Democrats planned Joe Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 US presidential race as early as in 2023 - as per a newly released book. The book "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes has cited two unnamed sources and added a new angle into the saga of Biden's declining healthcare. A copy of the book - which was published last week - was obtained by The Guardian has revealed that Democrats were in "hush-hush talks" on Biden's removal from the presidential race. 

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Moreover, it said that Kamala Harris' close aides "strategised around the possibility that Biden might die in office". 

All such planning was led by Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director - the book claimed. Simmons allegedly drew up of a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear Harris in, the British newspaper reported. 

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He "never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023," the authors write, "but he advised colleagues that he should be notified immediately if something happened to Biden, because he had worked out an entire communications strategy. And he left the spreadsheet with another Harris aide," Allen and Parnes wrote in the book. 

This is the third book by the authors after studies of Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and defeat by Biden in 2020. 

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The book also talked about some prominent events after Biden's removal - Harris being frustrated after being unable to distance herself from Biden, the "unpopular president" and also her team’s failure to land an interview with Joe Rogan. Trump had secured a three-hour long interview with the American YouTuber that became a key moment for his presidential bid in November 2024. 

“A handful of Democratic National Committee officials already had considered contingency plans,” Allen and Parnes write. “In hush-hush talks starting in 2023, these officials gamed out Biden-withdrawal scenarios, according to two people familiar with them," they added. 

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“They wanted to make sure the party was ready for every possible circumstance: if Biden launched his campaign and then stepped aside before the primaries; if he won a bunch of primaries and then could not continue. If he secured enough delegates for winning the nomination but dropped out before winning a floor vote at the convention, and if he left a vacancy at the top of the ticket after taking the nomination," the book claimed. 

(With inputs from agencies)