President Joe Biden has decided not to seek re-election, having failed to salvage his campaign after a disastrous debate performance on June 27 and a series of televised gaffes.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden said in a statement released on Sunday. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
Biden said he will “speak to the Nation later this week in more detail about [his] decision.”
“Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump,” he concluded. “Let’s do this.”
Biden faced public pressure from figures in the Democratic Party as well as Hollywood donors after he stumbled through the CNN debate, in which he failed to counter points made by former President Donald Trump, fumbling his words and often drifting off mid-thought.
Biden was trailing Trump before the debate, and many polls showed him losing ground afterward. Many of his donors and supporters expressed concern about his ability to sustain a campaign, and some elected officials publicly called for him to step aside.
George Clooney, who co-hosted the single largest fundraiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever, wrote a July 10 op-ed in The New York Times calling for the president to step down.
“We are not going to win in November with this president … this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly,” Clooney wrote.
The president also faced pressure from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, according to reporting from CNN and ABC News.
The president had sought to reassure Democrats that the debate was simply one bad performance. At a fundraiser in Virginia on July 2, he chalked it up to failing to get enough rest after an overseas trip, though the trip was more than a week before the debate.
He also did a sit-down interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and NBC’s Lester Holt to try to stop the bleeding. On July 11, he did a press conference at the NATO summit that was intended to calm fears about his ability to speak off the cuff. But he inadvertently referred to Harris as “Vice President Trump.”
In another miscue at the summit, he mistakenly introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin.”
Biden was asked in an interview on BET on July 16 whether anything would make him reconsider.
“If I had some medical condition that emerged,” he said. “If doctors came to me and said, ‘You got this problem, that problem.’”
He was diagnosed with COVID-19 the following day.
For months, the president’s staff have swatted away concerns about his age and stamina, saying that he remained forceful in private meetings and kept up a withering schedule that wore out his staff. But his verbal slip-ups in public have grown increasingly frequent, and his voice sometimes trailed to a whisper.
This marks the first time since 1968 that a president opted not to seek re-election. That year, President Lyndon Johnson withdrew in late March, two weeks after an underwhelming performance in the New Hampshire primary. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and lost the general election to Richard Nixon.
This year’s convention will be held in Chicago on Aug. 19-22.
Read Biden’s full statement below:
My Fellow Americans,
Over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a Nation.
Today America has the strongest economy in the world. We’ve made historic investments in rebuilding out Nation, in lowering prescription drug cost for seniors, and in expanding affordable health care to a record number of Americans. We’ve provided critically needed care to a million veterans exposed to toxic substances. Passed the first gun safety law in 30 years. Appointed the first African American woman to the Supreme Court. And passed the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world. America has never been better positioned to lead than we are today.
I know none of this could have been without you, the American people. Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy. And we’ve revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.
It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.
I will speak to the Nation later this week in more detail about my decision.
For now, let me express my deepest gratitude to all those who have worked to hard to see me reelected. I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all this work. And let me express my heartfelt appreciation to the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me.
I believe today what I always have: that there is nothing America can’t do — when we do it together. We just have to remember we are the United States of America.
