The five groups of Democrats that ended Biden’s candidacy

While he positioned himself as a more centrist Democrat, Biden had reached a kind of détente with the progressive wing of the party: He adopted some left-wing positions; the left campaigned hard for him and other centrist Democrats. This alliance helped Democrats win the 2020 elections and do much better in the midterms two years ago than the incumbent’s party usually does.

Biden’s embrace of Israel as it killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and destroyed Gaza created a huge fissure with the left. Liberal activists were showing up at the president’s events and disrupting them. Some who had campaigned for him four years ago refused to do so this time. Perhaps most important, Arab Americans in Michigan, a must-win state for Democrats, were saying they could no longer vote for Biden.

Anger among progressive activists over Gaza ensured that the left largely did not come to Biden’s side as his candidacy flagged, even though Biden is the most liberal president in recent history. (When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Biden should remain the party’s candidate, it didn’t bolster the president with progressive activists but instead led to sharp criticism of Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders in left-wing circles.)

So Biden needed more than ever to maintain his support among the non-leftist contingent in the party. Speaking of which …

There were plenty of people in the news media, most notably Post columnist David Ignatius and longtime Democratic campaign strategist David Axelrod, who suggested last year that Biden was a weak candidate and shouldn’t run for a second term. But Ignatius focuses on national security and Biden allies suggested that Axelrod just didn’t like the president personally.

So it was different when people perceived to be both Biden-friendly and experts on elections started loudly objecting to his candidacy. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein produced a podcast in February that praised Biden’s policy record but also laid out a path for him to be replaced: Powerful Democrats such as former president Barack Obama and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) would convince Biden not to run, and Democrats would install a new candidate at the party’s August convention. (That’s basically what is happening.)

Klein’s take was shared by another prominent writer from the Obama years: data expert Nate Silver. Both before and particularly after the June 27 debate, Silver repeatedly warned that Democrats were depending on polls showing a close race, when in fact Biden was a clear underdog to Trump.

The debate itself inspired Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor, the former Obama aides who host the podcast “Pod Save America,” to start telling their audience that Biden probably couldn’t win.

Klein, Silver, Favreau, Lovett, Pfeiffer and Vietor are not a representative sample of the Democratic Party. They are all White men in the 40s. But having people with big audiences in liberal circles and close ties to the Democratic Party establishment all saying that the president’s candidacy was doomed created a real intellectual foundation for the effort to get a new candidate.

But ultimately, the movement would need people with real power, such as …

The easiest way for Biden to overcome his deficit against Trump was to flood swing states with both advertising and campaign staff. But that costs lots of money. And after the debate, the president was facing something akin to a strike from big donors. A super PAC that was supposed to spend heavily in support of Biden’s candidacy reportedly had $90 million of pledged money put on hold, as donors demanded a new Democratic candidate.

It’s hard to pin down the exact role of donors in Biden’s withdrawal, because campaign contributors aren’t public figures the way members of Congress and podcasters are. But one clue is that longtime Biden adviser Ron Klain wrote in a message on X, “Donors and electeds have pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump.”

Speaking of electeds …

The first Democratic member of Congress to call for Biden to leave the race was Rep. Lloyd Doggett (Tex.) on July 2. The first senator was Peter Welch (Vt.) in an op-ed for The Post on July 10. These are not famous or powerful lawmakers.

The 38 Democrats (out of 263 total Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents) who pushed publicly for Biden’s withdrawal were a motley crew in terms of ideology and geography. That diversity helped. It wasn’t that the party’s progressives or centrists or swing-state members wanted him off the ticket, but that a wide range of members saw his shortcomings. What these members had in common is that only a few of them were particularly close to the president or his aides.

It’s likely that the backbenchers’ views were held by the majority of Democratic members of Congress. But instead of them all calling for Biden to leave, they left it to the party’s current and former leaders …

In a 24-hour period last Wednesday and Thursday, stories appeared in major news outlets, including The Post, suggesting that Pelosi, Obama, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) were all dubious of Biden’s candidacy. None of the four were quoted directly. It was clear that they were not only expressing their individual concerns but also speaking for the broader party.

I interpreted the articles as both a nudge to Biden and a warning that he might be more aggressively pushed to leave the race if he didn’t withdraw soon. Those articles were the real end of Biden’s candidacy: All that was left was for Biden to figure out how he would end his campaign.

Biden argued that “elites” were against him. He’s not wrong. It was not elites alone, but it was certainly elite-driven. After all, because the primaries had already taken place, only elites could remove Biden.

I’m glad Biden is no longer the Democrats’ candidate. I had real doubts he could do the job for four more years, I was skeptical about his ability to campaign effectively these next few months, and I did not want to see his terrible policy and rhetoric around the Gaza conflict rewarded with a reelection victory. That said, I’m very uncomfortable with Biden being removed and Vice President Harris installed as the Democrats’ new candidate with little input from voters beyond opinion polls.

Some political scientists say the major parties are weaker than ever. That might be true. But it’s hard to reconcile that with what we just witnessed: party leaders, in less than four weeks, forcing a sitting president with a long record of policy accomplishments to end his reelection campaign against his will. Wow.