For 23 days, President Joe Biden insisted on pushing forward with his reelection bid in the face of calls from Democratic lawmakers and donors for him to step aside.
And then, almost on a dime, things changed.
Early Saturday, Biden told senior aides it was “full steam ahead” for the campaign. But by later that evening, he had changed his mind following a long discussion with his two closest aides.
In addition to presenting new concerns from lawmakers and updates on a fundraising operation that had slowed considerably, they carried the campaign’s own polls, which came back this week and showed his path to victory in November was gone, according to five people familiar with the matter, who, like others interviewed for this article, were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Biden asked several questions during the exchange.
The only other people with Biden in the residence when he arose Sunday were first lady Jill Biden and two other trusted aides: deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini and assistant to the first lady Anthony Bernal. At 1:45 p.m., he notified a somewhat larger group of close aides that he had decided the night before to end his quest for another term, reading his letter and thanking them for their service. A minute later, before any other campaign and White House staffers could be notified, he posted the historic letter from his campaign account on the social media site X.
The announcement, which shocked the political world, almost immediately flipped the narrative around Biden: His own party, after three weeks of deriding him privately as an isolated, deluded lion in winter dragging other Democrats down with him, was showering him with loving tributes, praising his record, career of public service and a selfless decision they said put his country first.
It wasn’t that the president had grown tired of the drip of defections from within his own party — although he had. Rather, it was that Biden himself was finally convinced of what so many other Democrats had come to believe since his poor debate performance last month: He couldn’t win.
When the campaign commissioned new battleground polling over the last week, it was the first time they had done surveys in some key states in more than two months, according to two people familiar with the surveys. And the numbers were grim, showing Biden not just trailing in all six critical swing states but collapsing in places like Virginia and New Mexico where Democrats had not planned on needing to spend massive resources to win.
With that knowledge and the awareness that more party elders, including more of his former Senate colleagues, would pile on the public pressure campaign, a sudden exit offered the president his best chance to make it appear that the decision came on his own terms. It was a face-saving move of high importance to Jill Biden, who, according to people familiar with recent conversations, was adamant that her husband’s dignity be preserved.
Senior Biden aides were bracing for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who’d worked behind the scenes to encourage others in the party toward the kind of collective action that might finally push the president to end his campaign, to go public this week and possibly even disclose Democratic polling clarifying Biden’s dire political straits.
“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”
With Biden vowing in a statement to return to the campaign trail next week, some in the party came to believe that more direct and public opposition might be the only way left to convince Biden to step aside. At least a half-dozen House and Senate Democrats — including senior lawmakers — had planned to call for the president to leave the campaign on Monday and Tuesday, according to one lawmaker who had a pre-drafted statement.
“We were giving him the respect of the weekend to make his decision. We were hopeful that this is the decision we would make,” the Democrat said. This lawmaker, who had personally spoken with dozens of lawmakers in recent weeks about their district-level polling and voter concerns back home, said they had already been sharing that data with the Biden campaign team on a regular basis.
On Capitol Hill, Democratic leadership sensed Biden’s decision was coming. A lawmaker close to leadership, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the president had “gone offline” in recent days as he spent time with his family, a signal that he was digesting several weeks of firm Democratic messages that he needed to step aside.
“He got the message,” said the House Democrat, granted anonymity to speak frankly. Referring to the Senate Majority Leader, House Minority Leader and Speaker Emeritus, the lawmaker said: “It was from Chuck, Hakeem, Pelosi.”
This account of what led to the president’s reversal is based on conversations with 22 people who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
by Eli Stokols, Jonathan Lemire, Elena Schneider, and Sarah Harris, Politico | Read more:
Image: Illustration by Bill Kuchman/Politico (source images via Getty)
