President Biden is historic An unusual decision on Sunday Less than four months after being declared the presumptive Democratic nominee, and just days after his disastrous debate performance, he announced he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race.
The 81-year-old president withdraws from the race The debate, held just months before Election Day, came after the incumbent Trump consternates Democratic donors and strategists with his frail and sometimes incoherent speech.
Biden’s withdrawal is expected to lead to a more chaotic race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The president cannot choose his successor by executive order in the 2024 presidential election.
The roughly 4,000 delegates who have pledged their support for Biden have just about five weeks to field a new candidate, with a virtual roll call to formally nominate Biden expected to be finalized by Aug. 7 before in-person deliberations begin at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
So far, Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and former first lady Michelle Obama have been mentioned as possible candidates to replace Biden.
Harris, 59, said: Legal Restrictions The Biden-Harris campaign is in conflict over the transfer of campaign funds, and many Democrats have questioned her viability in the general election given that her favorability ratings are often lower than Biden’s.
Biden chose to surrender after a series of embarrassing revelations that party leaders had no confidence in his ability to win and amid growing resentment among rank-and-file Democrats who fear they too would lose if Biden were to lose by a landslide.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) are among those to have warned Biden about the bleak polling data, while former President Barack Obama has reportedly confided to allies that he has lost confidence in Biden’s trajectory for another term.
The president will run for re-election in April 2023 and has asked voters to give him another four-year term to “finish the job.”
Biden, already the oldest president in US history at the time, chose to seek a second term despite plummeting approval ratings, with polls at the time showing that a majority of Americans, including Democrats, did not want him to serve another four years in office.
The president’s 15 months on the campaign trail did not allay voters’ concerns about his age and mental health: A second term could have meant Biden would have turned 86 before his term ended.
Special counsel Robert Hur noted in his February report on Biden’s handling of classified White House documents that he decided not to recommend criminal charges against the president because jurors might view Biden as “an elderly man with a frail memory.”
The scathing report said that during his interview with Heo, Biden was unable to recall his time as vice president in the Obama administration or the death of his son, Beau Biden.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released the day before Biden’s failed debate with Trump showed that 70% of respondents felt Biden was too old to be commander in chief.
The June 27 showdown with Trump, 78, marked the death knell for his campaign.
Biden’s debate performance, which included looking down at the podium for 10 seconds, losing his train of thought, and then declaring that he had “defeated Medicare,” caused panic among mainstream Democrats.
The day after the debate, editorialists at the liberal New York Times called on Biden to step down as the presumptive Democratic nominee, calling the president “admirable” but “a shadow of a great public servant.”
“He understood that he needed to address long-standing public concerns about his mental competency, and that he needed to do so as soon as possible. The truth Mr. Biden must now face is that he himself failed the test,” the Gray Lady concluded.
Actor George Clooney, who hosted a $30 million fundraiser for Biden in Los Angeles in June, also called on Biden to give up the nomination.
“It shocks me to say this, but the Joe Biden I sat with at a fundraiser three weeks ago was not the ‘big’ Joe Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote in an op-ed for The Times. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debates.”
The day after the disastrous results, Biden insisted he had the strength to remain in office.
“Folks, I take this as Biden: If I didn’t believe I could do this job with all my heart and soul, I wouldn’t be running again, because, quite frankly, the stakes are too high,” Biden told North Carolina voters, indicating he had no intention of dropping out of the race.
Before Biden, no sitting president had ever formally announced his candidacy, actively campaigned, won the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination and then dropped out of a reelection race.
Only a handful of sitting presidents have chosen not to seek a second term in office, including Lyndon B. Johnson, Harry S. Truman, Calvin Coolidge, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Buchanan, and James K. Polk.
“I will not seek nor accept my party’s nomination for another term as your president,” Johnson famously said in a television address after winning the New Hampshire primary in March 1968, citing the Vietnam War and domestic turmoil.
Johnson’s withdrawal came shortly after his Democratic opponent, Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), won 42 percent of the vote in the first presidential primary to Johnson’s 48 percent, and then Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-New York) entered the race.
Following President Kennedy’s assassination in June, sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated for president at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which was marked by violence.
The 2024 Democratic National Convention, which begins on August 19, will also be held in Chicago.
