The best time for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race would have been several weeks ago, in the panicked days after his disastrous debate performance. The American public saw on that stage a man incapable of prosecuting a vigorous campaign against Donald Trump, a would-be dictator, and who was either unable or unwilling to make a reasoned, principled defense of abortion rights, the Democrats’ strongest issue.
The weeks that followed have been filled with hand-wringing from the pundit class, backbiting and dueling leaks to the press from the president’s allies and those Democratic party insiders who wanted him to drop out, and anxiety from the party base and the public, who saw the Democrats’ descending into infighting rather than posing a meaningful alternative to Trumpian authoritarianism. The best time to drop out would have been before all this, when the depth of the concern for Biden’s electoral viability became clear. He could have spared his party, and his country, these weeks of chaos.
The second best time is now. In withdrawing from the presidential race, Biden has given the country a fighting chance to defeat Trump and avert the worst of what the far right has planned for America. He has chosen to preserve the prospect of a Democratic victory in November even at the expense of his own ego, even at the cost of what must be a profound personal humiliation. Many politicians – most conspicuously Trump himself – have made it clear that there is nothing they value more than their own aggrandizement. Biden has shown that there is something he prizes more highly than himself. Whatever you think of Biden the man, it is an honorable gesture that he made on Sunday.
It was also, clearly, not an easy sacrifice to make. The speed and tenor of leaks from both pro- and anti-withdrawal camps within the Democratic party over the past weeks have made it clear that Biden deeply wanted to stay in the race; that he was, for some time, in evident denial about his electoral prospects and resentful about the calls for him to drop out. He withdrew to his beach house over the weekend, where he was reportedly stewing in resentment. It could not have been easy: a confrontation with his own mortality, with the injustice of age, and with the cruel pragmatism of electoral politics.
The welfare of the country relied upon his choice to make this sacrifice, and it was not always clear that he was willing to make it. In a post-debate interview with George Stephanopoulos, which was meant to bolster Biden’s credibility in the wake of his horrible performance, the news anchor asked the president how he would feel if he stayed in the race and lost. Would he feel he had helped to usher in another Trump administration? Biden’s answer was revealing; he spoke not of the nation, but of himself. “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that’s what it is about,” he said.
But that’s not what it is about: a Trump victory would yield untold suffering and indignity for Americans: the immigrants he is promising to deport, the women he is promising to deprive of their access to abortion, the millions who deserve to breathe clean air, drink clean water and access education and medical care. In 2020, Biden had won the party’s nomination in part because of his single-minded focus on defeating Trump, on his promise to fight off the threat of authoritarianism before all other priorities. Here, egotism seemed to eclipse that promise. It is clear that he was tempted to do the wrong thing. It is to his credit that he did the right one.
Shortly after announcing his withdrawal from the race, Biden issued a statement endorsing his vice-president, Kamala Harris, for the top of the ticket. The move was canny, avoiding a chaotic contest, cutting off bizarre and destructive fantasies of a so-called “blitz primary” and effectively sealing Harris’s nomination ahead of the convention in Chicago next month. The move will also allow the new ticket to claim credit for Biden’s accomplishments – like a fundamentally strong economy, a cap on insulin costs, an explosion in green energy production, and a broad and popular climate and jobs bill – while being able to pivot away and recalibrate on some of Biden’s most unpopular or morally indefensible choices, like his support for Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.
The move also reverses the role that the vulnerability of age plays in the race. At 59, Harris is not a young woman, but she is downright spry by the standards of elite American politicians. Trump, by contrast, is 78, a rambling, largely incoherent speaker, and visibly weaker than when he first began running for president nearly 10 years ago, in 2015. Trump has always practiced a politics of masculine domination, and his petty little virility displays – like looming over Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016 – have long led liberals to fear that a woman could not defeat him; this, too, was part of Biden’s pitch to voters in the 2020 primary.
But Trump is not the figure he once was. He is tired and diminished, less focused and energetic, burdened by bad press from lawsuits (like the one in which he was found liable for the sexual assault of E Jean Carroll) and prosecutions (like the one in which he was convicted of 34 felonies). He is burdened, too, by bitterness and grievance, devoting good chunks of most public appearances to enumerating the various people he hates and how he has been wronged. He is unpopular, unpleasant, undisciplined and unappealing. He is the reason why Roe v Wade was overturned, and he wants to be a dictator. He is eminently beatable. And finally, Democrats may have a nominee who can beat him.
Most importantly, with Biden out and Harris stepping up to the plate, the Democrats may now have a candidate who is an eloquent, comfortable and active advocate for an issue that Biden was never able to persuasively campaign for: abortion rights. Biden shied away from abortion, and his discomfort was dragging Democrats down, leaving a public health crisis, a civil rights emergency and a crucial Republican liability on the table. With that issue now squarely on the agenda, the race will be dramatically changed.
• This article was amended on 23 July 2024. Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, not 38 as a previous version stated.
