President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he is dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, a seismic event that will leave Democrats scrambling to select his replacement just weeks before the convention.
“While it was my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interests of my party and country that I step down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President during my term,” Biden posted in a statement on social media.
Mr Biden said he would address the nation later this week.
Never before has a sitting president and presumptive nominee dropped out of the race so late in the process, and Mr. Biden’s decision to do so underscores the gravity of the crisis that has engulfed his campaign after his disastrous debate performance against the former president. Donald Trumphis Republican rival in late June.
In the days since the debate, a growing chorus of Democrats has openly expressed concern about the president’s health and mental state, his ability to defeat Mr. Trump in November and his fitness to lead the country for another four years. Pressure to step aside has steadily increased as Democratic lawmakers and governors have gone days without hearing directly from Mr. Biden, allowing questions about his future to swirl within the party ranks. And a growing number of Democrats on Capitol Hill have publicly called for him to step aside.
In the weeks since the debate, the president has tried to backpedal, insisting in a series of public appearances and meetings with Democratic elected officials that he was committed to staying in the race. “I’m not going anywhere,” he vowed. But even longtime allies have begun urging him to change course.
The pressure eventually became insurmountable, with top Democrats in Congress telling Biden he should step aside and allow a replacement to face Trump in November.
Mr. Biden is the first incumbent president eligible for reelection to decline to run again since President Lyndon Johnson stepped down in the spring before the 1968 election. Mr. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination that year and lost to Richard Nixon.
Only a handful of first-term presidents in American history have not sought a second term, the last being Rutherford B. Hayes, who declined to run again in the 1880 election. James Buchanan and James Polk also chose not to seek the presidency a second time. Calvin Coolidge, who assumed the presidency in 1923 after the death of Warren Harding, won his own term in 1924 and declined to seek another full term four years later.
A disastrous debate
For months, Mr. Biden’s campaign and allies reassured the public that the president was up to the rigors of leading the free world, often dismissing questions about his age and fitness even as polls consistently showed that Americans had concerns. Mr. Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term.
But on debate night on June 27, more than 50 million Americans watched as the president, without his teleprompter and without notes, struggled not just to refute Mr. Trump but to articulate his own policies. Mr. Biden, never the most eloquent speaker, repeatedly lost his train of thought and muddled his answers, at one point saying that his administration had “defeated Medicare.”
The missteps confounded members of his own party, many of whom quickly recognized the political danger of having Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket if an overwhelming majority of voters deemed him unfit to serve.
Before winning the White House in 2020, Mr Biden called himself a “bridge” to a new “generation of leaders”, leading many to wonder whether he would serve just one term. After the debate, he explained that his thinking had changed, and the division in the country had led him to believe that only he could defeat Mr Trump.
After days of his campaign and other allies trying to contain the fallout, the dam broke, and the president faced pressure from a growing number of Democrats on Capitol Hill to step aside and let a new nominee take over. He resisted that pressure for more than a week, defiantly and publicly declaring that he would not abandon his reelection bid. But he continued to misspoke in interviews and speeches, doing little to allay concerns about his ability to win in November.
Calls for him to step down died down after the failed assassination attempt on Mr. Trump on July 13. But behind the scenes, Democratic leaders in Congress were reportedly urging him to leave, and polls showed large majorities of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a different nominee. News of this private pressure campaign began to emerge on July 17, coinciding with a call from the powerful Democratic Representative Adam Schiff for Mr. Biden to drop out.
The Democratic National Committee also postponed a virtual vote that would have cemented Mr. Biden’s status as the nominee, saying on July 17 that plans for a quick resolution would be delayed until August. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries reportedly encouraged the party’s rules committee to delay the vote.
What happens next?
The states have already held their primaries, meaning Democratic voters have no time or mechanism to directly choose a replacement. At this point in the process, it is up to Democratic delegates — state and local party officials who were selected during the primaries — to decide who will replace Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket, either at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August or before. However that plays out, it will be a logistical nightmare for Democrats in the coming weeks.
The convention is scheduled to begin on August 19 in Chicago.
The party is expected to hold a virtual roll call sometime before Aug. 7 to formally select a nominee to secure ballot access in Ohio, amid a dispute over the state’s ballot certification deadline. Whether that will happen now that Mr. Biden has dropped out remains to be seen.
Originally published by CBS News, written by Kathryn Watson on Sunday, July 21 at 2:01 p.m. EST.
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