In an explosive turn of events, President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he would no longer seek re-election, leaving Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic Party’s most likely candidate to face Donald Trump.
“My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote in a statement before endorsing Harris to take over as the Democratic nominee. “My first decision as the party’s nominee in 2020 was to choose Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it was the best decision I ever made. Today, I want to express my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be our party’s nominee this year. Democrats—it’s time to come together and defeat Trump. Let’s do it together.”
Biden’s departure from the 2024 campaign caps a nearly month-long saga that began with his disastrous debate performance, in which the president appeared dazed, fumbled and stammered his way through questions, and was crushed by Trump’s usual rapid-fire lies. Longstanding concerns about Biden’s mental health and electability have come to a head, thrusting Harris into the spotlight as the obvious successor.
While Biden has publicly endorsed his vice president, Harris still needs to secure the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in late August. She’s already on the ticket, so it would be easy for her to take over Biden’s campaign funds, avoiding the complicated process of transferring those funds to another candidate. She’s also a historic figure, the first woman, first Black person, and first South Asian American to be elected vice president. And influential Democratic figures, including major fundraisers and top Biden allies like the former speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Representative. Jim Clyburnis expected to quickly back Harris, leaving little chance of an open convention with a candidate vying for the nomination.
However, if there is any open primary process, Democrats have a large pool of potential candidates, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Andy Beshear, Gavin Newsom, JD Pritzker, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro, And Roy Cooperas well as senators like Mark Kelly. Any of the people mentioned above would probably be a possibility for Vice President if Harris wins the top spot.
Biden’s departure relieves Democrats of concerns about his sanity, but Harris also brings her own challenges. The vice president has outperformed Trump in some polls, but she also suffers from low approval ratings, according to FiveThirtyEight’s latest average.
Her tenure as vice president has been marred by mixed reviews, with much of the criticism revolving around Harris’ alleged political absence, high staff turnover and failure to deliver on key issues in her portfolio such as immigration.
Throughout the campaign, however, Harris emerged as a strong voice on reproductive rights, an issue that has resonated with Democratic voters since the conservative-majority Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022; and she has been in charge of reaching out to blocs that have begun to swing to Biden, including black, Latino, and younger voters. She has also recently become a fixture in the online community, thanks to progressive content creators turning her more awkward moments into hilarious and relatable memes.
Harris’s rise to the top of the Democratic Party has been three decades in the making. She started as a prosecutor in the Bay Area, working her way up to two terms as San Francisco’s district attorney. She then became California’s attorney general, positioning herself as a reformer while often taking tough stances on crime, some of which came back to haunt her unsuccessful 2020 Democratic primary campaign.
But Harris’s success on issues like reducing crime and protecting consumers propelled her to the U.S. Senate, where she became known for her in-depth questioning of key Trump-era witnesses, including the former president’s Supreme Court nominee. Brett Kavanaugh and his attorney general Bill Barr.
And though her 2020 presidential campaign collapsed before the primaries even began, Biden chose Harris as his running mate thanks to her formidable debate skills, executive record, and broad appeal as a South Asian American and a Black woman. Four years later, Harris may be the Democrats’ best hope of defeating Trump and his party’s right-wing vision of America.
