Biden’s decision not to run is a shocking, but not surprising, moment that changed history

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Abandoning the indefensible, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. bowed to the inevitable and, ultimately, the unavoidable.

By stepping aside from the quest for a second term, Mr. Biden set in motion a cascade of extraordinary developments that reshapes the 2024 presidential race even as his withdrawal placed his fingerprints on American history by endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris, a Black and South Asian woman, to succeed him.

His decision, creating yet another astonishing turn in a turbulent, immensely consequential presidential-election year, brings to a sudden end Mr. Biden’s fourth presidential campaign; assures the eclipse of his half-century at the centre of American politics; and throws into upheaval the general-election plans not only of his own party but also of Donald Trump’s Republicans. Mr. Biden’s rivals had been planning for more than half the year on a campaign against an 81-year-old whose decline provided fodder for his opponents but was heartbreaking to his allies.

Confined by COVID-19 in his Delaware beach house, under intense pressure and facing the saddening likelihood that the White House years that he had yearned for in an arc of nearly four decades would be circumscribed, Mr. Biden overlooked Cape Henlopen State Park for days while looking over his options. Outside the Biden home, speculation swirled. Inside, a President seethed, and then, almost on impulse, he relented.

With his disastrous performance at the late June debate with Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden – who as early as 1987, when he began his first quest for the White House, was regarded as a symbol of the vigour and potential of America’s youthful political class – was essentially chased from the campaign. He was recast in the public eye not as a striving man of potential but as a halting senior with rapidly declining mental acuity.

The result was an extraordinary spectacle in which an incumbent who wished for another term was all but denied the chance to seek it.

This episode is a poignant echo of the withdrawal from the 1968 race by president Lyndon B. Johnson, which occurred when Mr. Biden was a 25-year-old law student. It was an inflection point in the American passage that clearly shaped the rhetoric the 46th president used in his own withdrawal statement.

In a period of tumult that – with political strife and the spray of bullets – resembles 1968, Mr. Biden adopted and adapted the rationale that the 36th president, also facing possible defeat for re-election, employed for his withdrawal. Both told the American people they would focus their energies on completing the work they had begun and, implicitly, would make way for fresh new leadership.

The Biden decision represented a remarkable reversal in the President’s fate and destiny at the same time as it reshaped presidential history, which in almost every case assures a president who seeks a second term a chance to do so. One exception, along with the Johnson example, was Franklin Pierce, also an American chief executive in a time of political convulsion – in his case, the contention over slavery that led to the Civil War. The Pierce effort to win the Democratic nomination of 1856 stalled out after 15 ballots at a national convention that delivered the nomination to James Buchanan on the 17th ballot.

For about a month, Mr. Biden resisted the call of senior party leaders because he knew that they, and their forebears, have underestimated him for decades. Indeed, that has been a pattern since late 1971, when he approached the Democratic National Committee for assistance only to find that the party wise men – wrong for not the last time – rudely dismissed him as a callow 29-year-old in a hopeless challenge to a popular Republican Senate incumbent that he eventually won.

The political reaction to Biden’s withdrawal from presidential race

The Biden decision was greeted with praise from fellow Democrats, who created a chorus that swelled to the sentiment expressed by Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who in an interview Sunday, said, “As a patriotic American, the President did the right thing.” In a separate interview, Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent, said, “He’s clearly decided that this decision, while personally difficult, is in the best interest of the country.”

Mr. Biden has put the full weight of his office, and the power that comes with his years of party service, behind Ms. Harris. That likely short-circuits the possibility of the first American open convention since 1952 – a prospect that sent party elders, who prize stability and reliable political processes and deplore the kind of chaos such an event might produce, into eruptions of worry.

“Kamala benefits from very low expectations,” said Steven Grossman, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “She’ll do well with voters of colour, women, young people and seniors.”

Though Harry Truman did not endorse his vice-president, Alben Barkley, for president in 1952, and though Barack Obama did not endorse Mr. Biden in 2016 – a source of recurrent Biden family resentment aimed at the Obamas – in many respects, Mr. Biden could do little else in the case of Ms. Harris.

Mr. Biden, who on Sunday described his Vice-President as “an extraordinary partner,” chose the former California senator as his understudy nearly four years ago. On that day in August, 2020, he argued that she was “ready to do this job [of the presidency] on Day One.” He thus is on record with that sentiment, which would have been awkward to reject, even at a time of profound party crisis. He also almost certainly believed – and many party leaders agree – that a party whose core loyalists are Blacks and women could not turn away from a Black woman.

Cardiologists know that shock often is followed by confusion, and this is surely the case in the American body politic.

Mr. Trump said that his long-time rival had “quit the race in COMPLETE DISGRACE!” The Republicans now must completely recalibrate their autumn appeal, aiming it at Ms. Harris rather than at Mr. Biden. There were indications from the Trump campaign Sunday night that the former president might choose not to debate Ms. Harris.

Mr. Biden’s decision – one of those moments in the life of a country that is shocking but not surprising – does not settle accounts in the Democratic Party. Indeed, it raises several substantial questions that must be answered in the days and weeks ahead.

One of those questions is not likely to be a challenge to Ms. Harris’s nomination. One Democratic senator, seeking anonymity so as not to discomfit the Biden camp, said that he had surveyed all the possible replacements for Mr. Biden and found that none had the taste for a challenge to Ms. Harris for the nomination. Former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ 2016 nominee, were among the first in a parade of party leaders to endorse the Biden endorsement.

Biden has withdrawn from the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris. Here’s what could happen next

Now the question is whether Ms. Harris will choose her own running mate or, like the 1956 Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, request an open contest at the party’s convention in Chicago a month from Monday. It is a prize worth having, even if the Harris ticket is defeated in November.

In the possibility of a Harris defeat, the presidential field would be open four years from now for any or all of those who might become the Democrats’ 2024 vice-presidential nominee. They include Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former astronaut and husband of former representative Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head in 2011, and governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Roy Cooper of North Carolina.

Every one of those figures knows that vice-presidential nominees such as Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, LBJ, George H.W. Bush and Mr. Biden himself eventually have become president, and others, including Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore, have won presidential nominations.

Now, Ms. Harris is on the precipice of joining the list.