It took nearly a half-century for Joe Biden to rise to the pinnacle of American politics, an ascent haunted by tragedy and capped by triumph. The fall, in comparison, felt brutally fast.
Just weeks after a disastrous debate spurred a dramatic revolt within his own party, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the 46th President of the United States, caved on July 21 to concerns among Democrats about his dwindling re-election chances, dropping out of the contest against former President Donald Trump. The dramatic decision upends the 2024 race and sets the stage for a frantic scramble to Election Day.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden wrote in a letter posted on social media a little before 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. “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 to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” In a separate post issued minutes later, Biden threw his support for the Democratic nomination behind Vice President Kamala Harris.
Since the June 27 debate against Trump deepened questions about the President’s mental acuity and his ability to campaign and govern, dozens of the party’s elected officials had urged Biden, 81, to withdraw. Biden stubbornly defied those calls, bristling at the uprising and determined to forge ahead. He was 100% all in, aides insisted—until suddenly he wasn’t.
To understand the deliberations of the President as he weighed whether to step aside, it helps to trace the path that led him here. No sooner had Biden been elected to the Senate in 1972 than he suffered the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash. Fifteen years later, his first run for the White House ended abruptly after he delivered a debate argument pilfered from a British politician. As the plagiarism scandal snowballed, Biden’s inner circle—many of whom still occupy positions in his orbit today—urged him to exit. Even now, Biden has regrets that he heeded his advisers over his family, who urged him not to quit.
The experience colored Biden’s contempt for both the press and his critics. He sees the elitists in Washington working against him. To bow to the calls for him to end a storied career would be tantamount to admitting he wasn’t up for the task, and he believed he was. For Biden, it meant reliving 1987 all over again.
But Biden’s dismissal of the Democrats’ doubts as a Beltway phenomenon was inaccurate. Americans long had doubts about Biden’s age. An Associated Press–NORC poll last summer found 77% of adults believed Biden was too old to govern effectively through a second term. The debate with Trump cemented that perception. Democrats were shaken to watch Biden stumble his way through, mixing up names and figures, losing his train of thought, failing to parry Trump’s lies or give coherent descriptions of his own accomplishments and vision for a second term.
Unable to push him out, many frustrated Democrats stayed silent, either too timid to declare the President could no longer lead the ticket or unsure whether Harris would fare better. But in the days and weeks that followed, a growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers and donors sounded the alarm, warning that Biden was likely to lose in November, potentially dragging down the party’s candidates across the country and handing the House and Senate to Republicans.
Biden insisted he would stay in the race and worked overtime to shore up pillars of support within the party, from union leaders to the Congressional Black Caucus. For a moment, it looked like Biden had quelled the dissent. Then his longtime ally Nancy Pelosi gave the ditch-Biden effort fresh momentum. “It’s up to the President to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short,” the 84-year-old former House Speaker said of her 81-year-old President, speaking as if Biden hadn’t been promising to stay in the race. It was a remarkable diptych—one octogenarian determined to cling to power, even when his capabilities had flagged; another who had voluntarily surrendered it, and yet retained the clout to clip the President of the United States’ campaign when he became a political liability.
As the party fretted, a string of appearances designed to showcase Biden’s strength did little to quell doubts. Polls showed him trailing across battleground states. Prominent donors began abandoning him or recalibrating their investments. Discussion of his apparent cognitive decline dominated the news. Stan Greenberg, who was Bill Clinton’s pollster and who had previously touted Biden’s re-election chances, repeatedly petitioned the White House to take his current peril more seriously. Other party strategists were similarly concerned that the campaign was ignoring a crisis situation for both the President and the down-ballot candidates across the country whose fortunes were tethered to his. Reliably Democratic states were suddenly trending purple.
Then shots rang out across a fairground in Butler, Pa., on July 13, and a gunman’s attempt to kill Donald Trump sent shock waves through the country.
Moments before Trump was shot, Biden had slipped into St. Edmond Catholic Church near Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach boardwalk just as Saturday-evening services were slated to start. Soon, news broke of the shooting. Biden was hustled out of the building, a black baseball hat over his shock of white hair, to receive word that his predecessor had been the target of an apparent assassination attempt.
Biden sprang into action and set into motion his return to Washington. He got his national-security team on the phone and peppered aides with questions. He soon spoke with Trump, and had addressed the nation three times by the following night. His campaign halted political activities in deference to the sensitivity of the moment, even as aides acknowledged that his opponent’s staring down a bullet would only intensify the MAGA movement’s ardor and maybe strengthen Trump’s advantage in the race.
The Trump shooting barely put the debate over Biden’s age on pause. Both House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and his Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, had told Biden directly that their caucuses harbored deep concerns about his candidacy. Pelosi, too, told Biden that his refusal to bow out jeopardized Democrats’ ability to hold the Senate and retake the House.
Then, during a campaign swing through Nevada, Biden was diagnosed with COVID-19, and retreated to his beach house in Rehoboth to convalesce. To a tightened circle of advisers, he blasted Democratic donors for trying to push him out of the race, stewed at the lack of credit accorded to his achievements, seethed at the disrespect from purported allies and old friends. But even close allies knew he had all but run out of road, and was beginning to mull an exit in earnest.
Buoyed by the iconic images of his near assassination and show of strength in response, Trump emerged from the Republican convention ascendant. An Associated Press poll released that same day found that 7 in 10 voters thought Biden should withdraw from the race—including 65% of Democrats. Party leaders were no longer willing to muffle their panic.
Now Biden’s decision to bow out resets the race. Trump’s campaign, tooled to mock, deride, and defeat Biden, is scrambling to rethink their approach to the electoral map. Democrats will try to capitalize on the fresh start, banking that a new candidate at the top of their ticket will energize the base. But who that might be is an open question.
Even before Biden endorsed his running mate to top the new Democratic ticket, the easiest path forward for the party was to swap in Harris, who quickly announced that she would seek the nomination. Passing over the first woman and first person of color to fill the vice presidency would be politically tricky for a party that relies on those constituencies at the ballot box. Unlike other replacements, Harris would face no trouble tapping into the ticket’s war chest. Biden has said he wouldn’t have picked Harris for Vice President if he didn’t think she would make a strong President.
But party bigwigs are eager to start fresh. For weeks, some have been drawing up and circulating notional plans for a truncated nominating contest that would culminate at the party’s convention in Chicago in August. The Democrats, and America, are in uncharted territory now. / With reporting by Eric Cortellessa
