Biden succumbs to Democratic pressure after threatening defiance one last time

President Joe Biden acceded to an intense Democratic pressure campaign to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, capping a career as a loyal and often fierce partisan abandoned by his party.

Biden had hoped to make his reelection campaign a referendum on former President Donald Trump, a strategy that appeared to work well enough in the 2022 midterm elections. But as the race increasingly turned on Biden himself — his age, fitness to serve, and record as president — most Democrats concluded he could not win. Biden never recovered from his June 27 debate with Trump, which his campaign pushed for and was largely conducted on their terms.

Democrats will now celebrate Biden as someone who put the country and party above his own political ambitions, while Republicans will question his ability to remain in office through January if he is unable to continue his reelection campaign. 

Biden won in 2020 as a candidate who would restore normalcy after a tumultuous Trump term and a pandemic that wreaked havoc on the economy. But after Biden took office, the southern border descended into chaos as migrants streamed into the country in record numbers, inflation hit a 41-year high, major cities continued to cope with violent crime, war broke out in Gaza and Ukraine, the administration conducted a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that appeared to have a permanent negative effect on his poll numbers, domestic polarization intensified, and Trump remained a viable national political figure.

The president’s job approval rating stood at 40% in the RealClearPolitics polling average on the day he dropped out. At the beginning of the month, both New York Times-Siena College and CNN had Biden’s approval rating as low as 36%.

Biden spent 36 years in the Senate, emerging as a Delaware political icon before it was a reliably blue state. The man who became the oldest president in history began his political career as one of the youngest senators, winning his first term at 29 and turning 30 just in time to meet the constitutional age requirement for the job. 

That first Senate win in 1972 was marred by personal tragedy, as Biden lost his first wife and 13-month-old daughter in an automobile accident. Out of this loss came two of the most enduring parts of the Biden brand: his image as a consoler and his commuting back and forth between Washington, D.C., and Delaware to be with his surviving children, two young sons.

Biden would go on to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he helped sink President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and presided over the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. The Bork and Thomas sagas kicked off the contentious confirmation processes and politicization of the high court of the past few decades, after conservative Antonin Scalia sailed through the Senate 98-0 in 1986.

Later Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a position he held in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He voted to authorize the war in Iraq, although he subsequently claimed to have been misled by President George W. Bush. 

“[Bush] looked me in the eye in the Oval Office. He said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program,” Biden said on an NPR podcast in September 2019, as he was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination for the third time. “He got them in, and before you know it, we had shock and awe.”

As a senator, Biden was known as a bipartisan deal-maker. He took credit for numerous pieces of legislation, including the 1994 crime bill signed into law by President Bill Clinton. That measure included the so-called assault weapons ban, helping to cost many Democrats who voted for it their seats in that year’s midterm elections. The ban expired in 2004. Biden has repeatedly called for its reinstatement over the past 20 years.

After failing to gain much traction as a candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, winning less than 1% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama tapped Biden as his running mate. The pair would go on to win in November, defeating Republican Sen. John McCain, and served two terms.

Biden was often Obama’s point man on Capitol Hill. He had relationships dating back decades while Obama was elected president as a freshman senator after less than four years in Washington. Their biggest legislative success was the passage of Obamacare, which Biden famously described as a “big f***ing deal.”

There were nevertheless tensions between Biden and Obama, who allegedly had his own F-word quote about his vice president: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” Obama was displeased that Biden made fun of Chief Justice John Roberts’s flubbing of the oath of office in 2009. Biden preempted Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage, which they had both opposed in 2008, in a 2012 Meet the Press interview. The two became personally friendly, and Obama’s presentation of Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom looked like it would be the high point of the latter’s long political career.

Obama discouraged Biden from seeking the Democratic nomination in 2016. Biden had a late start, was mourning the death of his son Beau, and was viewed by Obamaworld operatives as unlikely to beat Hillary Clinton. Clinton would go on to lose to Trump in a stunning upset.

Obama reportedly played a key role in undermining Biden’s reelection campaign after the debate. Top Obama advisers openly participated in the revolt against Biden. David Axelrod told the New York Times “the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term” all the way back in June 2022. Axios reported hours before Biden dropped out that ill will over being talked out of the 2016 race contributed to the current president’s reluctance to exit this year.

The “shellacking” Democrats endured in down-ballot races throughout the Obama years — they lost 63 House seats in the 2010 midterm elections alone — ironically gave Biden another chance at the White House. The Democratic bench was thin, and many of the younger candidates radical and uninspiring. Party operatives feared Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would wind up winning the nomination and losing the general election to Trump yet again.

Biden had terrible showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, eliciting chatter that his third presidential campaign would end in failure. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg entered the race late to give centrist and establishment Democrats a viable option. But black voters coalesced around Biden in South Carolina, thanks in part to a critical endorsement from Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), and after that landslide victory, he cruised to the nomination.

Biden had a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde personality. He was capable of great gregariousness, empathy, compassion, and warmth. He showed a deft touch in debating Sarah Palin in 2008 when they were both seeking the vice presidency. He was masterful in consoling Meghan McCain about her ailing father in an appearance on The View in 2017.

Yet Biden was also often thin-skinned, defensive, and nasty. His first presidential bid in 1987 ended in part because of a bizarre confrontation with a voter in which he exaggerated his academic credentials. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” Biden said. ”The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class and then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class.” Biden actually finished 76th in a class of 85.

Biden faced a plagiarism scandal in the same race, lifting words from British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. He has been known throughout his career for telling stories about his past that ranged from exaggerated to verifiably untrue. “In President Biden’s telling, he was a teenage civil rights activist, a former trucker, the first in his family to go to college and the nephew of a cannibalism victim,” the New York Times reported in June. “All of these claims stretch the truth or are downright false.”

The newspaper gently described this tendency as “rhetorical flourishes and factual liberty” in contrast with “the stream of lies about a stolen election peddled by” Trump.

Biden told a black audience during the 2012 campaign that Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were going to “put y’all back in chains.” As recently as the disastrous June 27, he repeated a claim about Trump calling neo-Nazis “fine people” during the Charlottesville riot Snopes rated as false.

In the Senate of the 1970s and 1980s, being friendly to political opponents in private while savaging them in public was part of the game. This practice works less well in the Oval Office or today’s rapid-fire news cycle. As president, Biden could not reconcile his calls for civility with his framing of a large swathe of the electorate as “MAGA,” “semi-fascist,” and a threat to democracy. It was a tension that became apparent once again as he tried to respond to the failed assassination attempt on Trump.

Biden largely failed in his promises to be a centrist, institutionalist, and bipartisan bridge-builder as president. He had been out for the Senate for 12 years by the time he took office, 15 while he was trying to stave off growing calls from within his own party to remove himself from the ticket. 

Democrats will point to five pieces of legislation as evidence of Biden’s success. The first of these, the American Rescue Plan, helped spark the wave of inflation that defined his presidency. The fifth, the Inflation Reduction Act, appeared to come together only when the White House took a back seat to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in the negotiations. Manchin has regularly criticized the Biden administration’s implementation of the law. Both bills were enacted through reconciliation, a process that allowed them to pass with only Democratic votes.

There were three big bipartisan bills during Biden’s tenure: the infrastructure program, legislation promoting the manufacture of semiconductors, and the measure helping toxic burn pit victims. It is possible that Biden’s most important congressional relationship was with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who allowed these bills to advance in the upper chamber, often in contrast with House Republicans. McConnell and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) were also crucial to Biden securing additional Ukraine aid.

Biden no longer had many relationships with lawmakers, even in his own party. The most senior Democrat in the Senate currently is Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). She was elected in 1992, when Biden was already in his fourth Senate term. She was among those calling for Biden to reconsider his candidacy. This was a major reason his base of support collapsed so quickly and completely after the debate.

Despite his reputation as an institutionalist, Biden attacked the Supreme Court and ultimately endorsed reforms to the Senate filibuster and the Supreme Court from the Left he had initially resisted. Biden’s decision to end his candidacy ultimately followed that same trajectory.

Biden has spent most of his political career finding the center of gravity within the Democratic Party and positioning himself one millimeter to its left or right. He opposed abortion and Roe v. Wade in the 1970s before becoming the 1973 decision’s foremost defender as president. Biden worked with both socialists and segregationists when they were powerful Democratic figures.

Ultimately, Biden’s legacy will hinge on whether he can secure his party’s nomination for Vice President Kamala Harris and whomever the Democrats nominate can beat Trump in November. To Democrats, his primary value was getting Trump out of the White House. They jettisoned Biden as soon as it appeared he might let Trump back in.

Even without Biden on the ballot, if Trump wins in November, many Democrats will remember the incumbent as presiding over conditions that contributed to Trump’s political rehabilitation. Biden partisans will defend him as someone who stood down for the second time only to watch the Democrats’ alternative candidate lose.

Democrats will celebrate Biden’s selflessness if the new ticket defeats Trump. But questions about whether his team concealed his decline, now openly discussed by most Democrats, heading into this election, until a bad debate forced his hasty departure from the race.