US President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid, bowing to relentless pressure from Democrats to drop out over fears he was too feeble to beat Donald Trump and injecting fresh chaos into the 2024 election.
Biden, 81, said he would serve out his term but endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, to take his place as the Democratic nominee, praising her as an “extraordinary partner”. Harris accepted the president’s backing, saying in a statement Sunday afternoon, “my intention is to earn and win this nomination”.
Biden’s historic exit effectively moves his five-decade career in Washington toward a close and cedes the stage to a new generation of Democratic Party leaders.
The decision kicks off a three-month sprint to the November general election, in which Democrats will face the task of uniting around a new nominee with just weeks before their nominating convention and rapidly making up ground against the front-runner Trump, who survived an assassination attempt just last weekend.
“While it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden said in a statement he posted to X.
“It’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this,” Biden said in a subsequent post offering his “full support and endorsement” to Harris.
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There were early signs that senior Democrats were coalescing around Harris as the nominee. Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, liberal stalwart Senator Elizabeth Warren and several battleground-state lawmakers all threw their support behind the vice president.
“I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite our nation — to defeat Donald Trump,” Harris said.
Former President Barack Obama issued a statement praising Biden, but is not planning to endorse any candidate until after someone has secured the nomination, similar to his approach in previous elections, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
It wasn’t clear until Sunday that Biden would relent to the pressure from allies — at one point he said only the “Lord Almighty” could get him to stand down.
Biden held multiple calls with Harris on Sunday but only informed his senior staff of his decision minutes before the announcement went out on social media, according to a people familiar with the matter. On Saturday night, the message to his campaign team was that the president was moving full speed ahead with his re-election bid. Most White House and campaign staff did not know of his choice before the X post was published, one of the people said.
The first president in more than half a century not to seek re-election, Biden had until now repeatedly rejected calls to drop his bid in favour of a younger candidate.
Those appeals grew stronger following a disastrous June 27 debate performance that crystallised doubts among Democratic leaders, donors and voters that he could defeat Trump and serve another term. Biden’s campaign was dealt another blow when he tested positive for Covid-19 last week, forcing him off the campaign trail just as he was trying to regain momentum.
The president’s announcement prompted calls from Republicans for him to resign.
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President. He must resign the office immediately. November 5 cannot arrive soon enough,” US House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement.
Biden leaves a race where polls show Trump’s lead is growing, especially after the Republican candidate was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13. Trump told CNN in an interview Sunday that he believes Harris will be easier to defeat, and said Biden will be remembered as “the worst president in the history of our country”.
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Trump cemented his control of the GOP at the convention in Milwaukee, naming Ohio Senator JD Vance, a 39-year-old populist firebrand, as his running mate.
Democratic angst
Democrats grew increasingly fearful that Biden’s weakened state would allow Republicans to take control of Congress, as well as the White House. Around three dozen Democratic lawmakers publicly called on the president to step aside.
From foreign capitals to financial markets, the prospect of a Trump victory in November is seen as increasingly likely, bringing policy shifts from sweeping import tariffs and immigration limits to a pullback from treaty commitments that could transform the global economy and the US role in the world. In prediction markets, Trump appeared to be the clear favorite after the announcement.
Investors have already taken to “Trump trades”, betting on more trade barriers and potentially higher inflation.
Democrats are hoping that Harris — the first female, Black and Asian vice president who is popular with key parts of the party’s base — will be able to revive their chances in November.
Some polls in recent weeks showed her performing better against Trump than the president. She has seen her standing with swing-state voters improve after a shaky start to her tenure in office that saw Republicans pounce on gaffes and seize on her unpopularity with the electorate to attack Biden’s re-election hopes.
Still, she remains untested at the top of the ticket, having pulled the plug on her 2020 presidential run before a single vote was cast. Harris and the party face turmoil if other heavyweights decide to try to seek the nomination.
Governors Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois were seen as potential 2024 challengers before deferring to Biden. Whitmer does not intend to challenge Harris for the nomination, according to a person familiar. Newsom also does not plan to run for the nomination, according to CBS News. Other Democrats, though, could yet mount bids to become the party’s candidate in November.
Legal challenge
Republicans in recent days have suggested they could mount legal challenges to keep an alternate candidate off the ballot. Johnson, the House speaker, said at a Politico event on the sidelines of the GOP convention that “small armies of lawyers” would be needed to sort out the legal ramifications of any change in the Democratic ticket.
“I think they have got legal hurdles in some of these states, and it’ll be litigated, I would expect, on the ground there, and they will have to sort through that,” he added Sunday in an interview with CNN. “They have got a real problem.”
The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, had said it was plotting possible legal challenges before the announcement.
“We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside, either now or before the election, and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated,” Mike Howell, executive Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, said in a statement. “We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are followed.”
Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita was more circumspect when asked about how the campaign would respond at a CNN-Politico event at the convention, noting legal challenges to Democratic efforts to remove a nominated candidate from the ballot in a 2014 US Senate race in Kansas.
“We are certainly not going to tip our hand on what we’re going to do,” he said.
Historic exit
The last time a US president declined to seek re-election was in 1968. Fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson — weakened by divisions over the Vietnam War and facing powerful primary challengers — opted against seeking another term. But his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, went on to lose to Richard Nixon, a potentially worrisome omen for Democrats this year.
For Biden, the decision to pull out of the race is a stunning setback at the end of a half-century-long career in public service that took him to the pinnacle of power and allowed him to boast that he was the only candidate to beat Trump.
But after stumbling through a debate in which he repeatedly seemed to lose his train of thought, the oldest president in US history was unable to quell the explosion of worries about his fitness and mental acuity. Biden’s stepped-up campaign of interviews and public appearances in the weeks that followed brought new gaffes, only underlining the alarm. Major donors suspended support.
Even before the debate, Biden was struggling with historically low approval ratings fueled by Americans’ angst over his handling of the economy. High prices for housing and groceries have hammered US households, overshadowing the White House’s efforts to tout solid job growth and new investments on infrastructure and domestic manufacturing — centerpieces of the president’s economic agenda.
Biden’s efforts to cast the race as one in which the fate of US democracy was at stake struggled to win over voters, as efforts to prosecute Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election became mired in legal delays and reversals. The wave of public sympathy for Trump after the assassination attempt also complicated Democrats’ campaign.
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