In a life of nearly unimaginable turns, Joe Biden made yet one more. On Sunday afternoon, after weeks of defying calls to withdraw from his bid for a second term as President, he abruptly abandoned his pursuit. He announced his decision in a brief missive that revealed little of the turmoil roiling beneath: “It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, 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 threw his support to Vice-President Kamala Harris, who quickly issued a statement, announcing her intention to “earn and win” the Democratic nomination.
At the age of eighty-one, after a half century in politics, Biden came to his decision at a moment of acute vulnerability—far from the White House, sick with covid, at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Even after days of speculation and increasingly widespread reporting that the President was beginning to come to grips with political reality, many in the White House were stunned. Before he sent out the letter, he convened his senior staff in a Zoom call. The mood was sombre. Biden read the letter word for word. There was no pep talk. “You could tell he’d been wrestling with it,” an official on the call told me. Biden had concluded that he would drag down Democrats in an election of grave consequence. “He said he’d been thinking it over for the past forty-eight hours and continuing to work it, and that was his conclusion, that the strongest way forward was to get out and get behind the Vice-President,” the official said, acknowledging that it left as many questions as it answered. “It wasn’t a scenario where you could be working a bunch of Plan Bs.”
More than three weeks had passed since a disastrous debate performance left an indelible impression of infirmity; then came the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. Biden’s grappling with his decision has been a spectacle of psychological and political complexity that will take its place alongside the other momentous passages of modern Presidential history: Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon; Bill Clinton’s embattled Presidency after a sexual affair with an intern; George W. Bush taking office after the Supreme Court awarded him the election over Al Gore.
For Biden, the decision about whether to stay in the race carried a daunting range of political questions: Would Harris be able to gain the kind of broad-based support that had previously eluded her? Would others in the Party challenge her for the nomination? Would the Party Convention descend into chaos? But it also carried the heavy burden of history. As the weeks dragged on, and influential Democrats deserted him, Biden was risking a grave verdict of history, a creeping reputation for selfish resistance that would forever adorn his life story and overshadow his political career. He had waved off the suggestion that he was risking his place in history. “I’m not in this for my legacy,” he told reporters, less than two weeks before he exited the race. “I’m in this to complete the job I started.”
Almost instantly after Biden announced his withdrawal, he was enveloped by praise from members of his party who had been widely understood to be pressing him to step aside. In a statement, former President Barack Obama, who had shared the White House with him for eight years, and who’d maintained a tense, often competitive relationship with him, said, of Biden, “Today, we’ve also been reminded — again — that he’s a patriot of the highest order.” In a sign of the uncertainties ahead, Obama did not add his name to the endorsement of Harris, but expressed “extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” Harris’s prospects and her conceivable running mates were a subject of immediate, intense debate. Some of the most plausible other contenders for the Democratic nomination, such as Governors Gavin Newsom, of California, and Josh Shapiro, of Pennsylvania, rapidly endorsed Harris, as did Bill and Hillary Clinton. Senator Tammy Baldwin, facing a tight race in Wisconsin, let it be known that she was “proud to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for President of the United States.” On Sunday evening, it remained to be seen how many other Democrats in difficult races would do the same.
Biden’s decision to yield to the outcry from senior members of his party was a colossal relief for some Democrats, a bitter defeat for others, and a supreme gamble for all. The Party will have to scramble to fashion a ticket strong enough to beat Trump in less than four months. The practical and political challenges facing the transformed campaign are daunting: How will Democrats introduce their candidates to an electorate that has been told, for more than a year, that Biden’s most powerful credential was that he is the only person who has beaten Trump in an election? What will happen to the campaign’s structure and leadership? Will the donors who had abandoned Biden coalesce around his chosen successor? Will Harris, who made her name in California and Washington, D.C., be competitive in Midwestern and Sun Belt states? The bitterness among Biden loyalists was unmistakable. Ron Klain, his former chief of staff, wrote, in a social-media post, “Now that the donors and electeds have pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump, it’s time to end the political fantasy games.” He urged them to support Harris.
Even amid the immediate political calculations, it was impossible not to reflect on the sheer drama of Biden’s about-face this weekend, just as Republicans wrapped their Convention. He has made the rarest of choices in the desiccated, demoralized politics of our time: he has sacrificed his own ambition for the sake of the country. He will have another six months in the Presidency, a period in which he will seek to insure the durability of his record—a thriving economy, a revived nato, and legislative achievements on climate change, gun control, drug prices, manufacturing, and infrastructure.
It seems likely that Biden will fall back on a recurring motif in his own long history of endurance. Decades ago, when he confronted the first agony of his life, the car crash that killed his wife and daughter, he landed on a strategy for survival: find a way, any way, to turn his pain into purpose. An aide remembered him once saying, “I’ve seen a lot of the worst that life can throw at you, and I’m telling you—you can get through it, but you need to find purpose.” Initially, that mission was raising his sons, Beau and Hunter, and defying the skeptics who wondered if the blustery young man from Delaware, elected to the Senate at twenty-nine years old, was really bright and capable enough for the job.
In 1987, having established himself during fifteen years in the Senate, he announced a run for the Presidency, a dream he had nursed since his college days, after John F. Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic President. But that Presidential bid led to humiliation; he was accused of plagiarism, and his insecurities roared to the surface; on the campaign trail, he boasted to a questioner, “I probably have a much higher I.Q. than you do.” In 2008, after another bid for the Presidency ended unsuccessfully, he returned to the Senate—and the prospect of a long, dull slide into the doldrums of elder statesmanship. Instead, Obama asked Biden to help him make history as the first Black President, shoring up support especially among white, Rust Belt voters. He, initially, resisted the idea of being vice anything, but came to see it as a chance to do more for civil rights than he had achieved as a young man. In 2013, during a visit to Selma, Alabama, where law-enforcement officers attacked men and women on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he expressed his regret that he had not played a larger part in the cause: “It took me forty-eight years to get here. I should’ve been here.”
After his son Beau died, in 2015, of a brain tumor, Biden once again cast about for purpose. In 2016, he resented that he was discouraged from running for the Presidency. Afterward, he stated his belief that he could have beaten Trump when Hillary Clinton had not. In 2020, he succeeded in driving Trump from office. Now, facing the prospect of Trump’s return to the Presidency, Biden has decided that his purpose is not to resist the reality of his limitations; it is to insure the defeat of an aging authoritarian and convicted felon.
In his letter to the nation, Biden included a short passage on his record. “We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy,” he wrote. In fact, that matter is decidedly unsettled. But, in stepping out of the race, he took one more step to protect the system to which he has devoted his life. ♦
Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book is “Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury.”
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