Why Biden finally quit

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.

Steve Ricchetti, who’s been with Biden since his days in the Senate, drove to see the president at his house on the Delaware shore on Friday. Mike Donilon arrived on Saturday. The two men, both of whom had been by Biden’s side during key decisions about whether to seek the presidency in 2016 and 2020, sat at a distance from the president, still testing positive for Covid , and presented damning new information in a meeting that would hasten the end of Biden’s political career.

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.

Ever since the debate, Biden and his closest aides had been determined to rebound, convinced that he remained his party’s best chance to defeat former President Donald Trump and optimistic that they could contain the fallout. An energetic rally in Raleigh , North Carolina, the day after the debate offered the president a chance to reframe his disastrous performance and more directly address the questions about his age and stamina, which exploded after his halting, confused and soft-spoken utterances beside Trump. And, aides hoped, a series of sit-down television interviews would show the country that Biden’s debate could indeed be chalked up to just a bad night.

But the country had seen what it had seen on the debate stage. At 81, Biden was clearly no longer the same figure he had been just four years earlier. And as the president and his team maintained a determined posture to push forward, more of the party’s most important voices began to act, determined to escalate a delicate pressure campaign aimed at replacing him as the Democratic nominee.

At a moment when it seemed like Biden might be able to withstand calls for him to step aside, Pelosi appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and said that the party would give the president, who’d been adamant that he was staying in, more time to come to a decision. The comment ricocheted around the Capitol, a signal to the party she long led that the president’s candidacy and looming nomination were not yet a settled matter.

Over three days late last week, Biden spoke privately with Pelosi, Jeffries and Schumer. The Senate leader traveled to visit the president last Saturday at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Jeffries put out a statement about his meeting with Biden at the White House but did not tip his hand about the tenor of the conversation. Shortly after the NATO Summit, which the president hosted, closed up, news leaked that Pelosi, in her private conversations with Biden, had urged him to consider stepping aside. Within 24 hours, stories emerged that Schumer, whose visit to see Biden had gone undetected by the media, had delivered a similar message.

Those leaks, which coincided with a Washington Post report that former President Barack Obama was also expressing concerns about Biden’s campaign privately, signaled to other Democrats who’d yet to express private concerns publicly that the time to do so was at hand.

But Biden’s sharp broadsides toward Trump during a rally in Detroit last Friday night seemed to bolster his inner circle and allies who wanted him to stick it out. It was the president’s best attempt since his feckless debate to take the fight more directly at the controversial former president and to shift the narrative driving the campaign away from his teetering candidacy and back toward the contrast Democrats viewed as essential to Biden’s chances.

But that shift was short-lived.

The following day, an assassin’s bullet came within millimeters of killing Trump, who was struck in the ear while speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. After Secret Service agents pulled him to the ground, Trump, his face streaked with blood, raised a defiant fist in the air before being carried off the stage. His exhortation of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” set the stage for a rapturous four days of programming at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. More importantly, they sharpened the contrast at the center of Trump’s campaign strategy, presenting the former president as the embodiment of strength against an increasingly frail Biden.

In the midst of the GOP convention, Biden abruptly ended a two-day campaign swing in Las Vegas after testing positive for Covid, flying back to Rehoboth Beach, where he has remained out of sight since Wednesday evening.

Among the small group of aides in Delaware with the president, including at least one who saw Biden on Saturday, only his closest confidants had any sense he was about to reverse course.

The president’s family, and a number of long-tenured aides, had been dead set against him dropping out, recalling crisis after crisis over the course of Biden’s political career in which they had banded together and bounced back.

Jill Biden and son Hunter Biden in particular seethed against the top Democrats — including some longtime friends — who they felt were betraying a loyal party leader and public servant.

But in recent days, the emotional weight of the moment grew, and the family — including sister Valerie — became more concerned about the toll the race would take on the president’s health and legacy. Biden’s slow recovery from Covid this week only underscored concerns that he would not be up for the rigors of the campaign.

Other top aides, including Ricchetti and Donilon most of all, had been among the last holdouts, still certain that Biden would be remembered as a top tier president and believing that he could still win. Former chief of staff Ron Klain, too, still firmly believed that Biden could rally.

Much of the campaign’s rank-and-file staff had grown frustrated with the senior officials leading the effort, especially Donilon, who kept a tight leash on the polling operation in particular and was seen by many staffers, not to mention donors and operatives, as shielding the president from bad data. The senior team’s difficulty in delegating responsibilities and trusting staff — hiring in swing states, two people said, was painfully slow because the president himself insisted on approving all major hires — fostered deep resentments in recent weeks as Biden’s fortunes turned.

When senior staff met to go over the new campaign’s new battleground polling at the end of this past week, there was no sugarcoating the results. Several aides suspected that Biden’s closest aides, in focusing primarily on national polls, had sought to avoid swing state data. Ultimately, the campaign’s numbers lined up with what vulnerable House and Senate members were seeing in their own polling, a major factor that compelled several more lawmakers to call publicly in recent days for Biden to step aside.

Within the president’s inner circle, others were privately more willing to see the writing on the wall. Chief of staff Jeff Zients and senior adviser Anita Dunn, for instance, had recently expressed privately that the party might need to go in a new direction, according to two people familiar with private conversations. But another person close to the president's inner circle said Zients and Dunn "said consistently in response to everyone that President Biden is the Democratic nominee and he will defeat Donald Trump."

In recent days, other senior Democratic operatives had already begun working on contingency plans, aware that they would need to move with alacrity in the event of a change atop the ticket in order to comply with party rules and state laws around ballot access. Even those individuals, according to two people familiar with private conversations, were caught off guard by the president’s announcement on Sunday afternoon. As of Saturday, plans were still being made for the president — if he cleared his Covid infection — to campaign in Texas and Georgia later this week.

On Saturday night, some in Biden's inner circle insisted to one high-level Democrat that the president was determined to stay in the race, "no ifs, ands or buts." When the Democrat checked in again Sunday morning, they told POLITICO, they were told there was no way that Biden would consider dropping out until after his planned meeting this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But at that point, Biden had Donilon and Ricchetti working on his exit plan. The majority of aides at the White House and on the campaign were shocked by the reversal as well. Shortly after the tweet went out, Dunn convened a phone call for communications staffers, according to multiple aides. Dunn reassured staffers who’d been insisting to the press that Biden wasn’t thinking about quitting had been correct based on the information they had up until the president’s thinking changed.

Some marveled that Dunn, who told colleagues that everyone was processing the news at the same time, didn’t know about it until just before the post went out on X.

“A lot of crying,” was how one White House official described the collective response to the news. “People believe Joe Biden is a great president, and they’re sad to see him step aside,” the official continued. “Most think he made the right move, but they’re still heartbroken.”

When Biden’s initial announcement made no mention of endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor as the party’s nominee, a flurry of panicked texts and calls ensued. Moments later, Biden’s account posted a second message clarifying that he was indeed backing Harris.

Democratic lawmakers rushed to signal their support for her as the party’s presidential nominee. Speculation turned to a potential running mate. And after more than three weeks as the biggest story in American politics, Biden was already being relegated to playing a supporting role.

In his first fundraising email on Harris’ behalf, Biden concluded with the refrain that Democrats, divided over his candidacy, have agreed on — but struggled to achieve — for nearly a full month: “It's time to come together and beat Trump.”

Adam Cancryn and Eugene Daniels contributed to this report.