Democratic candidate for the 2024 US presidential election, Joe Biden was pushed out by members of his party, after a catastrophic performance during a debate against Donald Trump and long months of controversy over his age.
He caved to the pressure. After winning the Democratic Party primaries for the US presidential election by a wide margin, Joe Biden finally gave up running for office on Sunday, July 21. The decision, announced less than four months before the election, plunges the United States into uncertainty. However, it is not entirely a surprise: For several weeks, the president had been called by a part of his camp to withdraw his candidacy before the national convention in August, during which he was to be formally invested.. Franceinfo looks back at the reasons which led him to throw in the towel.
Because his age has been constantly criticized
When he was inaugurated in January 2021, Joe Biden was already, at 78, the oldest sitting US president. Three and a half years later, the octogenarian’s candidacy has been continually criticized due to his advanced age. “LAge is linked to cognitive faculties and more broadly to SKILLS. He is accused of no longer being able to ‘do the job'”explained historian Lauric Henneton, lecturer at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, to franceinfo in February.
The first to make this reproach to the Democrat: his Republican adversaries, who have constantly affirmed that the outgoing president was not fit to serve a second term at the head of the United States. “If you vote for Joe Biden, you are actually counting on Kamala Harris [sa vice-présidente]because I think it is unlikely that he will last until he is 86 years old.”assured Nikki Haley, former candidate for the conservative nomination for the presidency, in April.
In addition to the Republicans, the American media has not failed to scrutinize Joe Biden’s actions, highlighting his numerous slips of the tongue and gaffes in recent months. As recently as early July, during a NATO summit, the Democrat was criticized for mistakenly announcing the “President Putin” when welcoming his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. His falls on his bike and on stage, in 2022 and 2023, had already been widely reported in the press.
A series of missteps, both physical and figurative, that ended up weighing on Joe Biden’s campaign. According to a Yahoo and YouGov poll cited by ABC News, 56% of Americans considered, at the beginning of July, that the president’s age would be a “big problem” for his ability to secure a second term.
Because he missed his debate against Donald Trump
Democrats’ concerns grew after his poor performance in a debate against Donald Trump on June 27. For Joe Biden, the debate was an opportunity to reassure Americans about his age. But the opposite happened.
In the opening minutes, the 81-year-old Democrat – who has stuttered since childhood – kept stumbling over his words. Throughout the exchanges, he seemed to have trouble keeping his train of thought, sometimes embarking on long sentences without being able to finish them. One slip of the tongue stood out in particular: when the president congratulated himself on having “defeated” Medicare, the federal health insurance system that his camp defends. Above all, the Democratic champion failed to respond to a Donald Trump who was as vindictive as ever, failing to correct the Republican’s many false assertions.
To justify Joe Biden’s poor performance, the White House has come up with a number of explanations, listed by the AP agency: over-preparation, jet lag after a recent trip abroad, or even a cold that would explain his hoarse voice. However, the day after this debate, the president himself acknowledged, during a meeting, that he “didn’t speak as well as before” And “didn’t debate as well as before”. “I had a bad evening”he admitted again in an interview with ABC News on July 6. Before assuring: “But that’s not a sign of a health problem. I was exhausted.”
Because his party was pushing him out
Joe Biden’s explanations have not convinced, including within his own camp. In the 48 hours following the debate, some Democratic officials internally raised the possibility that the president would give up running again, the Washington Post June 30. As the days went by, these calls became more numerous, and more and more public, as illustrated by the chronology of the New York Times.
Among the latest examples is influential House Representative Adam Schiff. “A second Trump presidency would undermine the very foundations of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about the president’s ability to defeat Donald Trump in November”he said on July 17 at Los Angeles Times, believing that it was time for Joe Biden to “passing the torch”. An opinion shared by 65% of Democratic voters, according to an AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Wednesday.
That was also the view of major party donors, as well as prominent Democrats like Hollywood star George Clooney. In early July, the actor and director wrote an op-ed in New York Times: “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago [lors d’une soirée de levée de fonds] is not the (…) Joe Biden of 2010, nor even the Joe Biden of 2020″he wrote. The editorial board of the prestigious American daily also tried to weigh in, publishing an editorial in which it urged the president to “leave the race” For ““serve the country”.
After three weeks of resistance, Joe Biden finally gave in. Now, his camp has one month left to organize the designation of a new candidate, who will be formally invested at the Democratic National Convention, from August 19 to 22 in Chicago. The selection process will be “transparent and disciplined”promised the leader of the Democratic Party, Jaime Harrison, in a statement on Sunday. Joe Biden has already given his preference: his vice-president, Kamala Harris.