To say Biden’s announcement that he would be stepping back from his campaign for reelection came as a surprise would be an understatement of the century. While there had been calls for him to step away from the campaign from the very beginning, he had remained adamant that he would be on the ballot in November. Those who questioned his capabilities or called for him to bow out of the campaign were often ridiculed and mocked on the belief they were merely partisan muckrakers. Then he debated Trump on national television and had a very poor showing. What exactly caused this poor showing will likely never be known, but it seems that very few, even within his own party, understood what was going on until the debate. This sparked numerous calls from members of his own party for him to withdraw, including his former colleague, President Barack Obama. It was reported that after the debate, he went to a family retreat with close confidants and family members to discuss his next steps. Ultimately, he chose to stay the course.

In the immediate lead-up to his announcement, there were some hints that he was seriously considering stepping down. Specifically, he publicly stated the only way he would stop his campaign was if he was medically unable to continue. Shortly thereafter, he announced that he had caught COVID again and canceled a series of campaign events while he recovered. During this recovery period, a tweet appeared on his account stating that he was withdrawing and urging people to vote for Kamala Harris, along with a picture showing a letter to the same effect with his signature. It is unclear how much notice was given to various members of his staff, but it seems that this came almost as suddenly for them as for the rest of the country. Initially, there was shock, and some believed that his account had been hacked, but as the dust settled, it became clear that Biden’s time as the candidate was over.

!!!   The public was largely divided along ideological lines. Conservatives questioned the legality of what appeared to be a palace coup of the highest office in the country, believing that Biden had either been forced to withdraw or was unaware that someone with access to his Twitter had withdrawn for him. There is no way to know for sure what happened, but the main point of contention was how sudden it was and Biden’s long absence from public view after the announcement. Liberals were divided. Some were grateful that Biden was putting his personal pride aside and allowing someone with a better chance to run. Others were skeptical, unhappy with many of Biden’s policies and the generally limp-wristed approach that the Democratic Party has been using for decades. To them, this was an attempt to ensure that the moderate faction of the party remained in power by giving such short notice that more radical candidates wouldn’t have time to gather steam, essentially forcing the torch to be passed to Kamala Harris, who would largely maintain Biden’s policies. While many grumbled about it, few actually took action, and Harris would later be officially recognized as the candidate shortly after the announcement.

Politically, the Democratic Party quickly coalesced around Kamala Harris despite much media speculation that others would step forward to challenge her ascent. While a handful of Democratic governors and former candidates may have had a chance to challenge her, none stepped forward, likely wanting to bide their time and run a full campaign in the future. Kamala was also the only candidate who could access the funds donated to the Biden campaign, which was a significant amount at the time. It is unclear how Biden views his health and age. During his 2020 campaign and his 2024 campaign, he downplayed or outright denied that his health and age had anything to do with his ability to be president. Since his decision to step down as the candidate, he has not made many public appearances or spoken on why he made the decision. Despite that, his health and age were becoming increasingly concerning for many voters, especially in his base.

A more likely reason for his decision is a combination of political pressure and public opinion. The two are more linked than one might expect. Democratic senators, representatives, party leaders, and governors all began calling for Biden to step down specifically because the public opinion polls were getting worse and worse. They were getting worse because his performance at the debate was so bad that it made his age and health seem like severe detriments to his ability to be president, and this was only compounded by a series of appearances immediately after the debate. Obama called him and urged him to step down, and members of Congress started openly calling for him to quit the campaign. It was becoming clear to everyone that if Biden did not bow out of the campaign, he would be campaigning alone, essentially dooming him. At the same time, it was looking less and less likely that he’d be able to win in November, even with the support of his party.

There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Biden wanted to stop his campaign. He was a career politician with decades spent in the Capitol Building and White House. He often talked about how much he enjoyed serving his country as a politician and how much it meant to him that he was elected president. Some reports also hinted that he felt it was finally his turn to call the shots after playing sidekick to successive Democratic leaders. There also doesn’t seem to be much evidence that his family, much maligned as they were during his presidency, wanted him to step down until shortly before the decision was made. Although he may have made the decision, it likely wasn’t something he looked forward to or even enjoyed doing, merely a pragmatic response to the situation that was developing.

Initially, there were concerns that the Democratic Party would devolve into infighting and remain essentially rudderless in the lead-up to the election. However, the opposite happened, and the party almost immediately rallied behind Kamala Harris. While there have been questions about the party’s ability to unilaterally transfer primary votes from one candidate to another, it doesn’t seem like that will impact the campaign or party in the near term. At the same time, Biden’s withdrawal can be, and is, seen as a last-ditch effort by the party’s moderate/old guard faction to retain control of the party. The moderate and radical wings of the party have locked horns repeatedly over each election prior to 2024, where the two remained remarkably docile. This was chalked up to a tradition of not challenging a sitting president and a belief that Biden being the candidate would help the radical wing in the long run. A spectacular Biden failure in November would discredit the moderate faction and give the radicals the opportunity to run the party for a time. Some believe that was the true reason behind Biden’s decision: handing the reins to Kamala in the hopes that she could beat Trump and buy the moderate faction four more years of rule in the party.

The schism within the Democratic Party can be attributed to many points in time, but the contemporary iteration of this divide can mostly be traced to the 2016 election. Bernie Sanders ran his most successful campaign yet and galvanized large swaths of young voters who were just shaping their political ideology. At the same time, the real conditions on the ground were shifting farther and farther from the assumptions that the Democratic old guard relied on. This left a lot of middle-aged and older Democratic voters feeling abandoned and that the party was out of touch, driving them to support the outsider, Bernie. On the other side, Hillary Clinton largely ran as a stock standard Democratic candidate but with the added spice of potentially being the first female president. The two ran a heated campaign against each other all the way to the Democratic National Convention, where a winner had to be proclaimed. After a whole host of allegations, leaks, revelations, and gaffes, Hillary Clinton was proclaimed the Democratic Nominee. Many felt that not only had the candidacy been stolen from Bernie by backroom dealings and technicalities — a feeling only exacerbated by the fact that the head of the party was literally on Hillary Clinton’s payroll — but that he had a better chance of winning in November. Ultimately, Hillary lost in 2016, and the radical wing that had been supercharged by Bernie’s campaign blamed the moderates and their fear of alternative approaches.

In 2020, things were less volatile thanks to a complete overhaul of the process to ensure nothing like 2016 could ever happen again. However, the almost simultaneous resignation of every primary contender except Joe Biden had many seeing flashbacks to the party bosses orchestrating outcomes rather than genuine primary democracy. Many of these primary opponents receiving lucrative cabinet positions after Biden’s win only heightened feelings that a deal had been struck behind the scenes. Again, the reason was often attributed to the moderate faction’s fear of change driving them to pick candidates who will run predictable campaigns, even if they are less likely to succeed. Some worry, or hope, that Robert Kennedy Jr. will act as a lightning rod for the voters who are either too ideologically opposed or too frustrated with the moderate Democrats to physically vote for a moderate while also hating conservatives, especially Trump. This would be similar to when Theodore Roosevelt ran under his own third party, fighting for the same pool of voters as William Taft. Neither of them received enough votes to win, allowing Woodrow Wilson to coast into the White House. However, between Taft and Roosevelt, they received more votes than Wilson, leading many to believe at the time and today that had one of them not run, the other could have won.

The new campaign is still in its very early stages, and it is unclear exactly what their strategy will be. At the time of writing, Kamala has only just announced when she will start releasing policy information, so only time will tell how similar or different she will run this campaign compared to Biden. That being said, it is expected that Kamala will likely run as a continuation candidate, attempting to broadly maintain Biden’s positions. Much like how Biden ran as a continuation of the Obama regime with only a few about-faces on issues that turned out to be unpopular with voters. The United States is no stranger to electoral messes. A similar situation occurred when Robert Kennedy was assassinated shortly before being made the candidate. Much like today, a new candidate had to be selected on short notice and rev up a campaign with not much time before the election. This will likely go down as an important event for historians to study and political scholars to keep in mind as time goes forward. Because of how similar Biden’s positions and Kamala’s positions are, this likely won’t impact the political and cultural divide that has been gnawing at the United States for over a decade. Had a more radical or hardline candidate replaced him, the situation may have been less calm, but that is something left to novelists.

Internationally, his decision was probably quite irksome to many foreign onlookers. Many foreign countries, both friends and foes, watch American elections and begin to prepare for both candidates so that when one wins, they are already prepared for the shifts in American policy. While Biden and Kamala will likely have significant amounts of policy overlap, that is currently just a guess, and generally, world leaders dislike basing their countries’ security on a single guess. Especially when many of them have likely interacted with Biden at least once and have a general idea of his views, values, and modus operandi, whereas Kamala seems to have had less exposure to other world leaders. Assuming Kamala doesn’t unveil any incredibly controversial or unprecedented policies, this is unlikely to change much with America’s foreign relations.

It is difficult to predict how Biden’s legacy will shape up. Many of his policies were designed around long-term rewards instead of immediate gratification, so it may be that once these investments mature, he will be heralded as one of the great minds of our time. Alternatively, it is possible a second Trump presidency will undo much of his work before it gets off the ground, as is tradition when parties swap places in the Oval Office. Or even that, as time marches on, his projects will face unforeseen crises and never reach their intended effect, as so often happens with long-term government projects. Much of his policies depended on intense borrowing, which is not unheard of for Democratic presidents, but adds to a slow-burning crisis that Americans will need to address eventually. His contribution could color how people view his reign two, three, four generations from now when the buck eventually stops.

Internationally, his policies are broadly popular. He played the opening moves of the war in Ukraine expertly, both disarming much of the prepared Russian propaganda and preemptively dispelling the inevitable European knee-jerk reaction that the war wasn’t happening and, if it was, it wasn’t their problem. He also maintained and expanded much of Trump’s policies regarding China, which is likely to be seen as prudent domestically. He was unable to strike an Iran Deal 2.0, but that was probably a blessing in disguise, seeing how things have turned out in the Middle East lately. Not being tied at the hip to Iran allows the United States both a wide range of potential actions and is likely one of the only reasons Tel Aviv is still answering the phone.

Unfortunately, the Biden presidency did not deliver on its Unity promise. The country is as, if not more, divided now than it was in 2020, with the first credible assassination attempt on a president or presidential candidate in nearly half a century capping off his time as the Great Uniter. He did little to soothe sectarian tension between various ethnic groups within the country, even as many of his strongholds began calling for aid. Likewise, his biggest plan to address the tensions between income brackets failed before it even started, with Congress stopping his massive IRS hiring campaign. It seems that any desire to combat wealth-related social problems died with it, as both his and Kamala’s campaigns have consistently stoked emotions over the “One Percent.”

He did deliver on his promise of an open border. Although it is impossible to tell exactly how many people were able or allowed to enter the country under his watch, the social ramifications indicate that it was a considerable amount. Many of his most ardent supporters would likely count this as a win, but as time has gone on, many of his less ideological supporters seem to disagree. A major point of contention among them is how much money their local governments must spend to support massive groups of people that are allowed into the country but not allowed to do anything in said country. Businesses are penalized for hiring them because they don’t have proper documentation, many of them don’t have the money to buy or rent land, which is part of why they came here in the first place, so the local government has to care for them while the federal government promises to eventually get involved.

Biden’s decision was the best move he could have made at that stage in the game. Time will tell if it was too little too late or the right call at the right time. He gave the Democratic Party a fighting chance in the election, even if the way in which it was done raises serious questions regarding ownership of votes and how much intention matters when voting. In the long term, this could all be a trivia fact or just forgotten entirely if Trump wins. If Kamala is successful, then it will likely ensure at least another decade of moderate Democratic control of the party and mostly the continuation of what America has been doing for the last four years. Ultimately, the Democratic Party put all their eggs in one basket, knowing that eventually, they’d need a second one. After four years, not a single name came to the fore as a potential Biden protégé, forcing the party to back the only name big enough to run. When it turned out that he likely couldn’t handle the responsibilities of being president into 2028, he was pragmatic enough to step aside, and the party apparatus acted with record speed to put the only other known name on the ballot. Now, all we can do is sit back and wait for November to see how all the chips fall into place.