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Before Biden\u2019s announcement, Harris\u2019s staff had started preparing for her debate with Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential process. Biden and Trump were scheduled to face off in a second debate on Sept. 10. It is unclear if Trump and Harris will do so. If Harris secures the nomination, she will have to select a running mate under a compressed timeline to ensure the Democratic ticket meets all state ballot deadlines.<\/p>\n
Before any of that could happen, Biden\u2019s campaign apparatus began the process Sunday of morphing into a \u201cHarris for President,\u201d campaign, a process that will involve creating new iconography, reengaging donors and deploying Biden\u2019s considerable campaign war chest to introduce Harris to voters.<\/p>\n
Biden\u2019s campaign, headquartered in Wilmington, Del., held a call Sunday to let staff know that they were still employed and would continue their long-held mission to defeat Trump in November. O\u2019Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez led the call.<\/p>\n
The Democrats\u2019 predicament \u2014 a candidate dropping out after sweeping mostly unchallenged through the party primaries to become the presumptive nominee \u2014 is untested in the modern era. It caps weeks of delicate strategizing by party leaders on how to dislodge Biden, a proudly stubborn figure known to bristle at those who write him off. It signals the conclusion of a remarkable half-century political career that began when Biden won election to the Senate in 1972 as one of the youngest-ever senators and will now conclude in January with his service as the oldest-ever president.<\/p>\n
The Democrats\u2019 process for choosing their nominee will be hurried and fraught with deep uncertainty and the potential for further intraparty turmoil. The Democratic National Convention is in four weeks in Chicago, although Democrats had initially planned to formally nominate Biden in a \u201cvirtual roll call\u201d before the in-person gathering. Seeking to head off any sense of disunity, multiple state delegations to the Democratic National Convention said Sunday they would unanimously back Harris, giving her a jumpstart to securing the nomination.<\/p>\n
The president will leave office with notable accomplishments, especially for a one-term president in an era of deep division. He pushed through bills on infrastructure, climate change, health care, gun control and the semiconductor industry. He pulled the United States out of Afghanistan, rebuilt American alliances and led a coalition to defend Ukraine against Russia.<\/p>\n
At the same time, however, he suffered historically low approval ratings and was blamed for stubbornly high inflation, record migration at the U.S.-Mexico border and a chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 2021.<\/p>\n
His staunch support for Israel in the Gaza war sparked condemnation at home and abroad, and lingering concerns over his advanced age drove down his poll numbers, leaving him trailing Trump in many crucial swing states.<\/p>\n
In abandoning his reelection campaign, Biden joins two other incumbent presidents in modern history who chose not to seek reelection: President Harry S. Truman in 1952 and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Those presidents\u2019 announcements, however, came months earlier and gave their party far more time to regroup for the general election. Even so, Democrats lost both elections.<\/p>\n
Many Democrats considered Biden\u2019s June 27 presidential debate against Trump shocking and catastrophic, as Biden sometimes struggled to complete sentences or marshal his thoughts. The president and his aides insisted for weeks afterward that he was staying in the race, likening the moment to other occasions in his long career when he had been counted out.<\/p>\n
Voters have long told pollsters they were concerned about Biden\u2019s age and the debate was an inflection point, releasing a wave of Democratic anxiety that the Biden campaign had previously been able to keep in check.<\/p>\n
On July 2, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) became the first House Democrat to publicly call on Biden to step aside as the nominee, invoking Johnson\u2019s decision 56 years earlier. \u201cUnder very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw,\u201d Doggett said. \u201cPresident Biden should do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
That kicked off an agonizing stretch for Democrats when every day or so, another congressional Democrat would issue a statement declaring their affection for Biden and admiration for his accomplishments, but adding that it was time for him to \u201cpass the torch.\u201d<\/p>\n
A native of Scranton, Pa., Biden entered politics more than five decades ago, winning a seat on the New Castle County Council in Delaware in 1970. He first ran for Senate in 1972, defeating a Republican incumbent, J. Caleb Boggs, in a scrappy, underdog campaign.<\/p>\n
Tragedy struck Biden\u2019s life within weeks of his Senate election, when his wife, Neilia, and 1-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident while Christmas shopping in Delaware. His two young sons, Beau and Hunter, who were also in the car, were seriously injured. Biden pushed ahead, plunging into life in the Senate, raising his boys and getting remarried to his current wife, Jill \u2014 the first chapter in a long biography of tragedy and recovery.<\/p>\n
As Obama\u2019s presidency wrapped up in 2016, Biden, who served as his vice president, agonized over whether to run to succeed him, but he ultimately opted against it as he continued to grieve after another personal tragedy: His elder son, Beau, had been diagnosed with brain cancer and died in 2015 at age 46.<\/p>\n
Trump then shocked the political world by defeating Hillary Clinton for the presidency, sending the Democrats into a brooding exile and dramatically raising the stakes for the 2020 campaign. Biden later said he was inspired to join that race after watching Trump decline to unequivocally condemn a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. He won his primary and defeated Trump in a year when the campaign was upended by the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n
Running for a second term, Biden pitched himself as uniquely equipped to defeat Trump after doing so in 2020, facing minimal opposition in the Democratic primaries even as voter concerns lingered about his age. His campaign focused heavily on abortion rights, promising to restore the federal right to an abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will speak to the nation later this week in more detail about my decision,\u201d Biden wrote in his Sunday letter announcing his withdrawal from the race.<\/p>\n
Svitek reported from Washington. Liz Goodwin, Tyler Pager and Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on washingtonpost.com<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. \u2014 President Biden abruptly ended his reelection campaign Sunday, sending shock waves through the political world and plunging the Democratic Party into an unprecedented scramble to choose a new nominee to face former president Donald Trump. \u201cIt has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,\u201d Biden, 81, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6459,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}