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Joe Biden has officially dropped out of the 2024 US presidential race, and has publicly endorsed the current Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him.
But with only 105 days left to go until election day in the US, will it be Harris vs Trump? And is there enough time for the Democrats to fight against the momentum building behind Donald Trump?
Jitendra Joshi, The Evening Standard’s Deputy Political Editor, explains how we got here and where this all leaves the Democrats.
In part two, we take a deeper look at Kamala Harris, the potential Democratic nominee and hopeful president in waiting.
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Here’s a fully automated transcript of this episode:
From London, I'm Rochelle Travers, and this is The Standard.
Well, it's official, Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 US presidential race.
“I respect the decision that he has now made.
Not an easy decision, but a decision that I know that he will have arrived at taking into account the best interests of the American people.
And I look forward to working with him for the remainder of his presidency.”
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer giving his reaction to the news there.
After weeks of speculation and calls for President Biden to step aside, he released a statement on Sunday in which he said it was the greatest honour to serve, but his withdrawal was in the best interest of the party and the country.
He'll remain as president for the rest of the term.
Biden has publicly endorsed the current vice president, Kamala Harris, to succeed him.
Following the news, Harris said she would earn and win this nomination and unite the country against Trump.
But with only 105 days left to go until election day in the US, will it be Harris versus Trump?
And is there enough time for the Democrats to fight against the momentum building behind Donald Trump?
Jitendra Joshi is The Evening Standard's deputy political editor.
Jit, Biden has stepped down from the 2024 presidential race. What were the events that led to this decision?
Yes, so it's been just under four weeks in the coming really ever since the first presidential debate between Biden and Donald Trump in late June.
There were already doubts about Joe Biden's quite obviously declining physical and mental acuity.
You know, he really has slowed down in recent months and years and that's becoming more evident.
You know, he's always been known for his verbal gaffes.
Well, those had really grown quite acute.
And then the debate just really brought that all together.
This was a huge set piece moment where the Democrats were looking to their president, to their candidate to really stick it to Donald Trump in front of a national and global TV audience.
And he completely failed the audition.
Ever since that, then those doubts about whether he's got the standing power had really become acute.
So much so that lots of senior Democrats mostly quietly, but some quite openly had come out and said, look, this cannot go on.
We're going to lose to Trump and the Republicans in November unless we change things up pretty fast, despite the huge risks of changing things this late in the game.
What has the reaction been like to Biden dropping out?
I think really it's this sadness that it's come to this.
No one on the Democratic side is celebrating.
Donald Trump is in his own inimitable, insulting and abusive way, but that's another thing.
On the Democratic side, there's sadness, but there's also huge relief that Joe Biden has, in the view of many, come to see the inevitable before the party holds its convention in just under four weeks in Chicago.
It's more than just relief.
You can sort of measure how this is impacting the race by, notably, the flow of money.
Money counts for everything in US politics.
And all of a sudden, on Sunday, after Joe Biden's announcement, he saw over $50 million being raised online by the Democrats to support their would-be new nominee, Kamala Harris.
So if money talks, then it's talking pretty loudly.
And now it's really over to her, to the Vice President, to use that money and to show that she's worthy of this mantle.
Biden has publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, who we'll speak about in more detail in part two of this episode.
Does this mean it's a done deal and she'll become the Democratic nominee?
It's not entirely a done deal until it's a done deal, if you know what I mean.
So basically what that means is we need to see a roll call of votes either in Chicago or as some Democratic leaders are urging to have some sort of process done virtually before the convention so that the party can go into the convention with a united stand, knowing clearly who the nominee is gonna be.
But that's the sort of technical thing.
To all intents and purposes, once a candidate picks up enough steam, once they've got the money going their way, and once they're getting the high profile endorsements of senior people in the party, then that achieves a sort of fairly unstoppable momentum.
And it would be brave, shall we say, of anyone else to then split their head above the parapet, go against the presumptive nominee and set off some serious bloodletting at a time when the party really needs to get its act together.
Who are the other potential Democratic nominees if Harris isn't selected?
The party is actually not badly placed in terms of talent.
If they did want a challenge, could credibly point to their own political experiences, providing a platform for that.
So, people like that include Pete Buttigieg.
He was in the cabinet now under Biden.
He rose to prominence in 2020 from pretty much nowhere, really, to emerge as the winner of the Iowa caucuses before he eventually threw his lot in with Joe Biden.
So he's now the cabinet secretary.
You've got governors like Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Andy Beshear, Mark Kelly, one or two others.
They're all in the mix, but for the most part, they've all come out in the last hours since Joe Biden's announcement to say that they're backing Kamala Harris.
There's one intriguing one who is Gavin Newsom.
He's the governor of California and is widely seen as a sort of telegenic, effective, politically-experienced operator who might well have ambitions of his own.
There's, however, an issue there, which is that under the Constitution, you can't have two candidates, the president and vice presidential candidates, coming from the same state.
And of course, Kamala Harris is California herself.
Do you think the Democrats have enough time to turn things around before the US election in November?
Possibly, yes, because actually, while this is a shock, and it's never happened this late in the race to see a candidate drop out, I mean, you have to go back to 1968, when Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, bowed out in March of that year, six, seven months before the election.
We're now looking at a lot less than that, just over 100 days.
So, time is short, but they're not starting from a terrible position.
The polls had started tipping more decisively towards Donald Trump since that debate four weeks ago, but they stay in the realms of competitiveness.
And that's as true nationally as it is in the key six or seven battleground states, which will decide the election.
So, if you look at the baseline of where they're starting from, 47, 48% on a national vote, it's not completely impossible to turn things around.
The key, however, is what sort of candidate Kamala Harris is going to prove to be.
Let's go to the ads.
Coming up in part two:
She's already the first person of Indian Jamaican heritage to serve as vice president, and the first woman, of course.
So, were she then to progress to the West Wing as president herself, she would be shattering a huge glass ceiling.
We take a close look at Kamala Harris, the potential Democratic nominee and hopeful president in waiting.
Welcome back.
Still with me is Jitendra Joshi, The Evening Standard's deputy political editor.
Now, let's take a deeper look at Kamala Harris, the potential Democratic nominee who hopes to take on Trump.
What do we know about her and her background?
She's bottom-racing in California, and she's in some way, she's the embodiment of the American dream.
Her mother was an Indian immigrant.
Her father was from Jamaica.
So, she would be, or she's already the first person of Indian Jamaican heritage to serve as vice president and the first woman, of course.
So, were she then to progress to the West Wing as president herself, she would be shattering a huge glass ceiling.
Her path to politics, as for so many US politicians came through the law.
She was a district attorney and then attorney general in California, where she was quite effective in bringing down certain rates of crime, although there was controversy surrounding reluctance to call for the death penalty and also the rates of conviction that she pursued against marijuana users, which disproportionately affected black people in San Francisco.
So there was an issue there, but she overcame that to become a senator, democratic senator for California and used that platform to get quite a profile nationally in televised riddings of the Trump appointees after he won the presidency in 2016.
And she used that profile then to run for president herself, or at least to try and earn the democratic nomination in 2020.
And here's where things went really, started to go wrong for the first time in her political rise, because the thing about American politics, the thing about running for president is it's a long, exhausting, and very complicated and very cash hungry process.
It really finds you out if you're not quite ready.
She was exposed as not being ready, to be honest.
Her campaign was written by him fighting, she never quite managed to decide what her messaging was.
And she went from being the embodiment of the American dream to flaming out and had to quit the race even before the first contest in Iowa.
Joe Biden went on to win and really rescued her then by picking her as his vice president running mate.
And this was around the time of Black Lives Matter.
There was a lot of angst about racial politics and she was seen as the perfect sort of ally to help him with black voters and women voters.
So that did work then.
But now that she's at the top of the ticket, has she addressed those deficiencies from four years ago?
Let's see.
What does she stand for?
So, she's seen as sort of on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
She, under Joe Biden, she as vice president, she was tasked noticeably with trying to get to the bottom of what was driving the huge numbers of people entering the US illegally from Latin America.
And this is something that's actually hobbled her ever since.
So, while being quite sort of sympathetic to the plan of immigrants and refusing the more hardline policies espoused by Donald Trump and the Republicans, she slightly lost track of where America was going, where a lot of voters were going.
This was on this debate.
She tripped up quite badly in an early interview when she was asked, well, why haven't you gone to the border yourself?
And she said, well, I don't need to go to the border.
I haven't even been to Europe, and I still know lots of things about Europe.
I mean, it was an odd remark and she's never really recovered from that in the opinion polls.
That said, she's really gone after Donald Trump quite effectively, sort of leaning back on her past as a prosecutor, more recently to go after him very, very strongly on abortion.
So, the Republicans, the Supreme Court, that stacks with judges appointed by Donald Trump, overturned the historic Roe v. Wade ruling that protected a woman's right to privacy over her body, which in turn allowed for states to allow abortion rights.
That went by the wayside.
We're in a very uncertain period now where states are doing their own thing.
Some Republicans want to have a federal nationwide ban.
This has emerged as a real fort line of the election.
And Kamala Harris has really gone after Trump hard on that, as well as on some of those sort of social culture war fronts, while trying to protect Joe Biden's legacy on the economy and investment in infrastructure and sort of protecting disadvantaged communities with more federal support.
These are all things that Donald Trump wants to try out of the window.
There seems like there is so much momentum behind Trump since the debate and the assassination attempt.
Where do these latest developments with the Democrats leave the Republicans?
That's precisely the thing.
So they were on a bit of a high after Donald Trump's brush with death.
As potentially tragic as that was to see a political candidate gunned down in that way, he escaped not just with his life, but with a really powerful set of images and a powerful story projecting strength and resolution, which he then carried through the Republican National Convention last week in Milwaukee.
But a lot of the messaging there was premised on, you know, Joe Biden is a crook, Joe Biden is old, seen low and unfit for office.
That's now all off the table.
They have to recalibrate that to attacking Kamala Harris.
But she was already on Biden's ticket.
She was already in the mix of their political attacks.
And one thing you can rely on with Donald Trump is, you will always try and pick on the personal as much as on the political and on the policy front.
So, he's going after Harris for, well, notably for the way she laughs because actually that's one of the defining characteristics, I think, for most American voters.
She's got quite an enthusiastic belly laugh and that's become a stick with which to beat her in a lot of the attack ads.
So, he's got a new nickname for her.
He's calling her laughing Kamala Harris.
He says she's crazy.
She's nuts.
So he's losing no time to, you know, go down the political low road.
But in terms of policy, his campaign is, they've already got their first attack ads out, linking her very much to Joe Biden's policy agenda on immigration and also on the economy.
Because most Americans, just like in Britain, a lot of people are still feeling the pinch from the cost of living crisis that hasn't gone away.
You can read more about the US election in the Standard newspaper or on our website, standard.co.uk.
And that's it from this episode.
The Standard podcast will be back tomorrow at 4pm.
