Biden makes stunning decision to pull out of 2024 race

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President Biden has decided he will end his reelection campaign, he said in a statement released Sunday, a decision certain to send shock waves through the political world, following a stumbling debate performance that widely alarmed Democrats about the 81-year-old president’s fitness for office and ability to defeat former president Donald Trump.

“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,” Biden said in a statement.

Biden’s exit leaves his party in a virtually unprecedented position with months until the Nov. 5 election. Vice President Harris, a former senator from California, would bring her own liabilities to the race if she jumps in. Her approval ratings have largely mirrored the decline of Biden’s since 2021, and her own campaign in the 2020 presidential primary fell apart before voting began.

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 U.S. 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 even 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 1988 – 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.

Biden stood out in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary as an older, moderate Democrat who spoke fondly of bipartisanship. His campaign initially struggled to match his more charismatic rivals, but Democratic voters ultimately accepted Biden’s argument that he was most likely to defeat Trump – which he did, recapturing the three crucial states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and adding Georgia and Arizona.

But Trump refused to admit he had lost, even as Biden took office in 2021 pledging to heal the “soul of the nation.” A country already in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic was further jarred by Trump’s efforts to overturn the results, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Running for a second term, Biden pitched himself as uniquely equipped to defeat Trump after doing so in 2020, facing minimal opposition in the Democratic primaries even as voter concerns lingered about his age. His campaign focused heavily on abortion rights, promising to restore the federal right to an abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

While some Democrats were initially concerned that Biden’s reelection campaign was off to a slow start, he earned broad acclaim inside the party for his State of the Union address in February. During the speech, Biden aggressively pitched his record, drew sharp contrasts with Trump and pushed back after some GOP lawmakers interrupted him.

It was the kind of vigorous performance that Democrats had hoped to see months later in his first debate against Trump. Instead, the standoff in Atlanta marked the beginning of the end for Biden’s reelection campaign.