Joe Biden quits the race, at last. What’s next?
THESE EIGHT days in American politics spanned an eon. On July 13th the bullet of a would-be assassin came an inch from killing Donald Trump, the former president, just days before the Republican Party formally nominated him as their candidate for the 2024 presidential election. On July 21st, Joe Biden, the incumbent president, announced that he would abandon his re-election bid less than one month before the Democratic Party convention was due to begin. The period began with the near-death of one candidate—and concluded with the end of his nemesis’s political career.
The announcement came not in a televised address from the dignified backdrop of the Oval Office—where Lyndon Johnson announced the end of his candidacy on March 31st 1968—but as a letter posted online. “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,” he wrote.
He did not go willingly. His candidacy had been in crisis ever since his disastrous debate performance on June 27th, in which he seemed too incoherent and infirm to continue his campaign. Mr Biden, who is 81 and would have been 86 by the end of a second term, insisted that he merely had one bad night and tried to arrest a rebellion within his party. At least 35 Democratic congressmen and senators, skittish about dismal polling against Mr Trump, had publicly called for Mr Biden to stand aside. Many more said as much privately.
Up until the morning he stepped aside his aides were defiant, insisting that there was no chance their man would leave. They denounced pollsters, pundits and leakers as part of an elitist plot. But in the end the pressure proved too much for Mr Biden, who had lost the majority of both the party elites and rank-and-file voters. He has pledged to give a formal address to the country later in the week.
Immediately after bowing out, Mr Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice-president. Bill and Hillary Clinton came out with their endorsement of Ms Harris shortly thereafter. Barack Obama issued a statement praising the president, but did not endorse Ms Harris. If he were to do so then the contest would be over before it began. There is still a possibility that Ms Harris will face some kind of competition. But the likelier course is that her anointment will be made formal at the party convention in Chicago. Presidential contests in America are not built for speed. Major parties pick their nominee through a lengthy party-primary process, in which voters choose slates of delegates who arrive at the convention and reflect the will of their constituents.
Mr Biden had already secured an absolute majority of delegates. Democratic Party rules state that all delegates, “shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them”, meaning that Mr Biden had to renounce his candidacy for them to vote elsewhere. Now the delegates are not bound to any single candidate. But their vote still confirms the identity of the next Democratic nominee (and their running-mate). They are free to vote for whomever they choose, theoretically making possible a return to the contested conventions that were commonplace in American politics before 1972.
In reality, Biden loyalists are over-represented among the 4,696 delegates. They are therefore very likely to obey the will of the president. Some prominent Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, appear supportive of a hurried contest in the next few weeks, rather than a coronation of Ms Harris. But they might find that other contenders simply do not appear. Many of the other high-calibre Democrats on the wish lists of politicos—governors like Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan—may opt out of challenging the sitting vice-president directly and lobby instead to be Ms Harris’s running-mate.
By refusing to leave until he was forced to, Mr Biden has already jeopardised the chances of his party enough, party elites feel. Johnson’s exit in 1968 was in a different era of American politics, when presidential campaigns were not billion-dollar permanent affairs, and even then he left the race at the end of March rather than in late July. They will try to limit the damage by quickly consolidating support around Ms Harris rather than allowing the chaos to continue up until the convention. Bettors currently give her a four-in-five chance of being the nominee.
Republicans had already been shifting their attention and attacks on Ms Harris, anticipating that she might be their actual opponent. Mr Trump’s campaign last week refused to schedule a vice-presidential debate between Ms Harris and J.D. Vance, the newly announced Republican running-mate, saying, rather presciently, that “we don’t know who the Democrat nominee for vice-president is going to be, so we can’t lock in a date before their convention. To do so would be unfair to…whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running-mate”. They will argue that Ms Harris carries responsibility for Mr Biden’s failures in office—such as the botched withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the surge in inflation at the start of Mr Biden’s term and especially the surge in illegal immigration across the southern border.
They will also argue that Ms Harris participated in a conspiracy to hide her boss’s deterioration from the nation. Although the vice-president has enjoyed something of a rehabilitation in Democratic corners of the internet, her first foray in a national campaign for the 2020 contest ended in disaster. Ms Harris repeatedly changed her mind on serious policy matters, such as health care. Her list of accomplishments while vice-president is rather short. Her portfolio has included tricky issues such as the border and securing voting rights, though she more recently found her footing in attacking Republicans on the issue of abortion. All of this is sure to be raked over in minute detail in the coming months.
Even as they grew more fearful of his capacity, Democrats had been fearful of pushing out Mr Biden. In other years where coups against incumbent presidents have been attempted, the results have never been excellent. Jimmy Carter faced a serious challenge from Ted Kennedy in 1980, and lost to Ronald Reagan. A chaotic Democratic primary in 1968 saw the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president, who failed to differentiate himself from his boss’s unpopular stance on the Vietnam war, handing the presidency to Richard Nixon. The parallel is daunting. Democrats may well lose the presidency with a new candidate anyway. But by passing the task of defeating Mr Trump to a new generation of leaders, they now have a better chance. ■
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