Biden withdraws Race, can Harris successfully replace Biden?

Democratic US President Joe Biden withdrew his reelection campaign on Monday after being urged by party leaders to quit so he could focus more fully on getting stuff done instead of worrying about whether he was running too weakly against Donald Trump - and plunging fresh turmoil into the 2024 election landscape.

Biden, who is 81 but earlier this year announced he would run for reelection, also said that should another Democrat become his party's nominee in the event of a vacancy on the ticket - namely Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden described as an "extraordinary partner" - he wouldn't stand aside. Harris welcomed the president's endorsement: "My plan is to earn and win this nomination," she said Sunday afternoon.

Joe Biden bows out, making history and effectively closing a nearly five-decade chapter of his Washington career, while those with an eye on the future emerge from behind him within the Democratic Party.

The move starts a three-month race to the Nov. 8 general election, with Democrats needing to quickly coalesce around an alternative nominee less than four weeks before their nominating convention and begin closing ground on primary front-runner Trump despite his survival of an assassination attempt just last weekend.

I wanted to run for my next time because I believe that our country's common good and security are perhaps best served by me committing all of my efforts - as President, not candidate or campaigner," Biden said in a statement he sent out through X.

Come on, it's time to get together and beat Trump. Let's walk this path together," another tweet said, followed by Biden offering his "full support and endorsement" to Harris.

Senior Democrats had been displaying signs shortly before it was announced that they were expected to back Harris as the nominee. Endorsements former President Bill Clinton, his wife (and BIden's proprietor) Hillary, liberal stalwart Senator Elizabeth Warren, and lawmakers from battleground states all lined up behind the vice president.

"Democrats will stick together because we know who @realDonaldTrump really is," Harris tweeted.

Delegate Outreach

A person familiar with the efforts said Harris's team is reaching out to delegates after an initial media leak accelerated spins ahead of a virtual roll call. A formal roll call vote nominating a candidate is scheduled for August. Campaign chairwoman Jennifer O'Malley Dillon told Biden team members during an all-hands call on Sunday that few of them were in Chicago to elect Harris and still had work to do, a person familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Obama will not, however, support any candidate until someone has started to lock up the party's nomination (as he did in past elections), adding drama at the moment oriented so much toward look-forward and turn-the-page politics.

It wasn't until Sunday that Biden signaled he would bow to pressure from allies; at one point, he said only the "Lord Almighty" could talk him out of pulling troops.

According to two people familiar with affairs, Biden also spoke with Harris multiple times on Sunday but didn't tell his senior staff about the decision until sending word over social media. Saturday nig, ht President said he is "ON ALL LANES" with his reelection, campaign advisers told him. One of the people said that few White House and campaign staff knew he made his selection before Politico published an X post.

A person familiar with the conversation said O'Malley Dillon was quoted as saying she was "angry and sad" Sunday in response to Biden's announcement but also expressed confidence in his recovery.

As a president seeking reelection for the first time in over fifty years, Biden had never agreed to put his hat on hooks and was now under relentless criticism from Democrats calling for him to step aside. In which he withdrew his candidacy so a younger person could take over.

The calls for him to get out started after his botched debate performance on June 27, where some Democratic leaders, donors, and voters had their doubts confirmed that he was not the candidate who could beat Trump or serve another term. Biden also suffered another setback when he tested positive for Covid-19 last week and was forced off the trail while struggling to recover his momentum.

Republicans to Biden: ResignIn response, Republicans demanded that he resign from the presidency.

If Joe Biden is not fit to be a presidential nominee, then he is simply not fit as president. He should have to step down from the office immediately. "November 5 cannot come soon enough," US House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement.

The scary July 13 realization that, pursuant to the logic of assassination (violence begets more violence), thug Barack Obama is quite possibly three high-caliber gunshots from being President led Biden out of a race in which polls were showing Trump-to-be with increasing leads - particularly after Donald was grazed by an assassin's bullet du jour at some rally or other pretty certainly killing Jews. In an interview aired on Sunday with CNN, Trump said he thinks Harris would be even easier to beat if some of his other 2020 contenders were stronger enough. He called Joe Biden "the worst president ever" for whom the country would always remember.

The best and worst he can hope for right now is that fighting him instead becomes a habit. Trump strengthened his grip on the GOP last week in Milwaukee and installed Ohio Senator JD Vance--a 39-year-old populist firebrand as his running mate.

Democratic Angst

Democrats Feel Biden's Weakness Stands Final Hurdle In Way Of Republicans Seizing Congress, White House Some three dozen Democratic lawmakers urged him to resign.

From foreign capitals to financial markets, the specter of a Trump victory on Tuesday is considered a significant possibility. That's already inspired investors to make "Trump trades": gambling on additional trade fronts and the likelihood of greater inflation. [L1] Democrats are banking on Harris, the first black and Asian vice president after earning a popular reputation with the Democratic Party, to have a shot of rescuing their chances after a disastrous November.

Some surveys performed in the previous month showed she would be more favored for the presidency than Trump, who has been generally unpopular and beneath rain in certain key swing states for the most crucial part of the election cycle. She has now recovered with them following a good start, where her rivals captured the headlines after a rush of verbal standards surrounding her bid for the presidency. Yet, her act becomes untested when car is the victim; she lobbied after not obtaining a majority. Tennessee.

Governors Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois were provisionally spotted as prospective 2024 challengers afore relenting to Biden; according to the party leaders, Whitmer was not permitted to challenge Harris. Newsom tweeted after the president's resignation, "There was no one better to oversee the review of Inspector General Eric Domenech's review, groundbreakingly reversed on a pair of frontages over the last four years, and go our nation in a more robust direction than my favorite buddy, Mr. Pritzker.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro also endorsed Harris. However, other Democrats could still compete to become the party's candidate.

Republicans, for their part, have suggested in recent days that they may file a legal challenge to try to keep an alternative candidate off the ballot. Johnson, the House speaker, said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that "small armies of lawyers" would be needed to unravel the legal "mess" surrounding any change in the Democratic ticket. "I think they have got legal hurdles in some of these states, and it'll be litigated, I would expect, on the ground there, and they will have to sort through that," he said. "They have got a real problem."

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, had been organizing potential legal challenges before the announcement. Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita was more circumspect in his response during a discussion at the convention when asked how the campaign would respond. In a 2014 US Senate campaign in Kansas, his national hometown, was unsuccessfully sued by Democrats in the Supreme Court. "We are not going to tip our hand now to what we're going to do," he said.

Historic Moment

The only other time a US president renounced a candidacy was in 1968. Democrat Lyndon Johnson, backed by divisions over the Vietnam War and imminent primary opponents, rejected another bid. Nevertheless, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon, which could serve as a warning sign for Democrats this year.

It is a brutal crash for Biden at the end of a career in public life that has spanned more than half a century, to the pinnacle of power and the achievement of being able to claim he was the only candidate who managed to oust Trump. But after a genuinely disastrous performance in a debate where he repeatedly seemed to lose his train of thought, he could not silence the explosion of concern about his ability to continue in office.

Further slips only reinforced this while he engaged in a more extensive campaign of public appearances and interviews in the following weeks. Major funders suspended their contributions. Even before the debate, Biden had been weighed down by record-low approval ratings driven by voters' anxiety about his management of the economy. Surging prices for housing and groceries have inflicted severe pain on American families, overshadowing the White House's efforts to talk up a solid job growth figure and new investments in domestic manufacturing and infrastructure - the key economic plank of Biden's administration so far.

His argument that the election would determine whether American democracy could be safeguarded failed to gain ground. This was not helped by the faltering efforts to charge Trump over his attempts to overturn the election last year, mired in court delays and reversals. Public sympathy for the former president following an attempt on his life made it harder for the Democrats.