Slate takes final stock of just how Not Normal this election was.
Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race over the summer was the latest that a major-party candidate has ever quit a presidential campaign—by a lot. Lyndon Johnson had set the previous standard for stunning race shakeups by dropping out in late March 1968; Biden dropped out more than three months after that. In some states, early voting started less than two months after Kamala Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. Let’s take a moment to appreciate just how not normal all of this was!
Biden was obviously very resistant to taking this step—and he might well still be in the race today if not for one particular stretch of excruciating dead air during his June 27 debate with Donald Trump. Guh! It was really bad. Even writing about it four months later makes me uncomfortable! Ick!!!!
That debate itself was also unprecedented, as it was held before either Biden or his opponent had formally received their party’s nomination. It was the first general-election faceoff ever to be held before September, and Biden’s team had reportedly pushed for such a schedule, in fact, because it felt the arrangement would give him “time to recover if he floundered.” Well, things sort of worked out that way.
Heading into the debate, Biden’s position among Democrats and in the race was actually quite strong, considering that his approval rating with the general public was 16 points underwater. Early-year concerns that the 81-year-old president lacked the stamina and verbal coherence to campaign for reelection had largely been quieted by his energetic State of the Union performance. Polls pegged him as being roughly tied with Donald Trump, and he’d just done an enormous fundraiser with George Clooney and Barack Obama. A Democratic member of Congress, Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, had challenged Biden in the primary, raising concerns about his age—and ultimately won only 4 of the 3,949 available delegates.
In Atlanta, though, Biden was wobbly from the get-go. “I come from a household where the kitchen table, if things weren’t able to be met during the month, was a problem,” he said during his first answer. Perhaps he could have muddled through the broadcast—and the rest of the election—if he’d only made minor miscues of that type. But when he responded to CNN moderator Jake Tapper’s question about the national debt a few minutes later, it got much worse. From the transcript:
[Trump] had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one.
Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy.
What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.
For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America—I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million—billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period.
We’d be able to right—wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that—all those things we need to do, child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID—excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.
Look, if—we finally beat Medicare.
That was the end of his answer. As bad as it looks on the page, it sounded and looked worse live, especially when taken in context with the unsteady way he had walked to his lectern, the barely audible voice he was speaking with, and the vacant, almost alarmed way he stared into the camera when Trump was talking:
What viewers had seen was nearly 15 seconds of mostly dead air during which the president tried and failed to remember what he had been talking about. (What he seems to have meant to say was something along the lines of make everyone eligible for the prescription drug discounts that we negotiated into Medicare.)
Liberal-leaning commentators immediately began drafting calls for Democrats to replace Biden atop the ticket. The New York Times’ editorial board urged him to leave the race the next day, and he dropped 3 points in the polls almost immediately. One poll of viewers found that they felt Trump, who is not exactly a model of verbal clarity or coherence himself, had “won” the debate by a margin of 40 points, an unheard-of level of consensus in modern America. Polls of Democratic voters soon found that two-thirds of them wanted Biden to step aside.
Even George Clooney wrote that he had seen enough.
And given all that, it still took more than three weeks and several more highly non-reassuring performances for Biden to drop out of the race, a step he only took after reportedly being told by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that it was his only option. This was a man, we learned, who was very, very firmly dug into the belief that he and only he was capable of defeating Donald Trump. Were it not for one very, very bad freeze-up on camera, in fact, he might still be on the campaign trail telling us that today.
By the time he finally called it quits, Kamala Harris was probably the party’s only viable option to replace him, given that no other candidates had stepped forward to make a case for themselves publicly or assemble campaign staff. Trump, meanwhile, was gaining in the polls. As they did during the 2020 primary when a series of strategic endorsements essentially anointed Joe Biden as the nominee, Democrats decided to prioritize “being in position to defeat Donald Trump” over any other consideration. Kamala Harris has consistently run at least 4 points ahead of where Biden’s polls left off, so it’s safe to say that Biden stepping down, at least, was the right move. As for everything that happened after, well, we’re about to find out.
