Following weeks of internal Democratic Party discord, U.S. President Joe Biden has finally decided to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. The last incumbent U.S. president to do the same was Lyndon B. Johnson, on March 31, 1968.
Whereas Johnson announced his decision on national television, Biden made his declaration in a letter posted on social media, saying: “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
For many Democrats, the moment will intensify a sense of crisis and fear. Facing off against former President Donald Trump, a Republican nominee who many Democrats feel poses an existential threat to democracy, the party goes into the final weeks of July with their convention approaching and without clarity on whom their candidate will be.
But like all moments of political crisis, this occasion presents immense opportunities as well. The dramatic end of a presidential campaign can create the conditions for a new coalition to take power. If the party handles the next few months effectively, it has the chance to win the presidential election, possibly gain control of the House of Representatives, and start a new era in Democratic politics. Biden could go down as a leader who sacrificed himself and allowed for the change to take place. Trump can once again go down to defeat.
To be sure, the outcome of Johnson’s resignation in 1968 will not bring Democrats much immediate comfort. After Johnson announced that he was withdrawing from the race, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey emerged as the party nominee; Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s tragic assassination that June ended the possibility of another candidate.
The rest of the campaign did not go well. Democrats continued to splinter over Vietnam. Humphrey ended up looking to many Americans like more of the same rather than a fresh face. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned into a fiasco, as television cameras captured anti-war protesters clashing with police outside and delegates fighting among themselves inside the convention hall. In a three-person race featuring Humphrey, Republican nominee Richard Nixon, and American Independent Party candidate George Wallace, the GOP won control of the White House. Four years later, Nixon won reelection in a devastating landslide victory against Sen. George McGovern.
But although the short-term outlook at the time was bleak for Democrats, a new coalition took hold—one that included Biden, who was elected to the Senate in 1972. The New Deal coalition of unions, Black Americans, urban machines, and southern Democrats was supplanted by a new generation of party stalwarts rooted in the coasts and cosmopolitan areas in the Midwest. As the South shifted to the Republicans, Democrats found new strength with voters, and organizations that championed civil rights, urban reform, feminism and reproductive rights, environmentalism, and restrained militarism overseas took form. Suburban and college-educated voters became a central force. New kinds of unions, such as in health care, grew increasingly important. Many of the people who worked for McGovern’s 1972 campaign, as political scientist Bruce Miroff wrote in The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party, proved to be a launching pad for staffers such as Gary Hart and Bill Clinton.
The new post-New Deal/Great Society coalition certainly proved to be controversial. Many on the left believed that its leaders became too attached to market-based solutions to social problems (often called neoliberalism).
However, the new Democratic coalition would produce four presidents (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Biden)—two of whom served two terms, including Obama’s historic tenure. Democrats also enjoyed several periods in the post-Ronald Reagan era—when politics shifted to the right—with strong congressional majorities that produced groundbreaking legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as built support for the legalization of same-sex marriage. Though Democrats could not hold control as they did for much of the time from the 1930s to the 1970s, they enjoyed several key congressional sessions of resurgent strength.
The Democratic Party now represents a broad range of Americans, which is one of the reasons that victorious Republican presidential candidates have been winning elections without the popular vote. Biden’s withdrawal might very well mark the end of a Democratic coalition that took hold in the 1970s.
There is a new generation of Democrats born after the baby boomers who have been clamoring to exert influence. Vice President Kamala Harris is one of them. This rift was a point of tension in the 2020 primary debate, when then-Sen. Harris challenged Biden for having worked with arch-segregationists—Sens. James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia—against busing: “There was a little girl in California,” Harris said, “who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
A Harris candidacy could entrench a Democratic coalition formed of Generation X, millennials, and Generation Z. In part, the importance of the generational change will be just that: generational. Younger candidates who have grown up with different experiences and different points of references than someone Biden’s age can bring fresh perspectives and energy to politics.
The younger Democrats have been fighting for their party to be more aggressive in dealing with issues such as climate change, health care, gun safety, criminal justice reform, reproductive rights, sexual freedom, cultural pluralism, democracy protection, and policies to ease middle- and working-class economic insecurity and debt in ways that contrast with the lip service they believe comes from the conservative populism on display at the Republican National Convention. Instead of Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt, these Democrats want programs to assist with child care, job training, and investment in higher education. Whereas Biden stumbled in trying to give an answer about abortion during his infamous June debate with Trump, a politician like Harris will be able to share her point of view with full vigor and force.
This generation is also more comfortable with the media environment that currently shapes political campaigns. Having cut their professional teeth in the era of intense polarization and a radicalized Republican Party, they have a keen sense of the kinds of attacks that will be coming at them from the GOP.
For months now, Democrats have been pointing out the strength of their farm team. They have a wide range of exciting candidates—Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin, and California Rep. Adam Schiff, and more—who have been waiting for their turn. Biden’s announcement, which comes with the realization that his generation has aged out, opens a window. The 2024 election can turn from something tragic for Democrats into something historic.
The emerging coalition has not jettisoned the core issues that defined New Deal and Great Society Democrats as they fought for what historians Lizabeth Cohen and Michael Kazin have called “moral capitalism,” but they have vastly expanded their agenda to deal with the real-world problems that all working Americans, and the climate around them, confront in the 21st century.
Nor is it a pipe dream to say the emerging coalition can be victorious politically. As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has been pointing out, it is this coalition that Biden has counted on—even if he was not one of them—and that propelled Democrats to victories in 2018, 2020, and 2022, as well as in special elections.
And 2024 doesn’t have to be 1968. If Democrats can reset by avoiding internal division and putting together a campaign that outflanks the Republicans, the party has the real chance to avoid repeating 1968 and to simultaneously initiate a new era with a coalition that capitalizes on the broad support so many of their issues enjoy within the electorate. Unlike Humphrey, Harris—and most of the other possible candidates—would represent something new and different in politics from Biden.
Given that the electorate is far more polarized today, it is likely that the Democratic nominee will quickly generate excitement and support from much of blue America, especially with an opponent as unpopular as Trump. The initial hours after the announcement suggest that party donors will be reenergized and doubling down to make sure that the Democratic campaign’s financial base is strong. The voter mobilization apparatus that has been so effective in turning out the vote in recent election cycles, including with young voters, can now move ahead full steam. Harris has been one of the most effective and outspoken politicians on the issue that has the potential to galvanize Democrats more than almost anything else: abortion. Biden, who now will be seen as a heroic figure, will have the space to devote his political capital—along with former Presidents Clinton and Obama—to making sure that all Democrats cast their ballots.
The election could offer a powerful symbol of what this could mean for the nation. Rather than limping through the next few months, Democrats can make this a decisive moment in their own trajectory and that of the country’s democracy. One can just imagine what it would mean for the nation—and the perception of the United States all over the world—for Harris, a 59-year-old Black and South Asian woman, to bring an end to the political power of a Republican who started his political career as a birther and embraced the forces of right-wing reaction.