If Trump quits race, national GOP insiders would pick replacement, likely Pence.
Vice president would be the likely choice
In the unlikely event that an ailing President Donald J. Trump were to withdraw from re-election, it would be up to a slimmed-down Republican National Committee to select a replacement — almost certainly Vice President Mike Pence — and a new candidate for his running mate, according to GOP rules.
While such an occurrence would be historic, it would not be unprecedented that a top-of-the-ticket candidate in a presidential election were to drop out and be replaced. But in most states, including Connecticut, the time to change names on the ballot is almost past.
Connecticut town clerks began sending out absentee ballot forms to voters on Friday. There would be only one more week to reprint ballots and get them out to voters in time for the Nov. 3 election, state election officials said Friday.
So if Trump, Pence or Democratic candidate Joe Biden or U.S. Sen Kamala Harris, his running mate, were to drop out after Oct. 9, local voting officials in town and city halls throughout Connecticut could have to collect possibly tens of thousands of completed ballots, while simultaneously mailing out new, uncompleted ballots to tens of thousands of new applicants.
Address stickers on new ballots, however, might
not be read in computer tabulators, think state officials when asked about a scenario of laborious hand counting.
But in practicality, Connecticut is a blue state and the likelihood of a Republican by any name, winning the state’s seven electors is low.
Such a historic withdrawal of a presidential nominee would send ripples throughout the state and national election apparatus unlike anything ever experienced.
In July 1972, two weeks after his nomination to be Sen. George McGovern’s vice presidential running mate, U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri quit
the Democratic ticket amid newspaper accounts of previously denied mental health issues, including his hospitalization for depression, which Eagleton and his wife had tried to keep secret.
Amid the criticism of not vetting Eagleton properly, McGovern lost 49 of 50 states to Republican President Richard M. Nixon, who won 18 million more popular votes than the Democrat. But the withdrawal was early enough not to affect the eventual printing of ballots that included Sargent Shriver as McGovern’s running mate.
Under Republican National Committee rules, if
Trump were to withdraw, three RNC members from
each state - the state chairman, a national committeeman, and a national committeewoman - would cast ballots for a replacement.
Back in Connecticut, it would be up to the local town clerks to print and reissue new election ballots, which was last done in 2018 when a minorparty petitioning candidate for Connecticut governor changed his lieutenant governor running mate.
In 1912, during Republican President William Howard Taft’s re-election campaign, Vice President James S. Sherman died six days before the election and was replaced by Nicholas Butler, the president of Columbia University. Taft and Butler lost the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, only winning two states in a fourway race with Theodore Roosevelt leading the Progressive Party and Eugene Debs the Socialist Party.
Wilson collected 39 percent of the votes in Connecticut that year, and Taft got 36 percent.
Ronald Schurin, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, said Friday that if Trump was unable to pursue re-election, the choice of a successor candidate would be easy.
“I can’t imagine if Trump were to drop out anyone other than Pence would be picked by the RNC,” said Schurin. “It would be a slam dunk.” Schurin said that any eventual replacement candidates for vice president would likely depend on good-faith efforts to get their names on ballots.