Live Updates: Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race, Endorses Harris
President
Biden wrote on social media that he was ending his campaign for
re-election after intense pressure from within his own party. He
subsequently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him atop
the Democratic ticket.
mage
President Biden announced on Twitter on Sunday that he will no longer seek re-election.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
President
Biden, 81, abandoned his bid for re-election and threw the 2024
presidential contest into chaos on Sunday, caving to relentless pressure
from his closest allies to drop out of the race amid deep concerns that
he is too old and frail to defeat former President Donald J. Trump.
After calling Vice President Kamala Harris an “extraordinary partner,”
he endorsed her to take his place atop the ticket.
“It
has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president,” he
wrote on social media. “And 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 focus entirely on fulfilling my duties
as president for the remainder of my term.”
After
three weeks of often angry refusals to step aside, Mr. Biden finally
yielded to a torrent of devastating polls, urgent pleas from Democratic
lawmakers and clear signs that donors were no longer willing to pay for
him to continue.
Mr.
Biden’s decision abruptly ends one political crisis that began when the
president delivered a calamitous debate performance against Mr. Trump
on June 27. But for the Democratic Party, Mr. Biden’s withdrawal
triggers a second crisis: who to replace him with, and specifically
whether to rally around Ms. Harris or kick off a rapid effort to find
someone else to be the party’s nominee.
The announcement by Mr. Biden, who is isolating with Covid, came just three days after Mr. Trump delivered an incendiary, insult-laden speech
accepting his party’s nomination for a chance to return to the White
House for a second term. Mr. Trump, who has been preparing for a rematch
with Mr. Biden for years, will now face a different — and as yet,
unknown — Democratic opponent, with only 110 days left until Election
Day.
Here’s what else to know:
A political first:
No sitting American president has dropped out of a race so late in the
election cycle. The Democratic National Convention, where Mr. Biden was
to have been formally nominated by 3,939 delegates,
is scheduled to begin Aug. 19 in Chicago. That leaves less than a month
for Democrats to decide who should replace Mr. Biden on the ticket and
just under four months for that person to mount a campaign against Mr.
Trump.
Spotlight on Harris:
The president’s decision puts the vice president under renewed
scrutiny, with some Democrats arguing that she is the only person who
can effectively challenge Mr. Trump this late in the election. And they
say the party will fracture if Democratic leaders are seen as passing
over the first Black vice president. But others argue that the
Democratic Party should avoid a coronation, especially given Ms.
Harris’s political weaknesses over the last three-and-a-half years.
Age a chief concern:
Mr. Biden’s re-election bid was brought down by longstanding concerns
about his age and whether he remains physically and mentally capable of
performing the job. Even before the debate, polls consistently showed
that people thought he was too old, and majorities — even of Democrats —
wanted someone younger to be president. Mr. Biden was born during World
War II and was first elected to the Senate in 1972, before two-thirds
of today’s Americans were even born. Mr. Biden would have been 86 at the
end of a second term.
The debate moment:
The White House and aides closest to Mr. Biden denied for years that
his age was having any impact on his ability to do his job. But the
debate with Mr. Trump in late June, which was watched by more than 50
million people, put his limitations clearly on display. He appeared
frail, hesitant, confused and diminished, and was unable to make the
case against Mr. Trump, a convicted felon who tried to overturn the last
presidential election.
Ron Klain, the former chief of staff to President Biden, blamed “donors and electeds” for having “pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump.”
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 and unite behind the only veteran of a national campaign — our outstanding @vp, @KamalaHarris!! Let’s get real and win in November!
As President Biden recovered from Covid this week, Vice President Kamala Harris had already assumed the starring role on the campaign trail.
She hosted rallies in two battleground states, Michigan and North
Carolina, and headlined a fundraiser that brought in $2 million in
Massachusetts on Saturday.
Vice President Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Las Vegas in July. Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
With
Vice President Kamala Harris being eyed as a potential replacement for
President Biden on the Democratic ticket, her stances on key issues will
be scrutinized by both parties and the nation’s voters.
She
has a long record in politics: as district attorney of San Francisco,
as attorney general of California, as a senator, as a presidential
candidate and as vice president.
Here is an overview of where she stands.
Abortion
Ms.
Harris supports legislation that would protect the right to abortion
nationally, as Roe v. Wade did before it was overturned in 2022, in
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
After
the Dobbs ruling, she became central to the Biden campaign’s efforts to
keep the spotlight on abortion, given that Mr. Biden — with his personal discomfort with abortion and his support for restrictions earlier in his career
— was a flawed messenger. In March, she made what was believed to be
the first official visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice
president.
She consistently supported abortion rights during her time in the Senate, including cosponsoring legislation
that would have banned common state-level restrictions, like requiring
doctors to perform specific tests or have hospital admitting privileges
in order to provide abortions.
As a presidential candidate in 2019, she argued
that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation
of Roe should be subject to what is known as pre-clearance for new
abortion laws — those laws would have to be federally approved before
they could take effect. That proposal is not viable now that the Supreme
Court has overturned Roe.
Climate change
Ms.
Harris has supported the Biden administration’s climate efforts,
including legislation that provided hundreds of billions of dollars in
tax credits and rebates for renewable energy and electric vehicles.
“It is clear the clock is not just ticking, it is banging,” she said in a speech last year,
referring to increasingly severe and frequent disasters spurred by
climate change. “And that is why, one year ago, President Biden and I
made the largest climate investment in America’s history.”
During her 2020 presidential campaign, she emphasized the need for environmental justice,
a framework that calls for policies to address the adverse effects that
climate change has on poor communities and people of color. She has emphasized that as vice president as well.
In 2019, Ms. Harris, then a senator, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, introduced legislation
that would have evaluated environmental rules and laws by how they
affected low-income communities. It would have also established an
independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability
and created a “senior adviser on climate justice” within several federal
agencies. In 2020, Ms. Harris introduced a more sweeping version of the bill. None of the legislation was passed.
Democracy
Ms. Harris was tasked with leading the Biden administration’s efforts to secure voting rights legislation, a job she asked for. The legislation — which went through several iterations but was ultimately blocked in the Senate
— would have countered voting restrictions in Republican-led states,
limited gerrymandering and regulated campaign finance more strictly.
This year, she met with voting rights advocates and described a strategy that included creating a task force on threats to election workers and challenging state voting restrictions in court.
She has condemned former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In a speech in 2022
marking the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, she
said that day had showed “what our nation would look like if the forces
who seek to dismantle our democracy are successful.” She added, “What
was at stake then, and now, is the right to have our future decided the
way the Constitution prescribes it: by we the people, all the people.”
Economic policy
In
campaign events this year, Ms. Harris has promoted the Biden
administration’s economic policies, including the infrastructure bill
that Mr. Biden signed, funding for small businesses, a provision in the
Inflation Reduction Act that capped the cost of insulin for people on
Medicare and student debt forgiveness.
She indicated at an event
in May that the administration’s policies to combat climate change
would also bring economic benefits by creating jobs in the renewable
energy industry. At another event,
she promoted more than $100 million in Energy Department grants for
auto parts manufacturers to pivot to electric vehicles, which she said
would “help to keep our auto supply chains here in America.”
As a senator, she introduced legislation that would have provided a tax credit of up to $6,000
for middle- and low-income families, a proposal she emphasized during
her presidential campaign as a way to address income inequality.
Immigration
One
of Ms. Harris’s mandates as vice president has been to address the root
causes of migration from Latin America, like poverty and violence in
migrants’ home countries. Last year, she announced
$950 million in pledges from private companies to support Central
American communities. Similar commitments made previously totaled about
$3 billion.
In 2021, she visited the U.S.-Mexico border and said:
“This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about
children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about
suffering.”
More recently, she backed a bipartisan border security deal that Mr. Biden endorsed but Mr. Trump, by urging Republican lawmakers to kill it,
effectively torpedoed. The legislation would have closed the border if
crossings reached a set threshold, and it would have funded thousands of
new border security agents and asylum officers. “We are very clear, and
I think most Americans are clear, that we have a broken immigration
system and we need to fix it,” Ms. Harris said in March.
Israel and Gaza
Ms. Harris called in March
for an “immediate cease-fire” in Gaza and described the situation there
as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” She said that “the threat Hamas poses
to the people of Israel must be eliminated” but also that “too many
innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
In an interview later that month,
she emphasized her opposition to an Israeli invasion of Rafah, the city
in southern Gaza to which more than a million people had fled. “I have
studied the maps,” she said. “There’s nowhere for those folks to go, and
we’re looking at about 1.5 million people in Rafah who are there
because they were told to go there, most of them.”
She has said on multiple occasions that she supports a two-state solution.
Racial justice
Racial justice was a theme of Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign. In a memorable debate exchange in 2019, she denounced Mr. Biden’s past work with segregationist senators and opposition to school busing mandates.
She has called for ending mandatory minimum sentences, cash bail and the death penalty, which disproportionately affect people of color.
Amid the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, she was one of the senators who introduced
the Justice in Policing Act, which would have made it easier to
prosecute police officers, created a national registry of police
misconduct and required officers to complete training on racial
profiling. It was not passed.
Her record as a prosecutor also came into play during her presidential campaign. Critics noted that as attorney general of California, she had generally avoided stepping in to investigate police killings.
Senator
Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, says in a statement:
“Joe Biden has not only been a great president and a great legislative
leader but he is a truly amazing human being. His decision of course was
not easy, but he once again put his country, his party, and our future
first.
“Joe, today shows you are a true patriot and great American.”
Gov.
Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan says she will not be running for president
with Biden out. “My job in this election will remain the same: doing
everything I can to elect Democrats and stop Donald Trump,” she wrote on
social media.
In
a post on X, President Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris
as the Democratic nominee. “Today I want to offer my full support and
endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year," he
wrote. "Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do
this."
Gov.
Gavin Newsom of California put out a statement on X saying that Biden
“will go down in history as one of the most impactful and selfless
presidents.” Before Biden dropped out, Newsom was often considered a
contender to take his place on the ticket.
The
conversation will immediately move to Vice President Kamala Harris and
how much support she will have within the party, and whether Biden will
offer a full-throated endorsement of her as his replacement on the
ticket.
As Maggie Haberman and I reported yesterday,
the Trump team has been preparing for an advertising onslaught against
Kamala Harris, who they assume will be the Democratic candidate. They
have also been paying close attention to Josh Shapiro, who governs a
state — Pennsylvania — that the Trump team is focused on winning to
block Democrats’ path to the White House.
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