Biden drops out, backs Harris in 2024 race

Following President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 presidential race, and Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, one of the next big questions that’s emerged is who could potentially be her running mate.

Historically, vice presidents have been selected to complement the main candidate. Biden, for instance, named Harris because she would bring youth, diversity, and legal experience. And former President Donald Trump chose Vice President Mike Pence because he was a traditional conservative and offered legislative expertise that he didn’t have.

President Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s war in Gaza created a rift between moderates and progressives in his party. Now that he has stepped aside in the 2024 presidential race, the question is whether Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, would chart a different path forward as president.

One early signal that she might: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress on Wednesday, and Harris did not preside in her role as vice president due to a previously scheduled event she chose to attend in Indianapolis. A slew of congressional Democrats (not just progressives) decided not to attend in protest of Netanyahu’s strategy in Gaza.

President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office Wednesday night in the culmination of a pivotal few weeks that saw him relinquish the Democratic presidential nomination — an act that may one day be the defining moment of his political career.

The speech was an attempt to exit political life gracefully, but it also served as a reminder that only days after the president announced his unprecedented decision, the nation has already moved on.

Vice President Kamala Harris has 103 days to convince the American public to vote for her for president. It’s not a lot of time — especially considering former President Donald Trump launched his campaign in November 2022 — but it’s a timeline not too different from that of other countries, many of which have short campaign cycles.

The US has the longest campaign cycle of any of its peer countries partly because we operate on a presidential system. We have fixed terms of leadership, and we know there will be elections every four years, so it’s easy to start early (especially given all the procedural hurdles to running for president).

Five years ago, standing in front of a crowd of some 20,000 people in Oakland, California, Kamala Harris announced that she was running for president. “My whole life, I’ve only had one client: the people,” she said.

Now that President Biden has dropped out of the race and Harris has become the presumptive Democratic nominee, it’s fair to start asking what, exactly, she plans to do for her client if she wins in November. Despite Harris’s long career and remarkable rise in politics — she has served as the San Francisco district attorney, California’s attorney general, US senator, and, most recently, vice president — it’s still difficult to predict what her campaign, let alone presidency, will look like.

According to multiple reports, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — long known for her steely legislative prowess and confrontation of Republicans — was integral to the push to get President Joe Biden to reconsider his 2024 reelection bid.

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” a Democrat familiar with private conversations told Politico. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”

The day after President Joe Biden said he would not seek reelection, his White House announced more than $4.3 billion in grants from the Environmental Protection Agency to communities to curb climate change, cut pollution, and seek environmental justice.

It’s a big announcement, but easily lost amid the thunderous presidential campaign news.

For a very long time in American politics, the primary question of presidential candidate likability was voters asking themselves, “Could I have a beer with them?” But over the course of the social media age, a new gut check has emerged to test a president’s ability to capture the internet’s attention: Does this person make a good meme?

After four years of a president for whom the answer was “not really” (with a minor caveat for “Dark Brandon,” which was funny for precisely one second), Democrats now have a candidate who can actually compete with Trump in the court of internet opinion. On social media timelines the world over, Vice President Kamala Harris is currently being made into frenzied supercuts where she dances, laughs, and delivers her now-iconic metaphor about coconut trees as she expounds on being “unburdened by what has been.” She’s being edited into pop songs and remixed queening out to “Brat,” the Charli xcx album that’s become this summer’s biggest cultural breakout and digital shorthand for unapologetic, messy hedonism.

As Democrats unite around Vice President Kamala Harris as their likely new nominee, their public mood is absolutely jubilant. Now, they hope, the party has a nominee who can take the fight to Trump — and win.

These hopes are not yet supported by polling data, which currently shows Harris on track to lose.

President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race after winning the Democratic primary puts the party in an unprecedented position.

With just weeks to go before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — and less than four months until Election Day — they are running short on time to lock down the ticket and launch a campaign around an entirely new candidate. Democrats appear to be rallying around Biden’s preferred successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, and it seems likely that she’ll be the presidential nominee.

It started with a coconut tree. Sorry — actually it starts with the context of what came before.

If you’re an active internet denizen, you might already know what I’m referencing: a viral clip of Vice President Kamala Harris delivering a speech while repeating a question that she says her mother often posed to her: “‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’”

Just a few hours before President Joe Biden announced that he will not seek a second term in the White House, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson threatened lawsuits to try to force Biden to appear as the Democratic candidate on at least some state ballots.

“Every state has its own system,” Johnson told ABC News, “and in some of these, it’s not possible to simply just switch out a candidate.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After weeks of intense media speculation and sustained pressure from Democratic lawmakers, major donors, and senior advisers, President Joe Biden has announced that he is bowing out of the presidential race. He is the first sitting president to step aside so close to Election Day. “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus entirely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” Biden said in a letter on Sunday.

In his 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, the German writer Thomas Mann used an idyllic alpine sanatorium as a metaphor for the torpor and self-delusion of the European elite in the years leading up to the cataclysm of World War I.

I couldn’t help but think about the book a little while attending this year’s Aspen Security Forum, which was held in the tony Colorado mountain town during one of the busiest and most destabilizing news weeks in recent memory, one that included the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, the selection of arch-populist Sen. J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, and polls showing the increasing likelihood that Trump will return to office. It took place just before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, though questions about the future of the ticket were a constant backdrop to the conference.

President Joe Biden just relinquished his claim on the Democratic nomination and handed it to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Since his disastrous debate performance last month, it has been clear that Biden could best prevent Donald Trump from retaking power by withdrawing from the presidential race. More than 70 percent of voters consider Biden unfit to seek another term in office. His poll numbers in swing states have fallen sharply in recent weeks, while the Democrats’ internal data has shown Trump only narrowly trailing in blue states such as Minnesota, New Mexico, and New Jersey.

Not long after President Joe Biden announced he was stepping aside from the presidential race Sunday, pro-Trump social media influencers had settled on one line of attack: that Democrats had carried out a coup against their own president.

Biden “has now been deposed in a coup,” Trump-backing venture capitalist David Sacks wrote. “Undermining Democracy should never be condoned,” Trump ally Richard Grenell posted. “The coup is complete,” wrote Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).

President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he is dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his choice for the Democratic nominee. A practical question follows: What happens to his campaign funds?

The Biden campaign said it had $240 million in cash on hand earlier this month, compared to former President Donald Trump’s $331 million. Campaign finance rules put some limits on what Biden can do with that money now that he’s no longer running for president.

After weeks of pressure, conjecture, and handwringing at the highest levels of the Democratic Party, President Joe Biden has decided to step aside from the 2024 presidential race.

The president issued a written statement Sunday afternoon, saying he believes it is in the country’s best interest for him to step down, adding that he will address the nation later in the week about his decision. Biden’s decision comes after weeks of public and private entreaties from Democrats who have concluded that he is unlikely to defeat former President Donald Trump.

It’s official: President Joe Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor after announcing Sunday afternoon that he’s decided not to run again this year.

“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 wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Presidential candidates, and their campaigns, are the sum of all in which they exist and what came before them.

Just after he announced he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race, President Joe Biden endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the nominee in his place — giving her a huge leg up in whatever process could follow from here. But there are still many unknowns about the future of the Democratic ticket.

The last time Kamala Harris ran a campaign for the presidency, she dropped out of the contest before a single vote was cast.

After launching her bid in Oakland, California, in front of a crowd of 20,000 supporters in January 2019, she campaigned for 310 days before dropping out of the contest. At the time she left the race, she was polling at 4 percent or lower in polling aggregates — a complete flop. It was a stunning result: Harris had been seen as a rising star for most of her years campaigning for and legislating in the Senate, questioning Trump administration officials, and was viewed as the possible future of the Democratic Party as she prepared for a presidential bid.

If the goal of national Democrats is to keep Donald Trump out of the White House to protect democracy — and they’ve largely framed the 2024 election in just those existential terms — who is best equipped to do it? And after a dismal debate performance by President Joe Biden last week, is it possible that there is another Democrat better equipped to beat Trump than the sitting president?

Polling gives us one way to answer that question. But it’s not as simple as looking at the topline numbers and deciding that it’s time to dump Biden. The only timeline for which we know anything, solidly, is the one we’re living in: anything else is purely hypothetical, and requires some suspension of belief, some scrutiny in looking at numbers, and some skepticism in how we might expect the public to react.

Since becoming president, Joe Biden has faced calls to step aside and not run for reelection out of concern that he’s too old for the job. And since his disastrous debate performance, those calls have only grown louder.

What might be making him press ahead? Some have suggested that the president feels an overwhelming sense of duty to serve his country and believes that stepping aside would be a cop-out. Others have theorized that he remains in the race because he thinks he’s one of the few people — if not the only one — who can beat Donald Trump. As Biden told supporters, “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.”

A viciously xenophobic demagogue — who fomented an insurrection against the US government less than four years ago — is on track to win the White House this fall. And the only remotely viable alternative to him, for now, is a massively unpopular, geriatric Democrat who just advertised his inability to speak in complete sentences on national television.

This is the reality that confronts us in the wake of Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance at Thursday night’s presidential debate. A comprehensive account of how we arrived at this grim moment would require a multi-volume history. But one cause of our current predicament is worth highlighting: Democratic presidential candidates repeatedly failed to select running mates with an eye to their party’s long-term best interests.