President Joe Biden said he ended his reelection bid after hearing from congressional Democrats that he’d harm their chances in November, and concluding that he’d be “a real distraction” if he stayed in the race.
In his first sit-down interview since dropping out on July 21, weeks after a disastrous debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump, Biden gave a glimpse of the build-up to the decision, which followed pressure from his party amid concern over his age and mental acuity.
“Polls we had showed that is was a neck-and-neck race; it would have been down to wire,” Biden said on CBS’s Sunday Morning. “But what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in their races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race that would be the topic.”
Biden, who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination after bowing out, said he thought “it would be a real distraction” if he continued to pursue his second-term bid.
Biden and Harris plan to campaign in Maryland on Aug. 15, their first joint appearance since he left the race and she secured their party’s presidential nomination.
While the president has framed his decision as a bid to unify the country under a younger generation of leaders, he was relentlessly pressured by his own party to make the move.
“We must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” Biden, 81, said in the CBS News interview, which was recorded last week.
Biden’s exit from the race made him the first sitting US president not to pursue a second term since 1968, when fellow Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson said he wouldn’t accept his party’s nomination.
It followed an already tumultuous 2024 race that’s seen Trump become the first former president to be convicted of a felony. Trump later survived an assassination event from a gunman whose bullet clipped his ear.
Biden addressed his exit in a July 24 address from the Oval Office, saying he’d “decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.” He insisted he’d finish out his term and would stay “focused on doing my job as president.”