After the first presidential debate, on June 27, movers and shakers in the Democratic Party began pushing Joe Biden to abandon his run for president, because of his apparent age-related medical issues. This past Sunday, the 81-year-old finally caved to the pressure and announced online that he would be stepping back from the campaign and focusing on finishing out his term.
In an announcement that almost immediately followed on his first one, Biden endorsed his vice president and running mate, Kamala Harris, as the next presidential nominee.
This was not a fait accompli. In the weeks since the pressure campaign on Biden began, numerous names have been floated as possible replacements. Some of those have been nationally well-known names, such as California Governor Gavin Newson or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Others have been more obscure. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof rather ridiculously suggested Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo as a possibility; she is a member of Biden’s cabinet that few Americans have heard of and even fewer would support.
But all along, as elected Democratic officials, party bosses, donors and opinion makers have been squeezing Biden to leave, the one major figure in the room that they could not really ignore was the vice president.
Take a look at the breakdown of voters for Republican and Democratic candidates. For Democrats, black people, and to an even greater extent black women, are a vital voting bloc. To pass over the black woman waiting just behind Biden would be dangerous. It could alienate voters amid an already alienating transition.
But Kamala Harris has been polarizing. Her own presidential campaign for 2020 fizzled out, and among some segments of the American public, she has been seen as ineffectual or unlikable. Her laugh, her way of speaking, and so forth have also been cited as reasons she wasn’t the best alternate candidate to beat Trump.
Polling, though, has suggested that she has better likability and name recognition than any other of the suggested Democratic candidates, and her numbers were as good as Biden’s throughout polling until this week. Public perception and public polling are tricky things.
The choice by Biden to step down appears to have happened very close to his actual announcement. Last week, he spoke with some of the top elected leaders in the Democratic Party: former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Though Jeffries later said that he was confident in Biden as the candidate, reports are that all three of them presented a skeptical case to Biden about his prospects and whether the Democratic Party—and big-money donors—would continue to support him.
According to multiple reports, however, the real final straw came in a meeting with his most stalwart of aides, Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon. Unlike several other members of the inner circle (beyond Biden’s own family), these men had been adamant that Biden should remain in the race. But on Saturday, they met with Biden as he was at home in Delaware, recovering from Covid. They had come with new internal polling from battleground states—and it said that Biden had no path to a second term of his presidency.
On Sunday, at 1:45 p.m., after notifying just a select few of his campaign aides, Biden sent out a letter explaining that he was stepping down. The letter didn’t say that he was endorsing Harris, but after a few moments of worried back-and-forth messages, Biden explicitly said that he was doing so.

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