The panic following last week’s disastrous debate performance by President Biden has shifted the spotlight to potential replacements for the president at the top of the Democratic ticket, though most would still likely be underdogs against former President Trump.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are two names that have emerged as potential replacements for Biden if he were to leave the race, but both have trailed behind Trump in polling of a hypothetical matchup.

Whitmer would fare the best in a matchup with Trump, with a Fox News poll from November showing the Democratic governor within the margin of error of the former president, garnering 46% of the support of registered voters compared to 48% for Trump.

The two-term governor of the crucial Midwestern swing state could be an attractive option for Democrats, though Whitmer has reportedly expressed annoyance that her name is being mixed in as a potential replacement for Biden. Responding to a recent Politico report that the Michigan governor warned the Biden campaign the president no longer had a shot at winning her home state following the debate, Whitmer took to social media and argued anyone who thinks she would make such a claim is “full of s—.”

BIDEN’S INNER CIRCLE SILENT AS PARTY REELS FOLLOWING ‘EMBARRASSING’ DEBATE PERFORMANCE

If Whitmer were unwilling to step up for Biden, Newsom, who has been one of the more visible Democrats supporting Biden, would make a natural choice to replace the president if he were to end his campaign.

California’s Democratic governor ran slightly worse against Trump in the November poll, garnering 45% of the support of registered voters compared to 49% for the former president.

Like Whitmer, Newsom has distanced himself from the idea that he would replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

“I would never turn my back on President Biden. Never turn my back on President Biden. I don’t know a Democrat in my party that would do so. And especially after tonight, we have his back,” Newsom said shortly after Biden’s debate performance. “We run, not the 90-yard dash. We are all in. We’re going to double down in the next few months. We’re going to win this election.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom. (Getty Images)

BIDEN DEBATE DEBACLE: 10 EYE-OPENING MEDIA RESPONSES, FROM MSNBC PANIC TO ‘THE VIEW’ CALLING FOR REPLACEMENT

Notably, both Newsom and Whitmer performed better in the poll than Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris, who has also been floated as a potential replacement for Biden, trailed Trump by five points in the poll, garnering 45% support compared to Trump’s 50%. The two Democratic governors also compared favorably to Biden’s number, who the poll found losing the race to Trump by four points, with Newsom tying that mark and Whitmer besting it by two points.

Another option is Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who has proved popular in typically red Kentucky. 

While the Fox News poll did not feature Beshear in a hypothetical matchup with Trump, the Democratic governor’s ability to win over Trump voters in two elections could appeal to Democrats looking to defeat the former president in November.

In one example highlighted in a Politico report, Beshear was able to flip Kentucky’s deeply red Perry County during his 2023 re-election bid, a county that supported Trump over Biden by a resounding 77-22 margin in 2020. Just three years later, Beshear was able to carry the country with a 56-44 margin, a dramatic 65- point swing.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley, File)

According to a Morning Consult poll conducted in April, Beshear enjoys a 65% approval rating in typically-red Kentucky, making him the most popular Democratic governor in the country and the fourth most popular governor overall.

In comments to reporters Monday, Beshear acknowledged that Biden had a “rough” debate performance, but also said he had no desire to replace the president at the top of the ticket.

“Well, the debate performance was rough. It was a very bad night for the president,” the Kentucky governor said. “But he is still the candidate. Only he can make decisions about his future candidacy, so as long as he continues to be in the race, that’s important.”

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

The Supreme Court chose an unusual time to declare for the first time that presidents — past and future — are immune from the criminal law when it comes to their use of official or constitutional powers.

It comes just as former President Trump — who once promised to be “dictator for one day” — prepares to accept the Republican nomination to return to the White House.

Trump was also the nation’s first chief executive to refuse to accept his defeat in an election, insisting it was “stolen” and calling thousands of his supporters to come to Washington and to “fight like hell.”

The mob riot at the Capitol prompted the House to impeach him, a majority of senators to vote to convict him, and the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against him for conspiring to overturn the election results.

But the Supreme Court sent the opposite message Monday in the case of Trump vs. United States. The court’s six conservatives, all Republican appointees, said the Constitution has an unwritten immunity clause that shields presidents from being prosecuted or held to account for violating criminal laws when they are exercising their official powers.

Legal experts were surprised by the court’s opinion and predicted danger ahead.

“I can’t fathom what they were thinking,” said Donald Ayer, a former Justice Department attorney in the Reagan administration. “They know who Trump is. This will embolden him.”

Trump said recently he will seek “revenge” against those who have crossed him and his supporters. Earlier this week, Trump reposted an image calling Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney “guilty of treason” and for her to be prosecuted in “televised military tribunals.”

Fifty years ago this week, attorney Philip Lacovara went before the Supreme Court and urged the justices to order President Nixon to turn over the White House tapes. He won a unanimous decision, with three Nixon appointees joining in.

Lacovara was taken aback by Monday’s opinion, which he called the “most dangerous and anticonstitutional decision” since the 19th century.

“At the time of the Watergate investigations, not a single Supreme Court justice of any political affiliation would have taken seriously a claim that the president is immune from complying with federal criminal law. Not even Nixon in his wildest dreams ever imagined that any court would dignify such a claim,” he said. “This is part of a disturbing trend, as in, for example, Poland and Hungary, in which conservative justices on the right favor authoritarian concepts of presidential power.”

Today’s court conservatives believe in a strong role for the president as chief executive. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh served as White House lawyers under Republican presidents, and they are skeptical of limits on the president’s powers. The court’s other conservatives have worked in Washington for decades, and they also wary of politically driven investigations and prosecutions.

At the same time, however, they have sharply limited the power of executive agencies. The so-called Chevron doctrine held that judges should defer to executive agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Education Department when the president’s appointees adopt new regulations. But the court overturned that doctrine last week by the same 6-3 vote that expanded the president’s power this week.

John Malcolm, senior attorney at the conservative Heritage Foundation, hailed the ruling as historic.

It is “undoubtedly one of the most significant constitutional decisions [the court] has ever issued with respect to the separation of powers and the powers of the presidency.” It “will likely have a bigger impact on how presidents are likely to act in the future while in office,” he added.

“The idea that a Supreme Court, with justices picked by Trump, are ruling on a matter of this import right before an election, it just seems stunningly bad timing beyond the merits of the decision itself, which i think were really suspect,” said Chris Whipple, who has written two books on the presidency.

Prior to this week, “you already have orange lights going off for what Trump might do in a second term in terms what he himself has said,” said William Kristol, a conservative critic of Trump who served in the George H.W. Bush White House. That includes using the pardon power, and a raft of hard-right ideological proposals in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” report.

“This just turns the orange light into a red light,” Kristol said.

In addition to the legal changes, it creates psychological and political pressure on Republicans to carry out Trump’s most extreme impulses, experts say.

“Republican senators are already inclined to go along with Trump — and incidentally the court says he can do this and it will be used as an argument against anyone who is critical or hesitant to go along,” Kristol said.

Kristol envisions Trump obliterating post-Watergate norms that gave the Justice Department a measure of independence, and a trickle-down effect that would give license to Trump’s aides — inducing ideologues like Trump advisor Stephen Miller — to make demands of officials on Trump’s behalf.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, argues that Trump never worried about guardrails in the first place.

“He has always thought that he could beat whatever rules anyone tried to impose on him,” Bolton said.

“Trump’s mind-set is: ‘I’m going to do what I want and if somebody doesn’t like it, let ’em litigate,’” Bolton said.

But Trump could be talked out of things in his first term, Bolton said. Trump would demand every few months to prosecute former Secretary of State John F. Kerry for allegedly violating the Logan Act by intervening in his Iran policy, Bolton recalled. His White House counsel would ignore or obfuscate, but the people he chooses in the second term are less likely to do that, he said.

“In the second term there will be people around him who will say, ‘Convene the grand jury,’” he said.“What happens if he declares martial law because of the invasion across the border? … I think the courts will continue to be buffer. I hope so.”

President Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee combined brought in over a quarter of a billion dollars in fundraising the past three months, Biden’s team announced early Tuesday.

And the campaign, in showcasing the $264 million raked in during the April-June second quarter of 2024 fundraising, noted that it pulled in $127 million in June alone, which it touted was the president’s best month of fundraising since he launched his re-election bid over a year ago.

The announcement comes as the Biden campaign tries to flip the script on a negative narrative coming out of last week’s first debate with former President Trump.

Biden’s June fundraising was up from the roughly $85 million the campaign and the DNC brought in during May. And the campaign spotlighted that their second quarter haul was $75 million more than they brought in during the first three months of the year.

BIDEN TRIES TO FLIP THE SCRIPT ON DISASTROUS NARRATIVE COMING OUT OF FIRST DEBATE

They also touted that they had a whopping $240 million cash-on-hand as of the end of June, up from $212 million a month earlier.

A sizable chunk of June’s haul was raked in at a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles with former President Obama, Hollywood heavyweights George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and late night TV talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. The campaign said after the event that it set a new Democratic Party fundraising record with a $30 million haul. 

DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION OF BIDEN IN VIRTUAL ROLL CALL COULD COME AS EARLY AS THIS MONTH

The president also brought in over $8 million a few days later at a fundraiser at the Northern Virginia home of former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, where Biden was also joined by former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State and former Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was the Democrats’ 2016 standard-bearer.

But boosting the June fundraising to higher heights was the $33 million the campaign says was raised last Thursday through Saturday, the day of the first presidential debate and the following two days. And the Biden campaign showcased that their single best hour of fundraising this cycle came during the 11pm to midnight eastern hour on Thursday, immediately after the end of the debate with Trump in Atlanta, Georgia.

President Joe Biden (right) and former President Donald Trump participate in their first of two 2024 general election debates, on June 27, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The Biden campaign has been spotlighting its pre- and post-debate fundraising as it aims to alter the brutal conversation coming out of last week’s showdown. This, after the 81-year-old president’s halting delivery and stumbling answers at the debate sparked widespread panic in the Democratic Party and spurred calls from political pundits, editorial writers, and some party politicians and donors, for Biden to step aside as the party’s 2024 nominee.

The campaign also showcased its grassroots appeal, noting that nearly two-thirds of June’s haul came from small-dollar donors and that more than $30 million of the $38 million raised during the final few days of the month came from grassroots contributors.

“Our Q2 fundraising haul is a testament to the committed and growing base of supporters standing firmly behind the President and Vice President and clear evidence that our voters understand the choice in this election between President Biden fighting for the American people and Donald Trump fighting for himself as a convicted felon,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden walk off the stage after a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, on June 28, 2024. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

DNC chair Jaime Harrison noted that “grassroots donors across the country are chipping in every day because they know that this election will determine the course of history.”

In announcing their May fundraising figures, the Biden campaign waited until June 20, the final day the presidential campaigns had to file their monthly fundraising figures with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

But when it came to announcing their June and second quarter figures, the Biden campaign wasted no time in showcasing their numbers, announcing them just two days after the fundraising period ended.

Biden and the DNC enjoyed a large fundraising lead over Trump and the Republican National Committee earlier this year. But Trump and the RNC topped Biden and the DNC in fundraising for the first time in April.

And in May, the Trump campaign and the RNC, fueled in part by a fundraising surge following the former president’s history-making guilty verdicts in his criminal trial, combined hauled in a stunning $141 million, easily besting Biden and the DNC.

Former President Donald Trump walks offstage after giving remarks at a rally at Greenbrier Farms on June 28, 2024, in Chesapeake, Virginia.  (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The Trump campaign has until later this month to file its fundraising figures with the FEC and has yet to announce its June and second quarter hauls.

Fundraising, along with public opinion polling, is a key metric used to measure the strength of a candidate and their campaign. Money raised can be used to build up grassroots outreach and get-out-the-vote operations, staffing, travel and ads, among other things.

The Biden campaign has been using its funds to build up what appears to be a very formidable ground operation in the key battleground states and announced two weeks ago that they had hired their 1,000th staffer and had opened over 200 coordinated offices in the swing states. The Biden campaign enjoys a large organizational advantage over the Trump campaign when it comes to grassroots outreach and get-out-the-vote ground game efforts in the states that will likely decide the outcome of the election rematch.

“Team Biden-Harris grew its historic war chest while also significantly expanding its footprint and operations both in HQ and across the key states – the resources needed to win a close election,” the campaign highlighted in a release.

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.