@dropoffyourknee, I think Harris was the closest they could get to a functional candidate, lets say they picked someone else, who would have the name recognition that has not already utterly failed in the past. Biden won purely on the "I'm not Trump and I'm practically dead and my agenda from the 1960s was pretty centrist" so people were expecting a "do nothing president" and he picked a slate of failed candidates that were likely to not accomplish anything (Harris, Buttigieg etc) which is perfectly fine, the economy was great, we were getting out of COVID, all he had to do was nothing, he then handed over his administration back to Obama's hand picked staff who got a home in DC just to whisper in the ear of Joe.
Do you think people want 8 more years of (Michelle) Obama? (Hillary) Clinton? Who would be a feasible candidate that's not to the left of what Biden made himself out to be? They threw out the Kennedy family name because he wasn't woke enough for them. Do you think Cheney would've pulled any votes?
Even if you get someone like Walz or Shapiro earlier, you end up allowing the opposition to pick that candidate apart, actually fact check them, actually investigate them, we didn't really get that with Harris-Walz, nobody knew until the debate that Walz was a frequent flyer to China, even after the debate nobody knew he has an entire second family he made with a CCP party official - talk about compromised. Give 2 more months and that becomes a huge scandal, even if the legacy media doesn't report on it, Shapiro has similar serious allegation skeletons in his closet, besides the fact he's a Jew which means Democrats in Michigan, Philadelphia and the West Coast won't turn out for him.