Published 07/22/2024 10:50
After much pressure, President Joe Biden announced this Sunday (21) that he will not accept the Democratic Party’s primary nomination, resigning from his candidacy for the United States presidential election, on November 5, 2024.
Democrats are now entering a new process to unify the party around another name to face former President and Republican Donald Trump.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interests of my party and country that I step aside and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote.
In another statement on Sunday, Biden said he supported current Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the Democratic ticket.
Read too: Biden drops out of re-election bid; read withdrawal letter
“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be our party’s nominee this year. Democrats – it’s time to come together and defeat Trump,” the president said.
Vice President Kamala Harris responded to Biden’s endorsement and said she will fight for the party’s nomination. “I am honored to have the president’s endorsement, and I intend to earn and win this nomination,” she said.
“I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party – and unite our nation – to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda,” he added.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said that “in the coming days,” the party “will undertake a transparent and orderly process to move forward as a unified candidate capable of defeating Donald Trump in November.”
Harrison said in a statement Sunday: “As we move forward to formally select our party’s nominee, our values as Democrats remain the same — to reduce costs, restore freedom, protect the rights of all people, and save our democracy from the threat of dictatorship.”
Despite the mobilization after Biden’s withdrawal, the official definition will only be in August, during the Democratic National Convention, starting on the 19th.
Current Vice President Kamala Harris needs the support of 1,969 of the 3,936 Democratic delegates to secure her nomination at the convention.
Although the Democratic nomination will take until next month to be made official, the current vice president has received a number of endorsements from party members. Former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, declared their support for the vice president in the early hours. In addition to them, the state chairs of the Democratic Party of all 50 US states support Kamala Harris.
Since the moment Biden’s candidacy began to receive harsher criticism – the main milestone for this intensification was the debate against Donald Trump on June 27 – American institutes have carried out surveys simulating a confrontation between Kamala and Trump at the polls.
The poll by the Democratic firm Bendixen & Armandi gave Kamala a victory over Trump by 42% to 41%, with a margin of error of 3.1%, in a survey carried out on July 9 and reported by the Politico website.
Pressure for Biden to withdraw
Pressure for Joe Biden to drop out of the race has been growing intense following his disastrous performance in the first debate of the presidential race on June 27, hosted by CNN.
In March, the White House chief won the necessary number of delegates to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, surpassing the 1,968 delegate mark.
At that point in the race, the Democrat had greater unity within his party than his opponent Donald Trump. Trump even had to participate in debates within the Republican Party against candidates such as Ron deSantis and Nikki Haley.
However, as the months passed, Biden began to show signs that his cognitive abilities were indeed failing. There were numerous instances of mental confusion leading up to the CNN debate.
In June 2023, referring to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Biden said that the Russian president was “losing the war in Iraq”.
In February, one day after confusing the current Emmanuel Macron with François Mitterand, the American called the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the president of Mexico.
The televised debate in June, however, was the worst blow to Joe Biden’s campaign intentions. The Democrat spent almost a week at Camp David, a retreat for American presidents, preparing for the crucial debate.
During the debate, Biden’s voice was hoarse, attributed to a cold, and he was unenthusiastic and hesitant at various points. Trump, on the other hand, calmly and assertively spouted a series of lies, without being corrected by Biden.
After Biden’s disastrous performance, the US press reported a state of panic among Democrats. Party colleagues worried about the president’s ability to serve another term.
As of Saturday (20), 34 Democratic congressmen have publicly asked Biden to end his reelection bid – 12 of them in the last 48 hours alone.
They represented more than one in 10 Democrats in the US Congress, where Biden’s Democratic Party controls 213 seats in the House of Representatives and 51 in the Senate.
High-ranking Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, also worked behind the scenes to get Biden to withdraw his candidacy.
Several fundraising campaigns were on hold, Democratic sources told Reuters on Friday (19). They said the campaign raised only half of the $50 million in donations to Biden’s Victory Fund in July.
Democratic reaction to Biden’s resignation
Former President Barack Obama has spoken out about Biden’s withdrawal from the race. In a statement published on Medium, the Democrat called the current president “a patriot of the highest order.” Biden served as vice president under Obama from 2009 to 2017.
However, Obama did not immediately declare support for Kamala in his post-Biden withdrawal speech.
“We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead,” Obama said in a statement. “But I have extraordinary confidence that our party’s leaders will be able to create a process from which an exceptional nominee emerges.”
Unlike Obama, former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, are the biggest names in the party who have supported Kamala so far.
They said they “will do whatever we can to support her” and that “now is the time to support Kamala Harris and fight with everything we have to elect her. The future of America depends on it.”
In addition to them, the state chairs of the Democratic Party of all 50 US states support Kamala Harris.
Source: vermelho.org.br
