When Al Sharpton recently hung up the phone with Joe Biden, a man he has known for more than 30 years, first as a senator, then as vice-president and now as president, the message was clear: “He assured me he wasn’t going anywhere.”
In their conversation, Sharpton said he never asked Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race.
“I said to him that I appreciated what he did and I want to see it continue,” the reverend told the Guardian in an interview. “And he said: ‘That’s why I’m running, Al.’”
That was Monday. By the week’s end, the 81-year-old president, cloistered at his beach house in Delaware with Covid and besieged on all sides by dismal polling, voter concerns and a rebellion against his candidacy from members of his own party, was confronting the most consequential decision of his half-century in public life.
A growing number of Democrats weren’t waiting for an answer. More than three dozen congressional Democrats as well as activist groups and donors have urged the president to end his re-election bid. A group called Pass the Torch, Joe was holding a rally at the White House on Saturday.
The path Biden chooses could carry enormous consequences for his legacy, his party and his country as Americans approach the November election with a united Republican party determined to give Donald Trump a second term.
“Let him make up his mind,” said Sharpton, the veteran civil rights leader. “If he decides to walk, let him walk with his dignity, and if he decides to stay in it, he’s earned that right.”
In the weeks since Biden’s disastrous debate performance exacerbated longstanding concerns about his age, the president has appeared immune to his critics. And for a fleeting moment at the start of the week, after a would-be assassin opened fire on Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania last weekend, the prospect of Biden once again defying the political odds seemed, if not wholly probable, at least possible.
In an Oval Office address on Sunday, the president launched into the familiar role of consoler-in-chief, demonstrating his compassion and empathy at a time of national trauma – the very traits that helped elevate him to the White House during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic four years ago.
As Republicans greeted Trump with a hero’s welcome at their convention in Milwaukee this week, Biden returned to the campaign trail in pursuit of a political comeback. Sharpton spoke to the president on Monday, as Biden headed west, to Nevada, to appeal to the people who had salvaged his candidacy before: Black voters and leaders, including the South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn.
“He was as lucid as I’ve ever heard,” Sharpton recalled. “And I’ve known him for more than 30 years.”
The following day, Biden was greeted with a standing ovation at the NAACP’s annual convention in Las Vegas. Online, the president’s every verbal miscue was clipped and shared. But in the room, his fiery speech was met with chants of “Four more years!” After the address, Biden held an event with Representative Steven Horsford, chair of the Congressional Black caucus, which has remained a pillar of support on Capitol Hill.
“He was very energetic,” Sharpton said of the Las Vegas appearances. Biden had played his cards right, but it had done little to quell the rising tide of dissent still simmering in Washington.
The shocking attempt on Trump’s life briefly froze the public debate over the president’s fitness for office. But Democrats privately traded calamitous polling data that showed Biden trailing in the battleground states and at risk of dragging his party down with him, and it soon broke into public view again.
On Wednesday, Representative Adam Schiff, a prominent California Democrat who is running for Senate, shattered the silence with a statement calling on Biden to step aside. Behind Schiff’s announcement, some saw the hand of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, an ally known as her party’s most shrewd tactician who has reportedly grown pessimistic about Biden’s chances of defeating Trump in November.
The news came amid the publication of a poll that found nearly two-thirds of Democrats said Biden should bow out, according to the AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research, a figure that sharply disputed the president’s claim that the campaign against his candidacy was being driven by a few “big names” and party “elites”.
That afternoon, before Biden was scheduled to take the stage at the UnidosUS conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, he tested positive for Covid, forcing him from the campaign trail into self-isolation.
Then came a rat-a-tat succession of leaks to the press that appeared coordinated to force his hand.
In separate meetings with the president, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, reportedly warned Biden that his continued candidacy threatened the party’s chances of controlling either chamber of Congress. Pelosi had provided a similarly dire assessment to the president, it emerged.
By the day’s end, Biden was said to be “more receptive” to the case against his re-election campaign.
By Thursday, reality was reportedly “setting in” as allies predicted Biden would “exit” the race, possibly as soon as this weekend. Barack Obama, meanwhile, had reportedly conveyed to allies that his former vice-president’s path to victory had all but evaporated. By Friday, Biden’s family – a close-knit clan that includes his wife, Jill, his son Hunter and his sister, Valerie – was reportedly discussing an exit strategy.
Sharpton counts himself among the many Black leaders around the country, including some in Congress, uncomfortable with the rush to push out a president who he said had accomplished so much during his time in office.
“On many of the things that we challenged him on, he has delivered on,” Sharpton said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”
His hesitancy was an endorsement of Biden’s record, which includes landmark climate legislation, an infrastructure package, a pandemic relief package and a gun-reform bill, as well as his elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the supreme court, and Kamala Harris, the first woman and first Black and south Asian American to serve as vice-president.
Of course, Sharpton has concerns.
Like Biden, and most Democrats, Sharpton views the specter of a second Trump term as a serious threat to democracy and to the civil rights causes he has spent his career trying to advance. Moreover, he noted that the 78-year-old Trump had just delivered a rambling 92-minute acceptance speech at the party’s convention, and yet “not one Republican has asked him to step aside”.
“We’re talking about two men three years apart. So what’s the standard?” Sharpton said. “Are we setting a precedent that could come back to haunt us?
Sharpton was especially miffed by Democrats calling for an unprecedented overhaul of the party’s presidential ticket without providing a plan for what comes next.
“What you’ve heard all of them say is: ‘Joe Biden ought to step out.’ They’ve not said: ‘And therefore I would support this route to continue to work,’” Sharpton said.
On his call with the president, Sharpton did not raise the subject of a potential successor, but his preference was clear.
“I’m not asking him to step aside, let me emphasize that,” Sharpton said. “But, if he did, the reason you choose a vice-presidential candidate is that that’s who is supposed to be able to step in in case of an emergency. I don’t even know why it would be a debate.”
