The president’s decision plunges the Democratic Party into an unprecedented scramble to choose a new nominee at the 11th hour.
President Biden will end his reelection campaign, he said in a statement released Sunday, sending shock waves through the political world and plunging the Democratic Party into an unprecedented scramble to choose a new nominee to face former president Donald Trump.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden, 81, wrote in a letter he posted to social media 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.”
In a separate social media post Sunday, Biden endorsed his vice president, Kamala D. Harris, to replace him as the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer ahead of its national convention Aug. 19-22.
“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” Biden said in a post shared on X. “Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”
In a statement Sunday, Harris said she would be seeking to “unite the Democratic Party” and win the presidency.
“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said.
Harris, 59, is the first woman, Black person and Asian American to serve as vice president, and now she has the opportunity to become the country’s first female president. Several other top Democrats, including more than a dozen members of Congress, former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, quickly offered their endorsements of Harris as well.
Still, Biden’s exit leaves his party in an almost unprecedented position just months ahead of the Nov. 5 election. Harris, a former senator from California, would bring her own liabilities to the race against Trump, whom Democrats consider an existential threat to democracy. Her approval ratings have largely mirrored the decline of Biden’s since 2021, and her campaign in the 2020 presidential primary fell apart before voting began. Some lawmakers have advocated for a more open process to allow other potential candidates to compete for the nomination, further highlighting the tumultuous impact of Biden’s decision. Notably, former president Barack Obama did not endorse Harris in his statement, which praised Biden and suggested that Democrats would ultimately find “an outstanding nominee.”
Biden’s allies and critics responded to his announcement by publicly gearing themselves up for a new, unpredictable battle for the White House.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who had privately told Biden that his continued candidacy would harm Democrats’ chances, praised Biden for stepping aside.
“Joe Biden has not only been a great president and a great legislative leader but he is a truly amazing human being,” Schumer said in an emailed statement. The two men spoke Sunday afternoon, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private discussion.
Trump attacked Biden on Sunday and pledged to undo much of his legacy in a post to his social media platform, Truth Social.
“Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve — And never was!” Trump wrote. “We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly.”
Several Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), called on Biden to resign the presidency, arguing that if he could not continue his campaign, he should not remain in office.
Biden’s announcement came as a shock to many of his aides and advisers, some of whom had appeared on television Sunday morning and insisted he was staying in the race. Biden, who is isolating in Rehoboth Beach, Del., with a case of covid, informed Harris, his chief of staff Jeff Zients and campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon of his decision on Sunday afternoon, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. He told his senior White House staff of the decision at 1:45 p.m. The president’s statement was posted to X at 1:46 p.m.
“Last night, it was full speed ahead,” the person said, adding that Biden finalized his decision late Saturday with a small group of close aides.
The Democrats’ predicament — a candidate dropping out after sweeping mostly unchallenged through the party primaries to become the presumptive nominee — is unknown in the modern era. It caps weeks of delicate strategizing by party leaders on how to dislodge Biden, a proudly stubborn figure known to bristle at those who write him off. It signals the conclusion of a remarkable half-century political career that began when Biden won election to the Senate in 1972 as one of the youngest-ever senators and will now conclude in January with his service as the oldest-ever president.
The Democrats’ process for finalizing their nominee will be hurried, untested and fraught with deep uncertainty and the potential for further intraparty turmoil. The Democratic National Convention is in four weeks in Chicago, although Democrats had initially planned to formally nominate Biden in a “virtual roll call” before the in-person gathering.
The president will leave office with notable accomplishments, especially for a one-term president in an era of deep division. He pushed through bills on infrastructure, climate change, health care, gun control and the semiconductor industry. He pulled the United States out of Afghanistan, rebuilt American alliances and led a coalition to defend Ukraine against Russia. His staunch support for Israel in the Gaza war, however, sparked condemnation at home and abroad.
Many Democrats considered Biden’s June 27 presidential debate against Trump shocking and catastrophic, as Biden sometimes struggled to complete sentences or marshal his thoughts. The president and his aides insisted he was staying in the race, likening the moment to other occasions in his long career when he had been counted out. But a combination of dire polls, skittish fundraisers and Democratic defections ultimately made the president’s position untenable.
Undergirding Democrats’ urgency to replace Biden is the fear of another Trump presidency, which many in the party believe would be uniquely destructive.
In abandoning his reelection campaign, Biden joins two other incumbent presidents in modern history who chose not to seek reelection: President Harry S. Truman in 1952 and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Those presidents’ announcements, however, came months earlier and gave their party far more time to regroup for the general election. Even so, Democrats lost both elections.
Also, Truman and Johnson had both already served more than one term, having come to office upon the death of their predecessor. Truman, taking office after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945, had completed nearly two full terms.
Voters have long told pollsters they were concerned about Biden’s age — it was even an issue in his 2020 campaign — but the debate was an inflection point, releasing a wave of Democratic anxiety that the Biden campaign had previously been able to keep in check.
Biden’s advisers had hoped to use the early debate to focus voters’ attention on Trump’s record and policies, but the plan backfired spectacularly. For much of the roughly 90-minute event, Biden spoke in a raspy voice, struggled to find his words and gave meandering answers on issues that played to his strengths, such as abortion rights.
Biden and his aides quickly acknowledged that the performance was disappointing, but they downplayed it as a “bad night” and said the president had a cold. That did little to appease Democrats who viewed the performance as reflecting a far deeper problem and had already been on edge about his chances against Trump, who has led in many battleground state polls — a remarkable rebound from his disgraced exit from office four years earlier.
On July 2, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) became the first House Democrat to publicly call on Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee, invoking Johnson’s decision 56 years earlier. “Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw,” Doggett said. “President Biden should do the same.”
That kicked off an agonizing stretch for Democrats when every day or so, another congressional Democrat would issue a statement declaring their affection for Biden and admiration for his accomplishments, but adding that it was time for him to “pass the torch.”
A native of Scranton, Pa., Biden entered politics more than five decades ago, winning a seat on the New Castle County Council in Delaware in 1970. He first ran for Senate in 1972, defeating a Republican incumbent, J. Caleb Boggs, in a scrappy, underdog campaign.
Tragedy struck Biden’s life within weeks of his Senate election, when his wife, Neilia, and 1-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident while Christmas shopping in Delaware. His two young sons, Beau and Hunter, who were also in the car, were seriously injured. Biden pushed ahead, plunging into life in the Senate, raising his boys and getting remarried to his current wife, Jill — the first chapter in a long biography of tragedy and recovery.
In the Senate, Biden built a 36-year career as a self-styled champion of the working class and unapologetic bipartisan dealmaker. He chaired the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees, rising in stature as he presided over two Supreme Court confirmation hearings, including Justice Clarence Thomas’s contentious confirmation in 1991, and helped write the 1994 crime bill that was a priority of President Bill Clinton.
Biden had long harbored White House ambitions. His first bid — in the 1988 campaign — flamed out due to a plagiarism scandal, and he did not make it far when he ran again in 2008, vying in a Democratic primary that ultimately produced Barack Obama as the nominee.
But Obama, then a freshman senator, tapped Biden to be his running mate, looking to reassure voters that his administration would have deep legislative and foreign policy experience. Biden was happy to fill the role, serving dutifully as a liaison to Capitol Hill and regular visitor to the Middle East, especially Iraq.
A rare moment when Biden briefly diverged from Obama’s positions came in 2012, when Biden expressed support for same-sex marriage in a TV interview even though Obama had not embraced that policy. The president did so days later.
As Obama’s presidency wrapped up in 2016, Biden agonized over whether to run to succeed him, but he ultimately opted against it as he continued to grieve after another personal tragedy: His elder son, Beau, had been diagnosed with brain cancer and died in 2015 at age 46.
Trump then shocked the political world by defeating Hillary Clinton for the presidency, sending the Democrats into a brooding exile and dramatically raising the stakes for the 2020 campaign. Biden later said he was inspired to join that race after watching Trump decline to unequivocally condemn a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, in 2017.
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