The 2024 presidential election featured an unprecedented, last-minute change in a major party candidate when the Democrats replaced Joe Biden with Kamala Harris at the top of their ticket. How do voters view a party’s exercise of this power, particularly in terms of democratic legitimacy? We use a well-timed survey experiment to get leverage on how different approaches to replacing a candidate are viewed by a party’s members. Our survey, in the field after Biden’s poor performance in this debate with Donald Trump, but before his decision to drop out of the race, tests a variety of scenarios, as well as the effect of reminding respondents that Biden was the choice of a democratic primary process. We find that respondents supported some kind of process to replace Biden, and that they care more about evidence that their co-partisans support the eventual candidate than they do about the institutional procedures. We supplement this analysis with similar questions asked of delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention.