What happens if a candidate dies before the general election, or wins the general election but dies before the Electoral College votes, has been discussed before. Likewise what happens if the candidate withdraws.
OK, question 1, which is kind of a side question: What happens if candidate dies or withdraws right after the convention? The ballots have not yet been printed and serious campaigning has not yet begun, so it would seem there’s some flexibility. Would the party bigwigs meet and decide who to run?
But what if the candidate neither dies nor withdraws but is generally judged to be incapable of serving as POTUS? Two scenarios here:
The candidate suffers some sort of accident or health catastrophe (like a brain aneurism) that puts the candidate in a permanent vegetative state. Seems to me this would be treated the same as if the candidate died, but I could easily be wrong.
The candidate suffers a health catastrophe (again, maybe a brain aneurism) that leaves the candidate with no observable physical problems, but affects the emotional control portions of the brain. The candidate laughs and weeps inappropriately and flies into a rage at the slightest of perceived insults. Clearly not a person suited to be POTUS. But the candidate refuses to step down.
What happens then? I find it hard to believe that the parties have never put in some mechanism for handling at least situation #1 above, given the age of many candidates lately.
It’s up to each state to decide what to do. Technically, everyone is voting for a party’s Presidential Electors, and not the candidates themselves.
California’s Election Code is not clear (I am still trying to find where it says that the party with the most votes has its electors chosen), but I think that if a candidate dies, the electors can vote for anybody alive (subject to the “you can’t vote for both a President and a Vice-President from California” law), but if the candidate is alive and their name is on the ballot, the electors have to vote for that person anyway. (If the candidate is elected and does not want the job, then they simply do not take the oath on January 20.)
As fror the first question, consider Thomas Eagleton, who in 1972 withdrew from the vice-presidential nomination after 18 days. The Democratic National Committee immediately met and nominated Sargent Shriver to run in his place.
For the main issue, however, after looking through both the Democratic and Republican party by-laws, I can’t see any mechanism where the national committees can declare a vacancy to exist – as in the candidate has a health crisis, gets caught in a scandal or simply takes a permanent vacation after the convention. I’d imagine they’d come up with some sort of emergency temporary rule similar to the 25th Amendment.
