It's time. Biden should drop out so Democrats can run a historic two-woman ticket.

No American political party ever needed a reset more than the Democrats right now.

The drumbeat for President Joe Biden to step aside just keeps growing. The kind of quiet advice he has been receiving about that from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is now reverberating loudly in public.

It's past time to face it – Joe Biden is the past for Democrats. He served a long and distinguished career, capped by the presidency he always coveted. But he isn't up to the job of defeating the man he beat in 2020, former President Donald Trump.

It's time for a change. And that change must happen now, not later. Biden should finish his term while stepping aside in the campaign, throwing his support to Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket.

It’s hard to imagine the party rolling the dice on an open Democratic National Convention in Chicago four weeks from now. That way portends chaos.

It’s also difficult to see the Democratic Party’s Black female supporters, the one loyal chunk of the base that stuck with Biden as his poll numbers crashed, accepting the elevation of another presidential nominee over Harris, the first Black, South Asian and female vice president of the United States.

Harris, 59, has the résumé – a former California attorney general, service in the U.S. Senate and four years as an understudy for the most powerful position on the planet. Biden, in a July 11 news conference, called Harris "qualified to be president."

The ticket Democrats should push after Biden drops out

Harris would need a running mate. And the Democrats have a decent bench.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom looks ready and will certainly try his hand in four years. People who know Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro suggest that he has been gearing up for a presidential run since high school.

Even so, the Democrats need more than experience and ambition. They need a ticket that looks like history in the making if they’re going to turn the page on Biden’s slide to antiquity.

They should draft Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, 52, a big name popular in a critical swing state, easily elected to a second term in 2022 and legally barred from seeking a third.

Then Democrats should hype the hell out of a historic ticket of two women in their 50s while turning the tables on Trump, a 78-year-old known for slurring his words during rallies and wandering off on weird rhetorical tangents about sharks, Hannibal Lecter and other things that clearly frighten him.

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Trump's meandering speech while accepting his party's nomination at the Republican National Convention showed just how beatable he is again.

We were told he would push for unity. But Trump couldn't stick with that train of thought for even 20 minutes before lurching into more than 70 minutes more of his standard exaggerations and lies, stoking division with culture-war caricatures.

Picture two experienced women – tested surrogates for a Democratic platform that has scored big wins since 2022 on the Republican quest to stifle reproductive freedoms – facing off against Trump and his newbie vice presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.

Those are some debates I’d watch.

While Harris and Whitmer could hammer away at Trump for all the reasons voters rejected him in 2020, they could also dig into the shape-shifting Vance, who morphed from a well-regarded author who rejected Trumpism to an eager accomplice for authoritarianism.

At 39, they can cast Vance as untested, unready and unreliable.

Harris could bring a zeal that Biden has run out of

Biden’s disastrous debate in June and his ineffective attempts to recover sowed the seeds of his political end, in part, because he was incapable of refuting in real time the lies Trump told on stage with him.

Harris would bring a prosecutor’s zeal to fact-checking Trump, a candidate known to be rattled when challenged by a woman in just about any venue.

Vance’s position on abortion – he has rejected exceptions for rape and incest and wants a national ban – is even more strident than what Trump claims he wants. Imagine Whitmer pressing Vance on his suggestions that divorce, even in violent marriages, is some sort of trick pulled on America by the “sexual revolution.”

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Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying a Harris-Whitmer ticket jumps out to an immediate lead and leaves Trump and Vance in the dust. Trump right now looks to have a very good shot at winning a second term.

But Harris and Whitmer could upend that. Just the ticket change alone will prompt low-information voters who have not tuned into the presidential race so far to take notice.

That would draw more attention to debates, which could be platforms to reach voters who may be thinking 2024 is just too messy to mess with.

Potential attacks on both Democrats are pretty easy to predict

Biden put Harris in charge of border security. Trump has exploited illegal immigration, falsely casting it as the source of violent crime at a time when those crime rates are actually falling.

Harris would probably make a more cogent argument that Trump forced Republicans to kill a bipartisan immigration bill in the U.S. Senate that would have addressed many concerns on both sides of the aisle.

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Whitmer was the target of a 2020 kidnapping plot that resulted in criminal convictions for some of the men involved. That gave rise to the kind of far-right-wing conspiracy theories that Trump’s Republican Party now so eagerly taps into.

Who better to debunk conspiracy theories than a candidate targeted by an actual conspiracy?

Whitmer clearly has the GOP’s attention. Republican delegates from her state, speaking at their party’s convention in Milwaukee, singled her out for criticism while nominating Trump and Vance.

RNC speakers threw plenty of shade at Harris, too.

That’s a big platform, providing national attention to two Democrats not at the top of the ticket. The Republicans wouldn't be trash-talking Harris and Whitmer if they didn't see them as a threat.

Biden should step aside, touting his accomplishments in the White House and his role in opening the next chapter in the Democratic Party's history.

Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden, leave the race. Let Harris and Whitmer fight Trump