After an extraordinary few weeks of intense pressure from Democratic donors and, reportedly, former President Obama, President Joe Biden has announced his intention to withdraw from the 2024 race.
It is unclear what will happen now. Biden controls 99% of the delegates to the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago beginning on August 19. Speculation has ranged from having a “mini-primary” whereby candidates would debate each other prior to the DNC, at which point a vote would be taken to select a candidate, to simply conferring the title on Vice President Kamala Harris who, importantly, stands to “inherit” Biden’s campaign war chest.
In recent polling, Harris actually fares less well against GOP candidate and former President Donald Trump than Biden, leaving the door open to multiple challengers.
Biden’s withdrawal represents only second time in US history that a sitting president declined to run for a second term. The first was President Franklin Pierce, a pre-Civil War President who served from 1853-1857. Pierce failed to secure the nomination for the 1856 election due primarily to the turmoil surrounding the extension of slavery to the Western territories. The second was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who succeeded John F. Kennedy after the latter’s assassination in 1963. After Johnson won the 1964 election over GOP firebrand Barry Goldwater in a landslide, the social upheaval caused by the Vietnam War forced him to remove himself from the 1968 election, which was ultimately won by President Richard M. Nixon.
