American President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday, paving the way for Democrats to pick another nominee in their convention next month to take on the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
Minutes later, Biden endorsed his running mate and Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for the White House. If nominated, she will be the first Black woman and the first Indian-American woman to be a presidential candidate of a major party in the US.
“It has been the greatest honour of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” Biden announced in a letter to Americans on Sunday.
Roughly half an hour later, he said in a post on X: “My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”
Biden’s decision comes after a disastrous debate performance on June 27 against Trump exposed his age-related deficits and triggered a crescendo of voices within his party, from donors, and among voters for a change in the Democratic ticket. While Biden had maintained that he won’t quit, over the past two weeks, an increasing number of Congressional representatives, Senators, party elders made it clear that his candidacy was unviable. The assassination bid on Trump and a successful Republican convention added to Trump’s already existing lead in the elections, including in swing states, according to polls.
Trump, meanwhile, told CNN that he thinks Harris will be easier to defeat than Biden.
A CNN reporter said on X that Trump made the comments to the network shortly after Biden announced his decision.
In his letter, Biden spoke of what he saw as the achievements of his time in office — on the economy, infrastructure, health care, gun safety, climate, and more. “Together we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We have protected and preserved our democracy. And we have revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.”
Biden said he would address the nation later in the week.
The President’s decision throws an already unprecedented election into uncertainty. Whether Harris becomes the clear undisputed choice, or whether there is an open convention in Chicago in August where other contenders compete to win the support of delegates for the nomination isn’t clear. It also creates uncertainty about the fundraising that the Biden campaign has amassed so far, changes the nature of messaging around the election, and will force the Democrats to completely alter their campaign.
For her part, Harris became the first — and so far the only — Indian-American to be elected to the Senate. She threw her hat in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020 but her campaign collapsed early in the process. But Biden picked her as his running mate, in a signal to the Black community as well as the women vote. In her time in office, Harris has become the most vocal spokesperson of the administration on abortion, taking on the Supreme Court’s decision to remove the national protection to abortion. She has also been extensively campaigning in swing states in recent months.
But Republicans have cast her as the “border czar”, placing the blame for the increase in illegal immigration from the Southern border on her. This stemmed from an early decision in Biden’s term where he asked her to address underlying roots of migration from Central and South America.
Harris has come under criticism for high rates of attrition of her staff and being unable to carve out a distinct image, a criticism her supporters say is unfair given the nature of the vice presidency. They also attribute the negative perceptions around her to do with racism and sexism. But if she wins the nomination, Harris will now have the difficult challenge of unifying her party, raising funds, carving out a distinct message about her personality and priorities, mobilising the base and winning over swing voters, and defeating an energised Trump — all in four months.
Harris was born to an Indian mother who migrated to US in the late 1950s and a Jamaican father. She was raised by her mother after her parents split, and she has often fondly recalled her trips to Chennai to visit her grandparents. Harris has also spoken at Indian-American and Asian-American events. But her upbringing also had a strong influence of the Black community. Harris went to Howard University in DC, a historically Black institution. And her candidacy is expected to galvanize the Black community, though her challenge will be in also winning over the White vote especially in the midwestern swing states.
Two days before Biden dropped out, asked about Kamala Harris’s prospects, Angela Lang, a Black local political organiser in Milwaukee told HT that if Biden did drop out, then it had to be Harris – for picking anyone else would boomerang and draw a backlash from the Black community very conscious of representation. She said, “Kamala..has energy.. and ability to relate. I wouldn’t be as nervous watching a debate if it was Kamala Harris.”
Asked if the country was ready to elect a Black woman president, Lang said that given the stakes in the election, and the urgency of the task of defeating Trump, she felt that the normal barriers of race and gender may not operate in the same way in this election.
“There is a younger fresh energy with Kamala Harris. If the situation was different and it was a more normal election, then absolutely, my first thought would be like, I don’t know if we are ready to elect a woman president yet. I wish we were. But right now, I don’t know if people are talking about that part of the electability because it’s like, here’s this existential threat of democracy. So the typical electability questions about race and gender don’t seem to be at play right now in the way that they typically would. I don’t hear people talking about that. That’s very interesting.
