Had the Democratic Party actually allowed the public to witness President Joe Biden in the wild after 4 p.m. prior to the formal start to its presidential primary, and had the media any interest in exposing his now-undeniable senility, the best course forward for liberals would be obvious.

If the electorate knows that an 81-year-old candidate cannot speak for longer than four minutes, even with a teleprompter, after sunset without mumbling and stumbling slack-jawed and staring into space, and if that same candidate is now trailing a convicted felon by some six points nationally and even more in battleground states, the pragmatic decision for the Democratic Party would be to pressure the president into forgoing reelection and encouraging an open primary in the hopes of democratically superseding the vice president who is nearly as unpopular as he is.

It’s not hard to imagine a democratically nominated Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) or Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) running at least neck-and-neck with former President Donald Trump, even if he has a quantifiable record to compare against the incumbent party.

But the Democratic Party made the decision to go all in on cordoning Biden off from the public to prop him up for a second general election, and the media went along with it gleefully, chiding not just candid observations from conservatives about Biden’s condition but also special counsel Robert Hur and the rare dissenters in the press for reporting that Biden was cognitively deteriorating in real time. The party itself didn’t just cancel two state primaries and bar other candidates from the ballot in another four states to secure a seamless renomination for the incumbent ticket. The media engaged in a full-scale blackout of Biden’s long-shot challengers and, much more importantly, the reality that Biden was being escorted early out of international summits and incapable of unscripted remarks to the public.

So when Biden imploded Thursday night, he didn’t just blow up his own reelection odds. He suicide-bombed the credibility of much of the ostensible press and all of the liberal intelligentsia in the process. Publicly, the entire left-of-center Democratic media complex has broken its knives out and declared war on Biden, with the politicians and aides who haven’t yet called out for Biden’s withdrawal in their own voice, leaking their opposition to his continued candidacy to a press salivating for scoops to cover their own derrieres.

Privately, the promise of a multimillion-dollar severance may prove a better tact because the legal and practical reality is that the party has exactly 35 days to beg Biden to resign, and even if he cowers to their demand, Democrats are stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden became the party’s presumptive nominee four months ago and has since accrued a full 99% of the delegates to secure his bid. While Biden could theoretically release his delegates from their pledge, Ohio state law required presidential nominees to be added to the ballot no later than Aug. 7, until Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) agreed to a last-minute extension until the beginning of September.

But the Democratic National Convention is reportedly proceeding as though the original Ohio deadline were binding, planning a “virtual roll call” weeks before the DNC at the end of August. Even if Biden, who has spent half a century chasing after the presidency, agreed to step down before Aug. 7, Biden’s delegates have promised to wage war on the party if it tried to leapfrog over the nation’s first black, Asian, and female vice president with a less intersectional candidate. A brokered convention or brokered virtual vote that blew past the ballot deadlines now much earlier than in the past thanks to rampant absentee and early general election voting could wind up disenfranchising individual voters across the country.

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Harris is also the only alternative legally entitled to the Biden campaign’s quarter-billion-dollar war chest if he chose to give it to her. Otherwise, the PAC would be required to refund donors or siphon off the money in $3,300 increments to other Democratic campaigns.

In post-debate polling, Biden trails Trump by six points and Harris by two, and the Republican’s lead is only growing. But the time to find an alternative to the Biden-Harris ticket has passed because Democrats decided its voters were not entitled to an informed and democratic primary process. It’s Biden-Harris, or Harris, or bust.