Joe Biden has honorably served the United States for five decades, as a senator, as Barack Obama’s vice president, and finally in the nation’s highest office.
His four years in the White House have been a mixed blessing. He has been surprisingly effective at passing major legislation through a divided Congress, and he has scored some notable foreign policy successes, such as staunch support for Ukraine in the early months of the war. He has also made some momentous mistakes, including economic policies that have contributed to dangerously high inflation and a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
By the time Biden ran in 2020, he was the oldest serious presidential candidate in American history; in fact, he beat out his Democratic rivals, including Kamala Harris, in large part because he was too old to echo the apparent consensus among Twitter’s loudest voices, who had veered sharply left. His mental acuity waned over his years in the White House, something that was painfully laid bare for the world to see in the June debate against Donald Trump.
For a few weeks, Biden risked entering the history books as a King Lear, failing to manage his ride into the sunset and forcing the entire country to pay the price. But today’s decision to withdraw his candidacy ensures that he will be remembered as a true statesman, someone who made a selfless decision, even if it took him a few weeks too long to do so.
It is too early to predict how historians will judge his presidency. But it now seems clear that their judgment of his personal qualities — like ours — should be positive.
The best thing Democrats can do now is to mount a genuinely open contest over who should face Trump in the presidential race. Voters deserve a say in who represents them, and Kamala Harris was not on the primary ballot in either 2020 or 2024. And the contest, however turbulent, is likely to strengthen Democrats: either they find a candidate that voters prefer over Harris, or Harris will go into November strengthened by a show of Democratic support for her.
But that course of action may not be likely. Democrats — and the political class at large — ignored Biden’s declining health for months and years. When it became impossible to ignore, they (and he) wasted more weeks dithering over what to do. Now, the Democratic National Convention in August and the November election are dangerously close; and Biden, shortly after announcing his decision, threw his full support behind Harris to become the nominee.
If the Democrats elect Harris, the upcoming election will be very close. Like her boss, Harris is and has long been deeply unpopular. And she is unpopular both because she has made some very unpopular decisions in the past and because her changes of mind on important issues have left her without strong support in the progressive or moderate camp within the Democratic Party.
These are serious shortcomings, but — especially when facing an opponent who, for good and profound reasons, remains deeply unpopular himself — they can be overcome. Harris needs to make the case against Trump with force and clarity, qualities she demonstrated when she served on the Senate Judiciary Committee. But she needs to do so without appearing to be judging Americans who are genuinely undecided about whom to support in November. While some left-wing pundits like to proclaim the existence of swing voters, it is the millions of people who changed their minds between 2012 and 2016, or between 2016 and 2020, who will make the difference again this year.
One way to appeal to these voters is to position herself squarely in the political center. Trump has many personal and political vulnerabilities. But he has also shown himself willing to triangulate, for example by removing any pro-life message from the Republican National Convention platform and claiming that he does not support Project 2025, a radical and controversial set of policies put forward by the Heritage Foundation. If Harris wants to beat Trump, she will need to show that she is equally willing to sacrifice the Democrats’ less popular positions on issues such as the southern border or the participation of trans women in high-level women’s sports.
The election was beginning to look like a foregone conclusion, with Trump comfortably in the lead. The party that is on track to lose has an interest in rolling the dice. The Democrats have just done so. It’s a good sign: after weeks of seemingly paralyzed, the party that claims the future of American democracy will hinge on this election has shown it really wants to win.
