As more and more lawmakers over the weekend called for him to step down, Joe Biden has made the unprecedented and stunning decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.
What does this mean now for the race, the Democratic Party, and the nation?
Biden dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House on Sunday, ending his bid for reelection after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump that raised doubts about the incumbent’s fitness for office. The announcement, delivered less than four months before the election, immediately upended a campaign that both political parties view as the most consequential in generations.
The announcement is the latest jolt to a tumultuous campaign for the White House, coming a week after the attempted assassination of Trump at a Pennsylvania rally – and it totally changes the narrative and the trajectory of the battle for the Oval Office.
The Trump campaign and much of the GOP on Capitol Hill have been campaigning against Biden — and the “Biden Crime Family” — for years now. They’ve charged that Biden was too old, incoherent and mentally incompetent making him categorically unqualified to run the country and that he and his son are likely corrupt and have enriched themselves off his time as both VP and President.
Tear up that tattered playbook and flush it down the nearest toilet.
If it is indeed Harris who becomes the Democratic Party’s nominee, Republicans will be running against a much younger candidate (Harris is 59), a former prosecutor — who is sure to draw on that experience to contrast herself with Trump’s felony convictions. Harris effectively removes the age argument, shuts down any controversy over Hunter Biden, and also puts Trump in the difficult position of not maligning the first “black-Asian women to run for president” on race or gender terms.
If Not Biden, Who?
The president — intent on serving out the remainder of his term in office — quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take on Trump and encouraged his party to unite behind her, making her the party’s instant favorite for the nomination at its August convention in Chicago.
Now that Biden has stepped aside, even though he has endorsed his VP, Kamala Harris, she may not necessarily be his replacement. While much of the party seems to be coalescing around Harris, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), while dispelling rumors that he might want to run himself, says he wants to see an open primary. However, he is one of only a handful of Democrats who feel that the party needs to have a more in-depth selection process and not nominate Harris right away.
Harris, in a statement, praised Biden’s “selfless and patriotic act” and said she intends to “earn and win” her party’s nomination.
The reaction to Harris ascending to the top of the ticket has also been met with mixed enthusiasm by Democrats in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is arguably the most important swing state in the country. But while gushing endorsements for Harris came from the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington State, chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Pennsylvania party leaders sang a different tune.
Sen. John Fetterman, a fearless supporter of the current president, said he was unimpressed with the members of his own party who pushed Biden out, who then praised him extravagantly only after he withdrew.
“Spare me the soaring accolades from people with their fingerprints on the blades in our President’s back,” he said.
Fetterman wasn’t the only unhappy Democrat in Pennsylvania. One longtime Democratic voter, a union Democrat who has never voted Republican, said he felt, “Harris wasn’t up for the job; I hope it will be someone else; I don’t like how they pushed Joe out.”
He added he’s likely to still vote Democrat in November.
Those are not the only Democrats in Pennsylvania who worry about the VP’s appeal in the state, especially in Western Pennsylvania, where hydraulic fracking has been an economic game changer—something Harris adamantly opposes.
As a presidential candidate in 2020, Harris said in a televised CNN town hall that there was “no question I’m in favor banning fracking,” something she said if president she would do on day one in office. Former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, T.J. Rooney, said if you thought Hillary Clinton had problems connecting with the all-important smaller Pennsylvania counties in 2016, the ones such as Erie that ultimately cost her the election, Harris, because of her views on fossil fuels, will struggle even more so.
Changing the Narrative: Trump Campaign Pivots to Harris
While Harris has yet to officially replace Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, the Trump campaign had already been preparing new ads to attack Harris’ record, and is now actively compiling opposition research books and conducting polling to test her weaknesses in a general election matchup.
“Rest assured, we are 100% ready,” Trump pollster and senior adviser Tony Fabrizio said at last week’s Republican National Convention. He noted that speakers at the event often referred to the “Biden-Harris” administration in their speeches and that the campaign had prepared anti-Harris videos to swap in, just in case Biden stepped down sooner.
Though Trump aides had wanted Biden to remain in the race, they have argued a campaign against Harris — who they believe is the most likely Democratic nominee — wouldn’t be all that different from their race against Biden.
They will try to tie her to what they see as the Biden administration’s failures, saying Harris is complicit in everything that occurred under Biden’s watch. That’s particularly true when it comes to the handling of the Southern border. Harris had been tapped to lead the administration’s response to the border crisis.
Too Little – Too Late?
While the majority of Democrats feel that Joe Biden “did the right thing” in moving aside, ultimately, is it too little too late to defeat the juggernaut that is Donald J. Trump – especially with a flawed candidate like Harris?
If Biden and his fellow Democrats really had “the country’s best interests at heart,” they would not just anoint the unpopular leftist Vice President Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor. Instead, they will choose someone closer to the political center and eager to find ways to unify America behind a pragmatic, problem-solving agenda. Alas, this does not appear to be what they are planning. Biden’s open but delayed endorsement of Harris looks like an attempt to stack the deck in her favor, and it may be that he would not attempt this if those who pushed him aside were not on board with the Harris choice.
The underlying theme of the Biden administration and now defunct Biden campaign has been how Donald Trump and the GOP are “an existential threat to Democracy.” However, as they did with their shenanigans during the 2020 election, and now forcing out their “presumptive nominee,” it is the Dems who once again have thumbed their noses at our nation’s most sacred democratic processes on a scale no one else has ever imagined.