For Biden, a Decision to Step Aside Would Raise Another Question

President Biden has been saying some awfully nice things about Vice President Kamala Harris lately. “She’s not only a great vice president,” he told the audience at an N.A.A.C.P. convention last week. “She could be president of the United States.”

That, of course, is the point. She could. But will she? And most critically, perhaps, would Mr. Biden want her to be?

Even as the president confronts the agonizing decision of whether to drop his bid for a second term, he faces a second momentous choice if he does: Should he endorse his own vice president, effectively anointing her as the party’s nominee, or open the door to a short, intense contest to be decided weeks from now by Democratic convention delegates?

The question has absorbed Democratic politicians and strategists almost as much as the debate over whether he should step aside, a question framed largely through the lens of how they feel about Ms. Harris. Her supporters argue that she has earned the right to step in and that denying her would reek of sexism and racism. Her skeptics worry that she could not win in November and hope that a competition would surface a nominee with broader appeal.

The issue was infused with new urgency by reports that Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker who has been privately warning that Mr. Biden cannot beat former President Donald J. Trump, had told fellow members of her California delegation that she favored an open competition if the president did not run. While she considers herself a friend of Ms. Harris, Ms. Pelosi argued that the vice president would be strengthened by a contest.

“Most Democrats think it should be an open process,” former Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, said on Saturday. “What I would say is the best thing is for Kamala Harris is to win a contested convention fight because it would legitimize her candidacy. If it’s a backroom deal, you haven’t earned it and people want you to earn it. And once you earn it you get a huge bounce.”