Fellow Democrats Force Joe Biden Out of His Reelection Bid
After facing weeks of falling poll numbers and pressure from fellow Democrats and liberal donors, Biden ended his reelection campaign. He subsequently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
When he was campaigning for office four years ago, President Joe Biden promised to be "a bridge" to the next generation of leaders.
That bridge will be four years shorter than Biden may have planned.
Biden, the oldest president in American history at age 81, announced Sunday that he will not seek reelection this year. The announcement ends weeks of speculation about the future of Biden's campaign—and it could kick off a mad scramble to replace Biden on the top of the ticket, with the Democratic National Convention (DNC) approaching quickly and the general election less than four months away.
"It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president," Biden wrote in a letter to the country released Sunday afternoon. "And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term."
Though Biden wrote that he will continue to serve as president, he is likely to face further questions about his fitness for office. He said he would explain his decision in more detail "later this week."
In a subsequent announcement, Biden seemed to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. "My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it's been the best decision I've made," Biden posted on X, formerly Twitter. "Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year."*
Biden's physical and mental decline had been the subject of online speculation for months, but the evidence became impossible for many Democrats—and the media—to ignore after Biden turned in a disastrous debate last month against former President Donald Trump.
Even before the debate, polls showed many voters believed Biden, who will turn 82 in November, was too old to effectively serve another four years as president. Biden's campaign hoped to use the June 27 debate against former President Donald Trump to quell those whispers. The opposite occurred, as Biden struggled to articulate his own answers, seemed to lose his train of thought more than a few times, and showed none of the vim and vigor that had defined his long political career.
In the days after the debate, the White House's attempts to explain away Biden's poor performance seemed to raise other red flags. For instance, Biden said that a recent international trip was to blame for his unfocused appearance at the debate. "I wasn't very smart. I decided to travel around the world a couple of times," Biden told donors at a Virginia fundraiser in early July, according to Politico. "I didn't listen to my staff and I came back and then I almost fell asleep on stage."
But the president returned from that trip on June 16—a full 11 days before the debate. If it takes Biden more than a week to recover from jet lag, that's a potentially more serious indication of his physical and mental decline than anything that happened on the debate stage in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, after months of downplaying reports of the president's struggles, mainstream outlets like The New York Times and CNN were suddenly inundating readers and viewers with reports about Biden's day-to-day struggles. Biden's poll numbers took a hit after the debate—in a Times/Siena College poll taken in the days after the debate, Trump extended his lead to six points among likely voters and eight points among registered voters.
In the wake of the debate, Biden's campaign struggled to reassure donors that his poor showing against Trump was nothing more than a bad night. It didn't work. "If you wake Joe Biden at three-o-clock in the morning and ask him who's president, does he get it right?" one anonymous Democratic donor said during a phone call on July 2, according to Semafor.
Biden remained defiant. In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos on July 5, Biden said he'd continue running unless "the Lord Almighty" removed him from the race. A week later, while maintaining that he would not stand aside, Biden told reporters that he'd suspend his campaign only if staffers told him there was no path to victory. "No one is saying that," the president added. "No poll says that."
But the polls did show that Biden's path to victory was getting perilously narrow, even at this early date. By the second week of July, several prominent Democrats in Congress had joined the chorus calling for Biden to step aside. That drumbeat only got louder throughout the middle of month, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) reportedly delivering blunt messages to the president about his reelection prospects and the damage that his sinking campaign could do to other Democrats.
This week, as the Republicans were in the midst of their convention, the dam seemed to break. A poll released that day showed that nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters believed Biden should exit the race. Reports emerged that Democratic voters had, as The New York Times put it, "slammed their wallets closed" on Biden's campaign, with fundraising totals plummeting to about half of June's totals.
No one can outrun time, and Biden eventually acknowledged reality. In the letter released Sunday, Biden expressed "the deepest gratitude" to those who had supported his reelection bid.
This is the first time in modern American history that an incumbent president has exited a reelection campaign at this late stage. The only remotely comparable example would be President Lyndon B. Johnson, who ended his campaign in 1968 while the primaries were still ongoing. The Democratic Party, the executive branch of the federal government, and the country as a whole are very much in uncharted territory after Biden's announcement.
Some of the most important questions—like whether Biden is fit to finish his term in office, or who will be the Democratic nominee on the ballot in November—are still unanswered. Several prominent Democrats have called for a truncated democratic process to choose a new nominee before the convention, though it remains unclear how that would or could work. Still, those statements make it clear that there's at least some resistance to the idea of anointing Kamala Harris as Biden's natural successor.
But we can say with certainty that this mess is the fault of Biden's closest advisers and inner circle at the White House: people who tried for months to hide the president's physical decline until it became impossible to do so. Biden should have faced the media more than he did. He should not have skipped the traditional Super Bowl Sunday interview. Shielding Biden from the media for so long was an attempt to mislead the public, plain and simple—and it likely made Biden's debate performance all the more shocking, which means it failed as a political strategy too.
The Democratic Party also failed. There should have been a robust primary campaign that would have put Biden under the microscope. Regardless of what happens between now and the Democratic convention, the outcome would have been more fair and democratic if it had played out over several months rather than a few weeks.
Biden made what seems like the right decision for the country. But by waiting so long to make that decision—waiting that was enabled by people who surely knew better—he sowed the potential for an unprecedented level of political chaos.
UPDATE: This post was updated to include Biden's endorsement of Harris as his successor.
