Joe Goes

Biden's political standing was untenable.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has written a lot about American politics the past few weeks. Now would normally be the time when I would pivot to events overseas, be it myriad elections in Europe or the death of Vietnam’s leader or whatnot.

However, for the rest of 2024 the most important international relations story will be the U.S. presidential election. So let’s talk about why Joe Biden exited the political stage.

Just to reiterate some points I have made in previous columns:

1. Even a vegetative Joe Biden would have been the superior presidential option to Donald Trump;

2. If Trump wins, the foreign policy implications would be, how to put it, not great;

3. Joe Biden’s debate performance opened him up to legitimate questions about his ability to campaign and to govern for four more years;

4. The race tipped in Trump’s direction after the debate. It didn’t shift dramatically — the polls moved but not by that much. But Biden’s fundraising dried up and Democratic Party power brokers were not assuaged by either Biden or his campaign after his God-awful debate performance.

Despite all of this, the race is far from over, and I don’t think Trump’s big acceptance speech did him any favors.

So why did Biden get out now? Three things became apparent after the debate that made it extremely clear that Joe had to go. First, he lacked the capacity to campaign the way he needs to campaign. Second, the most electorally successful Democrats thought he had to go. Finally, the longer this played out, the more that Biden, his inner circle, and his diehard supporters sounded exactly like Donald Trump.

The first point should, by now, be obvious. Since the debate, multiple stories came out about Biden’s… let’s say “elderly” behavior accelerating over the past few months. His one-on-one interviews with George Stephanopoulos and Lester Holt were not reassuring. He focused on foreign policy matters, which voters do not care about. Sure, he had his good days — he gave a great speech the day after the debate, his NATO press conference was fine, and his recent Michigan campaign speech focusing on Project 2025 was excellent.

The problem is that he was also going to have his bad days — and he could not afford any of them at this stage of the campaign. Anyone who thinks Biden should have stayed in needs to look in the mirror and ask themselves how confident they really were that Biden would display the necessary vigor, wit, and toughness to beat Donald Trump every day until November 5th.

The second point should also be obvious by now. Barack Obama. Nancy Pelosi. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. Democratic governors. House Democratic. Senate Democrats. The reporting on all of these folks made it clear that a lot of powerful Democrats urged Biden to exit the campaign. The idea that this was just about the New York Times editorial staff or wealthy campaign donors is nonsense. The folks who pushed Biden out were the Democrats who had actually won elections in the past and had skin in the game for 2024. The contrast with a Republican Party that didn’t want Trump to win the nomination but failed to mobilize in any useful way is constructive.

Finally, both Biden and his loyal supporters started to sound way too much like Trump supporters did back during the days of the Toddler-in-Chief thread. Biden kept insisting that the polls were skewed and that Democrats wanted him to stay in the race — which wasn’t true. He claimed that he had done “more for the Palestinian community than anybody,” which wasn’t true. The reporting on Biden over the past few weeks focused far more on his mood and his emotional and cognitive state than anything else. One New York Times story, for example, characterized Biden this weekend as, “increasingly resentful” and “irritated at Mr. Obama” and “an under-the-weather president coughing and hacking more than a hundred miles from the corridors of power.” All these traits came up a lot when chronicling the Toddler in Chief, and I did not like seeing these themes emerge as Biden tried to defend himself.

So now he has decided not to run, endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris instead. As previously noted, the optimal solution would have been for Biden to resign the presidency and for Kamala Harris to be sworn in as president and become the 2024 nominee.¹ But it increasingly looks as though the party has decided in the same way that it did back in late February of 2020. This sets up an interesting contrast between a Gen X candidate who has made abortion one of her principal themes over the last two years and an aging, increasingly incoherent Baby Boomer.

If you want further thoughts about this in video form, my podcasting partner Ana Marie Cox and I recorded an emergency episode just as the news was breaking. Look and listen here:

1. I don’t care all that much who the VP nominee is, but if forced to pick I’d go with Andy Beshear.