President Joe Biden said in a statement posted on his social media account he is dropping out of the presidential race — a historic decision that throws the 2024 election into upheaval and marks the latest exit of a presidential incumbent in modern history.
The extraordinary move by Biden to decline the nomination will send shockwaves through the Democratic Party, triggering a frenzied effort to replace him just weeks before the party’s nominating convention. In a followup post on X, Biden endorsed Vice President Harris to be the party’s nominee.
“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 wrote. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”
The president’s endorsement is likely to shut down any serious competition from other Democrats to be the nominee, clearing the path for the vice president to be the 2024 Democratic candidate.
The president’s decision is a stunning development in an election already rocked by an assassination attempt on the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump.
Biden, 81, had come under intense and mounting pressure from fellow Democrats to step aside after a disastrous debate performance in June, when he appeared feeble and confused. Biden’s standing in battleground state polls dipped following the debate, heightening concerns about the president’s viability in the general election against Trump.
But Biden and his inner circle of trusted aides had remained confident in his path to victory, a deep-seated belief rooted in his five decades of ups and downs in politics and the conviction that he has repeatedly defied expectations after being counted out. As party elders and former Senate colleagues rejected his candidacy, the president grew angry, only begrudgingly coming to accept that too large a swath of his own party had irrevocably lost confidence in his bid.
Biden said he would serve out the remainder of his term, which ends in January.
No modern president has stepped back from an election this late in the race. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson pulled out of his reelection campaign in March of that year. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who won the nomination, went on to lose to Richard Nixon that fall.
Sunday’s announcement stunned White House and campaign aides, who were blindsided by Biden’s decision to drop out. Many of them, including some senior aides, found out by reading the letter that Biden posted on X.
“We’re all finding out by tweet,” said one Democrat familiar with the immediate reaction. “None of us understand what’s happening.”
In a sign of the abruptness of Biden’s decision, the campaign blasted out a fundraising email for “Joe and Kamala” at 1:54 p.m. — eight minutes after Biden announced he was stepping aside.
Anita Dunn, Biden’s senior adviser, held an all-staff call for communications aides soon after Biden made his announcement that he was no longer running for reelection, according to multiple White House aides. One said Dunn “reassured everyone who had been out front saying this wasn’t happening that they were correct because the decision came down late.”
She called on staffers to focus on defending and protecting Harris, who Biden had just endorsed.
Biden’s decision to back Harris will be a significant boost to the former California senator that could also head off a divisive fight for the nomination. Some Democrats have been pushing alternatives, including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — all of whom will now be immediately pressed to answer whether they will throw their hats into the ring.
But Biden’s endorsement of Harris as his successor on the ticket will put pressure on the party to coalesce behind her and pivot to a general election less than four months away. With the primaries long since over, the nomination is no longer in the hands of voters, but instead up to about 4,000 delegates at Democrats’ national party convention next month.
Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), whose endorsement saved Biden’s primary bid in 2020, threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris in an interview with POLITICO shortly after Biden announced his decision.
“I made it very clear that I was supporting him as long as he was in the race,” Clyburn said. “Looks like he’s changed his mind, and so I’ll change mine and I will be all in for Kamala Harris.”
For weeks, Biden and his campaign tried to soothe fears about the viability of his candidacy and rebut anxieties that he was too old to run for a second term. He sat for two national broadcast interviews and dialed into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to slam the “elites” calling for him to get out. He sent a letter to House Democrats, insisting he wasn’t stepping down. He delivered complex answers on foreign policy during a high-stakes NATO press conference. He cheered along with chants of “Don’t you quit” at a rally in Michigan.
“No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving,” Biden told his own campaign staff the week after the debate. He told donors the week after he was “done talking about the debate.”
But damaging reports on Biden’s health and mental acuity piled up. And even as the president insisted, over and over, that he was staying in the race, Democrats continued to insist, just as strongly, that Biden had a decision to make.
As the pressure campaign crescendoed, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned Biden that his candidacy imperiled Democrats’ chances to hold the Senate and flip the House in separate, one-on-one meetings. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also asked Biden to make a decision about stepping down soon, as he was dragging down the party.
Strategists to top potential Democratic presidential candidates fielded pleas from donors for their candidates to step forward as an alternative to Biden. Major Democratic donors started to withhold their cash, freezing out the campaign’s coffers, and grassroots fundraising also took a hit.
Actor George Clooney, a major Democratic donor who hosted a glitzy fundraiser for him in June, said Biden shouldn’t run for reelection in a New York Times op-ed, which reverberated through major donor circles from New York City to Los Angeles.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats privately whispered about their fears of Biden’s candidacy, anxiously waiting for poll numbers to come back from their own districts. But as the days ticked by, and Biden stayed in the race, those concerns started leaking out into the public. Democratic elected officials started calling for Biden to exit the race.
By the time Biden announced his decision to step aside, 36 congressional Democrats had called for Biden to bow out of the race, many urging him to “pass the torch” to a new generation of leaders.
Pelosi nudged Biden publicly and pushed him privately. Pelosi told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” one of Biden’s favorite cable programs, that “time is running short” for Biden to decide on running, declining to directly answer whether the president had her support. And on a call with the president, Pelosi confronted Biden over his poor polling, telling him his poor standing was dragging down the entire party.
Pelosi allies, including Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is expected to win a Senate race this fall, and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), called for Biden to step aside in quick succession. A famed political tactician, Pelosi stressed the need for an open convention — to prevent blowback from the optics of a coronation for Harris — to other California Democrats before Biden had even decided to step aside.
The assassination attempt on Trump, when a gunman grazed the former president’s ear with a bullet and killed an attendee behind him, bought Biden a brief reprieve. But days later, word leaked out about Biden’s meetings with Jeffries and Schumer, in which both warned him that his candidacy threatened the party’s chances of winning majorities in Congress. House Democrats called for the Democratic National Committee to delay or stop a plan to virtually nominate Biden by the end of July.
Biden’s own metrics for staying in the presidential race shifted. In early July, he told ABC News that only if the “Lord Almighty comes down” would he step aside. Then, at a post-NATO summit press conference, Biden said he’d reconsider his campaign if his staff told him that Harris was in a better position to beat Trump than him.
By Wednesday, Biden told BET News he’d reevaluate it if he “had some medical condition that emerged.”
That night, the White House said the president had Covid, and he’d be isolating at his Delaware shore home.
For Biden, whose first presidential campaign was 36 years ago, his sudden retirement could define his political legacy. Dating back to 2019, he campaigned on being the best candidate to drive — and keep — Trump out of the White House. He defined his campaign as an effort to prevent Trump from a second term that he portrays as nothing less than an existential threat to American democracy.
After clinching the Democratic nomination in 2020, Biden pledged to be a “bridge” to a new “generation of leaders,” appearing on stage with Harris, Whitmer and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), all of whom are in their 50s. But better-than-expected midterm results in 2022, coupled with his own belief that he was the only candidate who could beat Trump, cemented Biden’s decision to run for a second term, despite his age.
But his decision to quit just weeks before he was set to receive his party’s nomination acknowledges, with Trump leading in the polls, that Biden is no longer able to stop Trump.
