Is it because he feels too old? That he is now convinced that he cannot win against Trump? Joe Biden will speak about the reasons that led him to withdraw from the presidential race and pass the torch to Kamala Harris in a solemn speech on Wednesday.
The Democratic president chose a prime time slot, 8 p.m., to address Americans on one of the biggest political upheavals in the country’s modern history.
Having just recovered from COVID and emerged from a week of confinement, the octogenarian leader will explain why, on Sunday, he announced, through a simple letter published on X, that he would ultimately not be running for a second term.
He was replaced by his Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Tonight, our president will address the country about his withdrawal of candidacy, and he will speak not only about the extraordinary work he has done, but also about his work in the next six months,” she said Wednesday in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Joe Biden’s speech will be delivered from the Oval Office of the White House. It will undoubtedly be one of the most important when it comes time to assess his performance.
The 81-year-old Democrat’s health is obviously on everyone’s mind, since it was concerns about it that prompted his camp to call on him to drop out of the race.
Kamala Harris runs ‘for the future’
Kamala Harris, with a strong following, is now almost certain to win the nomination in August and become the Democratic candidate for the November 5 presidential election.
“I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one looking forward, one looking back,” the vice president said Wednesday.
“With your support, I am fighting for the future of our country,” she said.
The 50-year-old also warned against “Project 2025,” a nearly 900-page program shaped by an influential conservative think tank, which takes up many of Donald Trump’s ideas. The former president, however, said he disagreed with the text.
The “2025 Project” is, Kamala Harris denounced, “a plan to return America to a dark past.”
The independent organization Vote.org, which helps voters register, recorded 38,500 registrations in the two days after Joe Biden withdrew, most of them from people under the age of 35, Politico reports.
This is the highest number of registrations since the start of the campaign, even beating the record from March, when the singer Taylor Swift encouraged her fans to go to this site to find their polling station.
Trump plows the ground
Republican candidate Donald Trump continues to tread the electoral terrain, capitalizing on the unifying effect of his party’s convention in Milwaukee, which officially inaugurated him as a candidate last Thursday.
He will hold a campaign rally Wednesday night in North Carolina before addressing an association of ultraconservative youth Friday in Florida.
The septuagenarian will then fly to Minnesota, a state in the Great Lakes region, to campaign with his new running mate, JD Vance.
For four days, Donald Trump enjoyed the spectacle of a Republican Party in perfect working order behind his third candidacy for the White House.
But the former president is now being forced to rethink entire sections of his campaign strategy, which has so far focused largely on projecting himself as an energetic leader in the face of a declining Joe Biden.
The Republican candidate has already committed to debating Kamala Harris, however, and has assured that it would be “easier” to win against her in November.
The few polls published since the vice president entered the race are mixed, placing the two candidates neck and neck.