United States President Joe Biden has heeded calls to withdraw his re-election bid, thrusting this year’s already high-wire race for the White House into an uncertain territory.
The announcement on Sunday by the oldest sitting president in US history came amid mounting pressure from his fellow Democrats, with more than 30 Congress members publicly pushing for his exit.
In a post on X, Biden, 81, said he will remain in his role as president and commander-in-chief until his term ends in January 2025 and will address the nation this week.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, 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,” Biden wrote.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
His initial statement did not include an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, but he followed up a few minutes later with an expression of support.
Harris, 59, would become the first Black woman to run at the top of a major party ticket in the country’s history.
Biden’s historic move – the first sitting president to give up his party’s nomination for re-election since President Lyndon Johnson in March 1968 – leaves his replacement with less than four months to wage a campaign.
Biden’s gaffes
The Democratic backlash against Biden came after he delivered an unsteady performance at the first presidential debate of the 2024 election season as he lost his train of thought and struggled to articulate basic talking points.
Biden’s failure at times to complete clear sentences took the public spotlight away from Trump’s performance, in which he made a string of false statements, and trained it instead on questions surrounding Biden’s fitness for another term.
Days later, he raised fresh concerns in an interview, shrugging off Democrats’ worries and a widening gap in opinion polls, and saying he would be fine losing to Trump if he knew he would “gave it my all”.
His gaffes at a NATO summit – invoking Russian President Vladimir Putin’s name when he meant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and calling Harris “Vice President Trump” – further stoked anxieties.
Only four days before Sunday’s announcement, Biden was diagnosed with COVID-19 for a third time, forcing him to cut short a campaign trip to Las Vegas. More than one in 10 congressional Democrats had called publicly for him to quit the race.
The 46th US president’s departure from the race leaves the Democratic Party in an unprecedented situation, with only a month until the Democratic National Convention and less than four months until the November 5 election.
It was unclear whether other senior Democrats would challenge Harris for the party’s nomination – she was widely seen as the pick for many party officials – or whether the party itself would choose to open the field for nominations.
Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, said Biden had been under a lot of pressure recently.
“It is very difficult to say what made him make the decision now,” he said.
“What we do know is that he has been repeatedly insistent that he would not step down … So it comes as a bit of a surprise and a bit of a shock that Biden is saying he will step down after weeks of saying he won’t.”
