The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined at length on the need for Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection. Among other things, they described one of Party’s rationalizations for Biden’s staying the course:

Ignoring the ballots that voters have already cast for Mr Biden in primaries across the US would undermine democratic decision-making and anger the party’s core supporters.

The editors offered two reasons for why that rationalization is erroneous.

[T]he estimated 4,672 delegates to the Democratic national convention—most of whom were selected in primaries, caucuses, or local party conventions—are a microcosm of the party, not a self-appointed cabal of insiders.

And

[Delegates] aren’t robots. Although delegates pledged to a particular presidential candidate are expected to vote for that candidate, the official party selection rules leave room for judgment, saying that pledged delegates “shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” Delegates pledged to Mr Biden could conscientiously claim that new information has induced them to change their minds[.]

There’s a third reason, too, and this does directly address Party’s claimed concern for “democratic decision-making.”

Party went to great pains to limit primary voters’ choices to just one: Biden himself. Party pressured potential competitors against competing at all, and took active steps even to deprecate serious consideration for folks like Cornel West and Jill Stein, folks that most “democratic decision-makers” would have had no trouble assessing on their own. One potential candidate who was gaining traction, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, was interfered with and subverted so much that he felt driven to leave the Progressive-Democratic Party altogether and mount a separate, third-party campaign—where he’s getting anywhere from 8%-15% support in the polls. The one alternative candidate who was allowed into the primary campaign, Congressman Dean Phillips (D, MN), was sufficiently timid that he chose not to enter until it obviously was too late for him to have any sort of impact.