Rumors questioning the legality and legitimacy of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee

2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG

This is part of an ongoing series of rapid research blog posts and rapid research analysis about the 2024 U.S. elections from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and was co-authored by Ashlyn B. Aske, Stephen Prochaska, Mert Can Bayar, Nina Lutz, Danielle Lee Tomson, and Kate Starbird, with additional contributions from Sarah Nguyễn and Michael Grass.

Key Takeaways

• In the immediate aftermath of President Biden’s announcement that he would not seek reelection, rumors spread quickly as people tried to make sense of the rules, procedures, and prospects for selecting a nominee.
• Complicated and nuanced state-level election processes led to confusion and rumoring as people tried to make sense of what would happen following President Biden’s announcement to drop his campaign for re-election.
• Internal party concerns about nominating a replacement create the opportunity for members of opposing parties and/or foreign adversaries to take advantage of these critiques.
• Voices on the left and the right initially dubbed Biden’s stepping down and the presumptive nomination of Harris as a “coup” by party elites and the donor class, in some cases verging on conspiratorial language.
• False rumors about Vice President Harris’s citizenship status spread through “anchor baby” tropes aiming to delegitimize her candidacy.  The tactic of using racial and xenophobic biases against a presidential candidate to question their citizenship and legitimacy to run is not new.

In the days leading up to President Biden’s decision to not seek reelection, there was considerable speculation among Democrats, media figures, and others on the left about what could come next, as well as various proposals for how the Democratic Party could nominate a replacement candidate. Considering the unprecedented nature of Biden’s eventual decision to step aside, this speculation was not surprising. What was surprising for many was how quickly the party coalesced in their support of Vice President Kamala Harris as the likely replacement candidate that they will nominate in the forthcoming convention. 

As researchers of online rumors and disinformation, we anticipated and later saw that the replacement of the candidate for a major party at this late stage would lead to both internal party criticism — of the fairness (though not the legality) of the selection process that circumvented the traditional primary process — and bad faith efforts to exploit that criticism to delegitimize the eventual Democratic candidate. Though criticism has originated and spread on both sides of the political spectrum, our analysis (e.g., Figures 2 and 3 below) shows that it has been far more salient among prominent Republicans and right-wing influencers. The concerns and critiques of the process emanating from the left were often amplified by right-wing actors, a dynamic we’ve witnessed before.  

In addition to criticism focused on the shift in candidates and speculation about how the replacement process works, we have seen and expect to continue to see the development and growth of other narratives that question Harris’s legitimacy and legality as a candidate for the U.S. presidency — for example, efforts to question her constitutional eligibility, and conspiracy theories that seek to paint her as a “puppet” “anointed” by the “deep state.”

Here, we describe some of the rumors and narratives that have spread online in the days since Biden’s decision and explain how we anticipate these to continue to simmer and spread — and perhaps be utilized in disinformation campaigns — in the months to come.

Rumors About the Legality of Changing a Candidate

It is unprecedented for a Democratic candidate to drop out after winning primary elections but before receiving their official party nomination at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). As such, there is a degree of uncertainty surrounding the nomination of a new candidate, but election law experts agree that both state law and Democratic Party procedures allow for this. That said, parsing these rules and procedures can contribute to a highly volatile informational environment rife with speculative rumors. These rumors circulated for weeks following Biden’s highly criticized debate performance in June and became more prevalent in the hours after he withdrew from the race as legal experts, political influencers, journalists, and the public at large tried to make sense of what would happen given his announcement’s timing.  

In the United States, each party has authority over its own nominating process — not the government. Additionally, each state has its own laws governing balloting deadlines. These often complicated and nuanced processes led to confusion and rumoring as people tried to make sense of what would happen in light of Biden’s announcement. While some of the laws referenced in these rumors may have raised potential issues if Biden had dropped out of the race after being formally nominated at the DNC in August, putting an alternative candidate on the ballot before the presumptive nominee had been formally nominated would not violate state laws, according to a state-by-state survey conducted by CNN. It is worth noting that Republican organizations may leverage the uncertainty of this unprecedented situation and file lawsuits in efforts to block Harris’ presidential candidacy. In a widely viewed tweet and Fox News interview, House Speaker Mike Johnson stated that “the [Democratic] party will face legal challenges in trying to remove Biden from the top of the ticket.” While such suits are unlikely to succeed under existing law, court rulings can be unpredictable, and pending lawsuits may also serve as an additional vector for rumoring. 

Rumors had been circulating the internet prior to Biden’s announcement that an alternative candidate might not legally get on the ballot in some states, citing memos and analyses by conservative officials and think tanks. The Oversight Project (an initiative from the conservative Heritage Foundation) published a memo on X at the end of June, laying out states where a late candidate change might not meet ballot access deadlines. The organization previously indicated that they intended to pursue legal challenges blocking a change to the Democratic ticket before or after the official nomination. This received renewed attention following Biden’s withdrawal. A tweet that referenced the memo and got millions of views raised concerns about Nevada and Wisconsin, claiming that Biden’s name could not be removed from the ballot in these states. Election officials in both states have claimed otherwise in fact checks and a Community Note attached to the tweet, stating parties had until September 3 to submit their nominee to the ballot.  

Additionally, a screenshot claiming to be an output from X’s native AI tool, Grok AI‘s X feed, became particularly prevalent on X, listing 9 states where ballot deadlines had allegedly passed. Multiple users reshared the image, and many others made posts with the same text as the image. Two of the most popular reposts of the image received over 3 million views in the first 24 hours after they were posted. One of the posts tweeted the image with the phrase “More Bad News for Democrats: Biden Cannot be Replaced on Ballot in Three Swing States, GA, NV, and WI,” which appears to reference a June 29 Gateway Pundit article with a similar headline. The article cites the aforementioned Oversight Project memo’s claims that an alternative candidate would have a hard time getting on the ballot in some states.

Many of these rumors about ballot access have since died down as more information has come to light from election officials, legal scholars, and journalists about the nature of candidacy deadlines. For example, Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia Secretary of State’s chief operating officer, debunked misconceptions about ballot deadlines restricting access to an alternative Democratic candidate in his own state via a tweet with more than one million views.

Rumors About the Democratic Legitimacy of Harris’s Candidacy

Nominating a replacement candidate at a party convention in lieu of having one voted in via competitive primary elections exists without precedent in American history and politics. On the one hand, Democrats themselves immediately vocalized concern as to how a potential nominee will be selected without a primary process or a competitive, open convention — despite Biden throwing his support behind his vice president in his announcement. These internal party concerns about the process and nature of nominating a replacement create the opportunity for members of opposing parties and/or foreign adversaries to exploit these critiques and characterize the alternative candidate as illegitimate via various influence campaigns. 

For instance, early critiques and concerns emerged among left-leaning and pundit circles that there needed to be some kind of open, deliberative process at the convention in order to nominate a candidate, in lieu of simply supporting Vice President Harris, as Biden had endorsed. An open convention has historical precedent: up until recently, nominees were chosen by deliberation via party delegates (often powerful party leaders), not based on binding primaries or caucuses that require state delegates to reflect their will at the convention as is done today. (This change actually occurred in response to the 1968 Democratic National Convention following President Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement to not seek reelection and his vice president was chosen as the nominee by party bosses, causing discontent. The Republican Party later followed suit in reforms.) 

Some grassroots organizations specifically feared that the automatic choice of Harris without some kind of popular vote or deliberation not only would be undemocratic but would set up the first female, person of color candidate for race and gender-based attacks. Black Lives Matter (BLM) issued a statement calling for a snap primary prior to the DNC, criticizing “Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors” for “anointing” Kamala Harris without any kind of process. They cautioned that pundits would label Harris’s candidacy as “affirmative action” or a “DEI move.”  The BLM statement was immediately taken up by the conservative magazine the National Review, which reported that some Republican lawmakers had indeed already dubbed Harris a “DEI hire.” Figure 2 below shows how this conversation unfolded. It began with a mixed partisan discussion that became prominent on the left before being picked up and amplified by the right. 

Labeling a non-white or non-male leader a “Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)” hire, assuming that their position was not meritocratically awarded, has been an ongoing trope in right-wing narratives. In our recent work, we noted that the DEI trope was leveraged as a source of blame in rumoring about the Trump assassination attempt, given the Director of the Secret Service at the time was a woman.  We anticipate that this narrative will continue, particularly if Harris is nominated without a deliberative convention.  

Voices on the left and the right also initially dubbed Biden’s stepping down and the presumptive nomination of Harris as a “coup” by party elites and the donor class. The temporal graph below shows how, in the immediate aftermath, some of the top tweets describing the action as a coup were from politically left accounts. This narrative continued through amplification and cross-platform discussion by accounts on the political right, often blaming the coup on the “deep state” or suggesting that Biden was a puppet. The “coup” framing was also much more prevalent than discussions of Harris as “anointed,”  reaching over 184,000 tweets by the morning of July 27, many of which included prominent right-wing influencer accounts.

 

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones tweeted, “God is my source,” after posting a video that he had predicted Biden would drop out. Jones explained in subsequent videos that this was part of a larger plot, tweeting, “The Unelected Deep State Has Successfully Executed A Coup Against The Executive Branch & Is Now Planning To Move Against Trump & The American People!” 

X owner Elon Musk claimed to have known “the exact time and date” that Biden would resign. Musk couched this in larger political frames that the president is “a puppet” to “the real powers.” In a reply to a tweet by End Wokeness, he suggested that Alexander Soros, son of billionaire and conspiracy target George Soros, would personally select the next “puppet” — building on a larger trope that the Democratic party is controlled by opaque and powerful monied interests, not the voting public. 

Given Biden announced he was stepping down via social media and was not physically visible in any kind of live address because he was isolating after testing positive for COVID-19, other conspiratorial narratives emerged around the “coup” accusations. These rumors claimed that Biden was actually dead or dying or that the president’s signature on his candidacy resignation had been forged, garnering millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes on X.  Some of these tweets invoked the rhetoric of the larger QAnon conspiracy theory that a powerful insider was leaking information about the inner workings of elites in the “deep state.” One such tweet claiming to have predicted Biden would be “removed” by COVID-19 also suggested Harris wasn’t actually born in the U.S. and, therefore, would not be eligible to be president — applying similar “birther” conspiracy theories to those used against President Barack Obama, as described in the next section. 

Predicting that an octogenarian president might leave his candidacy or even the presidency is not unreasonable, particularly after his highly criticized debate performance. The challenge is when conspiratorial language intersects with the actual process unfolding as a means of offering meaning or reasoning behind the events or trying to claim exceptional insider knowledge in order to build trust in future claims. Given the exceptional and unprecedented nature of how the Democrats must now nominate a candidate, we expect to see more in-party critiques of the lack of a primary process to choose a nominee, but particularly, we anticipate seeing more opposition party and potentially foreign actors continuing to reinforce narratives that this process was a planned “coup” as part of an attempt to delegitimize whichever candidate is nominated.  

Rumors Questioning Harris’s Citizenship and Eligibility to Be President

Biden’s endorsement of Harris prompted a resurgence of rumoring about Harris’s eligibility to run as a U.S. presidential candidate due to rumors about her citizenship status — reviving the unfounded “birther” conspiracy theories lobbed at Barack Obama during his White House campaigns, suggesting he was not a citizen. Rumors around Harris’ citizenship resurfaced minutes after Biden’s July 21st post endorsing Harris at 2:13 p.m. EDT. Harris was born in California to parents who were not U.S. citizens, but she is a citizen of the United States. Under the 14th Amendment’s Naturalization Clause, a natural born citizen is “anyone born on U.S. soil and subject to its jurisdiction…regardless of parental citizenship.” Claims that Harris is not a citizen or not eligible for the presidency because of her parents’ citizenship statuses had been previously debunked and fact-checked in 2020 during her first presidential bid and in 2023 by factcheck.org and Reuters. 

Social media rumors around Harris’s citizenship status come from users on TikTok and X (where community notes have added context). Some posts attempted to fabricate a non-existing and not legally supported differentiation between “birthright” and “natural born” citizenship, claiming that those who are born to two noncitizen parents on visas (like Harris) should be considered “birthright” citizens and not natural-born citizens, therefore unable to run for President. 

On X, another similar rumor re-emerged, originally promulgated by controversial legal scholar John Eastman in 2020 and re-amplified by influencers including Emerald Robinson, Tom Fitton, and Mario Nawfal. Eastman attempts to raise doubt about Harris’ candidacy by focusing on the latter part of the naturalization clause — “and subject to [the United States’] jurisdiction.” Eastman suggests that there is an unresolved legal question as to whether someone born to non-citizen parents is subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States (and thus may not be considered a natural-born citizen). This is untrue — the prevailing view, even amongst conservative legal scholars, is that children born to foreign citizens on American soil are natural-born citizens, as a matter of settled law. As we’ve discussed before, scientific scholarship that has been discredited in academic communities can be leveraged to support false claims online — here, we see a similar dynamic with legal scholarship.

 

This re-emergence of questioning Harris’s citizenship to delegitimize her candidacy comes with the use of the “anchor baby” label, which is often utilized as a derogatory term for someone born to noncitizens in the United States. In recent years, given mass undocumented immigration into the United States, former President Trump has called to end birthright citizenship to put a stop to offering citizenship to any person born on U.S. soil.  The “anchor baby” moniker is used to stir up fears around migration and anti-immigrant sentiments into harmful rumors about how non-citizen parents of citizen children scheme to use their children’s citizenship for welfare and their own citizenship pathway. 

The tactic of using racial and xenophobic biases against a presidential candidate to question their citizenship and legitimacy to run is not new. However, the usage of “anchor baby” distinguishes these rumors trying to denigrate Harris and other children of immigrants from decades-old rumors trying to delegitimize President Barack Obama’s presidency by asking for his birth certificate as part of larger so-called “birther” conspiracy theories.  These questions and conspiracy theories surfaced because the Hawaii-born Obama had a non-citizen father. Both Harris and Obama are eligible for the presidency under the U.S. Constitution. However, should Harris become the nominee, we anticipate seeing more “birther” and “anchor baby” style rumors this election season, in a similar fashion to those that circulated during Obama’s candidacy. 

What’s Next? 

Rumors and questions regarding the legality of nominating a new Democratic candidate may fade once the party officially names a nominee. That said, ongoing criticisms of how that nomination came about — some concerned about the democratic process and others leveraged to sow distrust in the legitimacy of the candidate generally — may continue.  However, as we witnessed with the “birther” conspiracy theory about Obama’s citizenship, “anchor baby”  rumors and conspiracy theories can persist for years, casting doubt on Harris’ candidacy potential nomination and, if she wins, undermining her administration. 

Political attacks and speculative rumors across the political spectrum that exploit any kind of narrative weakness are often an anticipated part of the campaign season. In this unprecedented moment of American electoral history, we will also continue to see narratives that question the legality and legitimacy of a nomination process, even once some of those answers have been made clear legally and procedurally. 

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• Ashlyn B. Aske is a graduate research assistant at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and a Master of Jurisprudence student at the UW School of Law.
• Stephen Prochaska is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW Information School doctoral student. 
• Mert Can Bayar is a CIP postdoctoral scholar based in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering.
• Nina Lutz is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW HCDE doctoral student.
• Danielle Lee Tomson is the CIP’s research manager.
• Kate Starbird is a CIP co-founder and UW HCDE professor.
• Sarah Nguyễn is a CIP graduate research assistant and PhD candidate in the UW Information School.
• Michael Grass is the CIP’s assistant director for communications.

• Photo at top: Vice President Kamala Harris at a June 20, 2024 event at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. (Katie Ricks / White House Photo via Flickr)