Joe Biden Drops Out Of 2024 Presidential Race, Endorses Kamala Harris
UPDATED with endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris: Joe Biden on Sunday announced that he will exit the 2024 presidential race. He also said that he is endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris “to be the nominee of our party this year.”
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” the 81-year-old incumbent said today in a letter posted 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 to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” added the increasingly besieged Biden in words that hark to President Lyndon Johnson’s sudden exit from his own re-election campaign in 1968.
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After a Saturday that saw both GOP nominee Donald Trump and his running mate Sen J.D. Vance (R-OH) campaigning, as was Harris, the one-page correspondence from Biden, who has been at his Delaware home recovering from Covid, also noted that POTUS intends to “speak to the nation later this week in more detail about my decision.
Here’s Biden’s letter:
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
Biden’s decision and announcement today came amid weeks of revolt among party donors, supporters and congressional members that the president’s electoral chances and already shaky poll numbers were dimming following a disastrous debate performance last month that raised new concerns about his age.
As top Hollywood donors like Damon Lindelof, Rob Reiner and George Clooney stopped writing checks and called for Biden to exit the race, and top lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi’s right-hand man Adam Schiff echoed that sentiment, many eyes turned to Harris.
RELATED: Hollywood Donors Game Out A Kamala Harris Candidacy
Shortly after revealing his decision to drop out, POTUS put his full weight behind Harris:
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
The extraordinary sequence of events clearly has Harris as the heir apparent to the ticket, but it will be up to Democratic delegates to ultimately decide whether she should be the party’s nominee. The Democratic National Convention is August 19-22, but the party wants to have a virtual roll call before then because of concerns the ticket would miss ballot deadlines or face legal challenges.
Having said that, Harris will automatically gain access to a campaign war chest of more than $250 million.
Harris, 59, the first woman vice president, also would be the first woman president if elected in November against Trump.
This week, with Biden sidelined with Covid, it was Harris who was tasked with making the campaign’s case. She emphasized her former role as a prosecutor, a contrast to Trump, now a convicted felon.
The daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, Harris’ rise was relatively quick, with parallels to that of Barack Obama, another biracial candidate that mirrors the increasing diversity of the American populous. Even when Obama was first running for president, in 2008, and Harris was district attorney of San Francisco, she was seen as an up-and-coming future leader in the party. Two years later, she narrowly won a race for California Attorney General and, in 2016, handily defeated a fellow Democrat for an open California seat in the U.S. Senate.
Two years after going to Washington, Harris launched a presidential bid in a campaign that was initially a splashy debut in her Bay Area hometown. She had a standout moment at one of the first Democratic primary debates when she criticized fellow candidate Biden for his past opposition to school busing. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools. And she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me,” she said, as Biden looked on. He then sternly defended his civil rights record.
Harris also was a favorite among Hollywood donors, and the ties to the industry extended to her husband, Doug Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer from Los Angeles.
RELATED: Hollywood, Media And Politicians React To Joe Biden Dropping Out Of Presidential Race
Even though that was a signature moment of the primary campaign, Harris’ bid began to falter by the fall, amid staff discord, and she dropped out in December, before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus.
By the summer of 2020, with the country in the midst of the Covid pandemic and a racial reckoning following the death of George Floyd, Biden, who already had said he would pick a woman as a running mate, zeroed in on Harris, along with other prominent figures including Elizabeth Warren, Gretchen Whitmer and Susan Rice. He ultimately chose Harris, 22 years younger, even though she had her share of detractors from her home state. According to the New York Times, Harris won over other contenders because of her skills as a debater, her qualifications, and her racial diversity.
Still, as Deadline exclusively reported on July 19, a number of deep pocketed donors have encouraged Democrats to have an open convention in Chicago and not simply anoint Harris.
“We can’t have a repeat of 2016,” one self-described “deeply concerned” contributor noted of Harris and the deep wounds of Hillary Clinton’s coronation eight years ago over Bernie Sanders and to some degree Biden. “It has to be an open convention to be fair.”
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