Biden Ends Reelection Campaign, Endorses Kamala Harris as Democratic Nominee

Updated 5:15 p.m. Sunday

President Joe Biden will not run for reelection and is throwing his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris, he announced Sunday on social media — ending weeks of pressure for him to step aside following a disastrous June 27 debate performance and mounting concern from voters that the 81-year-old can’t beat former President Donald Trump and wouldn’t be able to serve another four years in the White House.

Biden announced his decision in a letter to the American people posted on social media. About half an hour later, he posted again endorsing Harris to be the Democrats’ nominee.

“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President,” he said. “And it’s been the best decision I’ve made.”

In his initial letter, Biden said he will address the country later this week “in detail about my decision.”

“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,” Biden wrote.

A few hours later, Harris issued a statement that she intends to “earn and win this nomination,” and praised Biden for selflessly “putting the American people and our country above everything else.”

“Over the past year, I have traveled across the country, talking with Americans about the clear choice in this momentous election. And that is what I will continue to do in the days and weeks ahead. I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda,” she stated.

Trump said in a post on his Truth Social social media network that Biden “was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve.” And House Speaker Mike Johnson took to X to call on Biden to step down.

“We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly,” Trump said.

Biden’s decision means he will release the nearly 3,900 delegates pledged to him, potentially setting off an open convention process not seen in 50 years.

In the next four weeks, Democrats — and more importantly, the approximately 4,700 DNC delegates responsible for nominating a candidate — must either coalesce behind someone or gather in Chicago on Aug. 19 to undertake a public nominating process that could require multiple rounds of voting.

The last time Democrats nominated a candidate in an open convention was in 1968, following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the nomination, but the convention was marked by brutal and violent crackdowns by police on anti-war protestors. The aftermath led Democrats to reform the nominating process to give more power to primary voters.

The president’s decision thrusts Harris, 59, into what’s likely to be a bruising campaign against former President Trump less than three months before the November 5 election and with just weeks until the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the party will officially nominate its candidate. Trump’s team has reportedly been preparing for this possibility, and has conducted opposition research and polls on the vice president.

Harris, who was born in Oakland and spent her early years in Berkeley, would be just the second woman and the first person of Asian descent to be nominated for president by a major political party.

The daughter of a Jamaican American father and Indian American mother, Harris began her political career as the elected district attorney of San Francisco and went on to serve as California’s attorney general and U.S. senator before running for president herself in the 2020 cycle.

She dropped out of the presidential race in late 2019, several months before primary voting and caucusing began, and was named Biden’s running mate in August of 2020.

Harris made a national name in the Senate during Trump’s first term as a sharp and exacting questioner who brought her prosecutorial skills to committee investigations and confirmation hearings. Perhaps most famously, she unnerved now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation, including with pointed questions about abortion rights.

And as California’s attorney general, she made national headlines in over a decade for refusing to accept a settlement with banks over their predatory lending practices that helped drive the 2010 financial crisis.

The Obama administration was eager for states, including California, to accept the multibillion dollar settlement, but Harris held out — despite her close ties to President Barack Obama, whom she backed when most of the Democratic establishment was still behind Hillary Clinton. She walked away from a $2 billion deal for California, ultimately securing a settlement that was 10 times higher.

But for those high profile wins, Harris has her critics — on the left and right. One of her first major decisions after being elected district attorney two decades ago was not filing capital murder charges against a man accused of gunning down a young San Francisco police officer.

Harris had run on an anti-death penalty platform, but her swift decision not to file charges angered police and the murdered officer’s family, leading to a rebuke from Sen. Dianne Feinstein at the slain officer’s funeral.

She also has progressive critics for her tenure as a local and state prosecutor — including for her anti-truancy campaign. As district attorney, she created a program that threatened parents with jail time if their children were chronically missing school, and in 2011 she pushed a state law codifying the policy. She argued that the program was needed, noting the high rate of high school dropouts who ended up homicide victims — but critics saw it as a “tough on crime” policy that largely punished impoverished Black families.

Now, she’ll be working to balance those credentials — woman of color, former law enforcement official — as she seeks to define herself more nationally in an election year that will likely be decided by a handful of swing voters in a few states.

Even before Biden’s decision, Republicans were already sharpening their attacks on the vice president. Corrin Rankin, vice chair of the California Republican Party, previewed some of the GOP’s potential attacks on Harris at the Republican National Convention this week, accusing her of lying to the public about Biden’s health.

“They had to have known. If people spent time with Joe Biden, they had to have known his condition, frankly. And just to keep lying and gaslighting Americans and just telling us that he’s okay,” she said. “Absolutely, she’s part of that. She’s come out several times and told us that he’s sharp and that he’s okay, just as sharp as he’s ever been.”