After an eruption of concerns about his age, a tumultuous month on the campaign trail and a series of tense meetings with his fellow Democratic leaders, President Joe Biden quit the presidential race and ended his bid for re-election Sunday in a letter posted to social media.
In a separate statement, the president asked the party to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris in his place.
Questions of age and acuity have dogged Biden, 82, since his successful run in 2020. But a disastrous debate performance against former president Donald Trump in June brought those worries to a fever pitch. The president sounded raspy throughout the night, repeatedly mumbled inaudibly or incoherently into his microphone, and abruptly stopped speaking mid-sentence on more than one occasion.
The White House blamed Biden’s struggles on a nagging cold and insisted he was on the campaign trail to stay. But a weekslong blitz of sit-down interviews, press conferences and public appearances did little to improve his polling or calm nerves within the party. From his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, the president announced plans to end a 53-year political career on Sunday and called on his supporters to rally behind Harris.
“Honestly, I don’t think either of them would have a great chance of beating [Donald Trump],” said Henry Gallagher, a senior engineering and technology major. “I think [Biden] should have picked somebody else.”
The consensus around Temple’s campus is that Biden made the right decision. Few Temple students say they trusted him to mount a winning campaign into the fall, let alone serve another four years as president. But they remain split on whether Harris offers Democrats a better chance at winning in November.
“Nothing too major has changed, because we still have Donald Trump as the Republican candidate,” said Lourdes Cardamone, a junior political science major who currently serves as chair of the Temple University Democrats. “At the end of the day, it’s a matter of preventing him from stepping into the office.”
Harris, 59, is more than two decades younger than Biden and 19 years younger than Trump, 78. Cardamone said she was relieved that Biden’s withdrawal seemed to answer the age question. But other critiques of the vice president remain open: Trump’s campaign has already run ads blaming Harris for illegal border crossings, and her past as a prosecutor could hurt Democratic efforts to win back some young voters and Black men — two areas where Biden was projected to lose support.
Cardamone acknowledged the Biden administration had its flaws, but urged voters frustrated with the last three-and-a-half years to focus on what she sees as a battle between democracy and dictatorship.
“We have to figure out what America we want, and the people we want to vote for,” Cardamone said.
Asked how Harris would fare against Trump in a general election, Gallagher said, “Not very well,” adding that the former president’s momentum may now be too much to overcome.
Despite his conviction on 34 felony counts in May, Trump enters the fall as strong a candidate as ever: His other criminal cases are bogged down in legal strife and prosecutorial scandal. Weeks of Democratic disarray have pushed his controversies off center stage.
The Republican National Convention greeted the former president with near-religious fervor last week — invoking “divine intervention” and donning costume ear bandages after their standard-bearer dodged an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Trump “is automatically going to be considered the favorite to win the race as whatever candidate is nominated gets nominated,” said William Walker, a junior political science major who leads Temple’s College Republicans.
But Walker doesn’t think being the frontrunner automatically makes Trump’s path easier.
“The pressure will be on him because he is the favorite for the first time ever,” Walker, who also serves as vice-chair of the state’s College Republicans, said. “So it will, in a lot of ways, be about playing defense.”
The College Republicans released a statement on Sunday night wishing President Biden well as he serves out the remainder of his term in office. The club said they respect his decision to step down, while also pointing out policy disagreements and committing their support to Trump and other GOP candidates in the general election.
If there was uncertainty among Democrats on Temple’s campus, it didn’t show up in the party’s coffers: ActBlue, the party’s chief fundraising platform, raised over $46 million in the hours after Biden stepped aside, making July 21 its single largest day of donations on record.
Despite the donations, some Temple students like Fletcher Gamwell, fear Trump’s momentum might be too much for Harris, or another possible Democratic nominee, to overcome.
“I thought it was a good decision to drop out, but I’m a little worried it was maybe too late,” said Gamwell, a senior media studies and production major. “It would have been better if he did it a lot earlier.”
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