and donors, voters, officials, and orgs will quickly abandon the national efforts and focus on whatever local efforts they can salvage.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans aren't just standing by rolling the dice to see if they'll decide to implode too. They're attacking, they're on the offensive. "Look at these people, they've been lying about Biden for four years, what else have they been lying about?" The new guy will have some controversies (they always do), and they'll be fresh and untested and hard to counter. (The party is circulating its talking points on the media, but in the fast-moving chaos the main story became something else, and nobody internalizes the response.)
Kamala might have a lot of problems, and might be historically unpopular -- but at least she doesn't come with these problems, and that may look attractive right now.
I think she actually does have a bunch of controversies. Nobody really cared to bring them up or make a big deal out of them before when she was just the VP, but there's no way Trump and his team are going to just leave all that ammunition on the floor. Right now the left have thoroughly demotivated their base with their support of Israel and what's happening there - appointing someone who fought to make sure non-violent and innocent prisoners stayed behind bars so they could be used for prison labour/fire camps as the representative of the left is going to be a huge demotivating factor for a lot of left-wingers as well... and I have a sneaking suspicion that Trump won't be too polite and gentlemanly to bring those up.
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Without the primary process, they don't need consensus. They need to not anger the black caucus (so they can keep the "get-out-the-vote" stuff in the cities), but what are the Democrats going to do? They're going to vote against Trump. So a new candidate without the problems for the squishies in the middle who WANT to vote against Trump (because that's the Thing to Do) but actually care about things like senility should be a winner for them.
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