Presidential Election of 2024

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      Kamala Harris Rapidly Picks Up Democratic Support as 2024 Race Is Reborn

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      Powerful leaders of the Democratic establishment quickly embraced Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday after President Biden’s shocking exit from the race, hoping that a seamless succession could end a month of damaging chaos and transform a contest widely believed to be tipping toward Republicans.By Sunday evening, Ms. Harris appeared to have a glide path to the nomination: No other top Democrats announced plans to challenge her, though some stopped short of an endorsement, including the party’s top congressional leaders and former President Barack Obama.With breathtaking speed, she took control of Mr. Biden’s enormous political operation and contacted Democratic leaders in Congress and state houses to ask for their support. The Biden campaign formally renamed itself “Harris for President,” giving her immediate access to an account that had $96 million in cash at the end of June. On an internal call, the Biden campaign’s leaders told staff members that they would now work for Ms. Harris.“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,” Ms. Harris said in a statement. “We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”The rapid turn of events plunged the party and the nation into unfamiliar political territory, giving unelected Democratic officials the final say over the party’s nominee. Complicated decisions loom. Ms. Harris must choose a running mate, take charge of the campaign with little time before early voting begins in some states in September, rebuild support among voters who had fled Mr. Biden and prepare to withstand a full-blown Republican assault.Speculation immediately turned to her potential running mate, with many Democrats privately arguing that Ms. Harris should pick a white man to widen her appeal and provide demographic balance to the ticket. A flotilla of governors — including Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota — as well as Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona have been frequently mentioned by donors, officials and other lawmakers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After Biden Drops Out, Democratic Voters Express Both Relief and Doubt

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      Democratic voters said they were relieved that President Biden was ending his campaign, but many said they remain worried about the political path ahead.For Democratic voters who have spent much of the summer brooding about President Biden’s fitness for office, his decision on Sunday not to seek re-election came as a relief. Now, they figured, their political party might stand a chance in November — though many still expressed deep doubts.“I’m overjoyed, absolutely overjoyed,” said Mark Oliver Rylance, 67, a Democrat from Columbus, Ohio, said about Mr. Biden’s announcement. Just last weekend, Mr. Rylance participated in a demonstration outside of the Ohio Democratic Party convention calling for Mr. Biden to step aside.“If Biden had stayed in, we would have lost absolutely everything,” he added, echoing the feelings of many Democrats. “We would have lost the House, would have lost the Senate, and it could very well have been a landslide.”The delicate subjects of whether Mr. Biden, 81, was fit for another term and how long he might stay in the race after his disastrous debate performance last month had found their way into conversations at dinner parties, neighborhood parks and church gatherings. The end of Mr. Biden’s candidacy on Sunday shifted some Democrats’ emotions from profound anxiety to hopeful determination, even if what comes next for their party remains unclear.There was also plenty of resignation to the idea that no Democrat might be able to pull off a victory against former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Biden’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him on the ticket drew quick support from some voters eager to chart a path forward. But, underscoring the party’s tumult, others were certain that Ms. Harris, whose own presidential campaign four years ago fizzled, would face ugly attacks and rejection.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Is Out, and Democrats Have a Whole New Set of Questions

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      An earthshaking political moment finally arrived, and the transformation of the campaign starts now.It’s over.At 1:46 p.m., with the minute hand of the clock pointed to the number of his presidency, President Biden somberly ended his untenable re-election campaign and sought to give his downtrodden party something he could no longer provide: a sense of hope.“It is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down,” he wrote in a letter posted to X, “and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”It was an earthshaking political moment many Democrats had been clamoring for — so I’m struck by how quietly it came, and with how little fanfare. Biden’s choice, made while he is at his Delaware beach house after testing positive for Covid-19, did not leak. He told some of his senior staff only a minute before he told the world, my colleague Katie Rogers reported. He did not make a speech to the public, though he said he will later this week.His campaign’s transformation, though, starts now.About half an hour after he withdrew, Biden endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. A little after 4 p.m., she made it official herself.“My intention,” Harris said in a statement distributed by the Biden for President campaign, “is to earn and win this nomination.”In an all-staff call, the campaign’s leaders said they were now all working for Harris for President, according to my colleague Reid Epstein.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Antisemitism on Campuses, Ivy and Beyond

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      More from our inbox:A Middleman’s Role in Drug PrescriptionsObjection, Your HonorTrump vs. the Environment Alex Welsh for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?,” by Bret Stephens (column, June 26):Mr. Stephens has issued a sobering and well-documented indictment of antisemitism on elite campuses. The question asked by the headline is timely and troubling for many Jewish high school students and their families.As noted by Mr. Stephens, confused administrators and revisionist curriculums contributed to this crisis. But the insensitivity and hypocrisy of supposedly idealistic and enlightened college students may be the most striking and unkind cut of all.“Safe spaces” and rules against “microaggressions” have become commonplace on campuses. Yet when Jewish students made it known that calling for deadly attacks on Jews (“Globalize the intifada!”) is offensive and intimidating, they were ignored.Chants in favor of colonization or racism would never — and should never — be met with such indifference. It hurts.Perhaps the headline of Mr. Stephens’s column should be rephrased: “Have Elite Universities Abandoned American Jews?”Alan M. SchwartzTeaneck, N.J.To the Editor:While the Ivies have claimed the antisemitism spotlight this year, Jew-hatred is flourishing on many other campuses, including mine, the University of California, Davis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      I Was a White House Doctor. Presidents Should Have to Take Cognitive Tests.

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      The job of president is physically and mentally demanding. I witnessed this firsthand as a White House physician for three presidents, including as the designated physician to the president for Barack Obama during his first term. My presidential patients often worked 12-hour days seven days a week. The leader of the free world travels constantly, and participates in or leads briefings in which he must retain huge amounts of information.Health scares can happen at any moment. My role as White House physician was to keep the president healthy and performing optimally, and to provide the public with a candid medical assessment of his ability to carry out the duties of his office.I participated in tabletop exercises in the Situation Room to go over how to follow Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, which deals with succession in the event the president is disabled or incapacitated. Typically, the 25th Amendment came into play when a president was going under general anesthesia for a colonoscopy or scheduled surgical procedure.It is widely assumed that the physician to the president will gather and provide pertinent medical information to those contemplating whether the amendment needs to be invoked. This is not stipulated, but most in the medical community agree that the appropriate role for a physician is to offer a medical opinion, based on facts, that is then weighed by the patient — in this case the president — and those around him.The debates around the fitness of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the last several weeks have created new pressure to start having serious conversations about exactly how the White House medical team should evaluate presidents and determine their fitness for duty — cognitively as well as physically. This has been the subject of decades of discussion within the White House medical team as well as with the broader medical community.Many Americans may want the White House medical team to take a more active role in declaring the president fit for duty. Many would probably like to see the same standard apply to candidates running for president as well. For those things to happen, these medical teams will need access to more data about these individuals than they now collect. And perhaps even more important, we should seriously consider the need for an age limit for those running for president, given the high stakes of the office and the realities of cognitive decline with aging.Many cognitive abilities decrease with ageWhile we retain much of our vocabulary as we get older, cognitive abilities such as speed and reasoning tend to decline more rapidly after age 60. More

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      Democratic Elites Were Slow to See What Voters Already Knew

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      President Biden and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agree on this much: It is the elites who are trying to take Biden down, ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters. But when I started arguing in February that his age would mortally wound his candidacy, it didn’t feel that way to me. I saw the elites propping him up, ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters.Who’s right?Maybe we both are. In any system, elites are most visible when they are fractured and factions are acting against each other. In July 2023 — before the primaries, before last month’s debate — a Times/Siena poll found that Democratic primary voters, by 50 to 45 percent, preferred that the party nominate someone other than Biden in 2024.But the Democratic Party’s elites were in lock step around Biden. They refused to listen to what their voters were saying. The fact that he was barely campaigning or giving unscripted interviews was rationalized rather than criticized. No major Democrats decided to challenge him for the nomination. Representative Dean Phillips’s effort to draft alternative candidates was rebuffed and his subsequent primary challenge ignored. Some of this reflected confidence in the president. Some of it reflected the consequences of challenging him.The White House and the Democratic Party apparatus it controls are powerful. Congressional Democrats will not get their bills prioritized or their amendments attached if they are too critical of the party leadership. Nonprofit leaders will stop getting their calls returned. Loyal party donors will abandon you if you’re branded a heretic. “I would be crucified by them if I spoke out of line,” an anonymous Democratic state party chair told NBC News early this month. “I know when you get out of line, they all of a sudden have a shift of priorities, and your races, your state is no longer on the map.” That was far truer a year ago, when Biden’s position in the party was unchallenged.These actions, decisions and calculations by Democratic Party elites were neither unusual nor conspiratorial. This is simply how parties work. But it meant that Democratic voters were given neither a real choice of candidates nor a demonstration of Biden’s fitness for the campaign. What they were given instead was signal after signal that every power broker in the party was behind Biden and confident in his ability to win re-election. Who were they to argue? Biden won the primary contest in a landslide.In February, after Biden skipped the Super Bowl interview and flubbed the news conference intended to defend his memory, I published a series of columns and interviews arguing that he should step aside and Democrats should choose a new ticket at the convention. My argument was that his age had become an insuperable problem — visible in every poll and appearance, omnipresent when you spoke to ordinary voters — and the way his team was insulating him from unscripted interviews reflected a recognition of his diminishment. Biden was trailing Donald Trump even then. He was not showing himself capable of the kind of campaign needed to close the gap. And the risk of frailty or illness causing a catastrophe across the long months of the campaign seemed unbearably high.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      One of the Republican Convention’s Weirdest Lies

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      I watched hour upon hour of the Republican National Convention, something I’ve done every four years since I was a young political nerd in 1984. I was even a Mitt Romney delegate at the Republican convention in 2012, and this was the first that was centered entirely around a fundamentally false premise: that in our troubled time, Donald Trump would be a source of order and stability.To bolster their case, Republicans misled America. Speaker after speaker repeated the claim that America was safer and the world was more secure when Trump was president. But we can look at Trump’s record and see the truth. America was more dangerous and the world was quite chaotic during Trump’s term. Our enemies were not intimidated by Trump. In fact, Russia improved its strategic position during his time in office.If past performance is any indicator of future results, Americans should brace themselves for more chaos if Trump wins.The most egregious example of Republican deception centered around crime. The theme of the second night of the convention was “Make America Safe Again.” Yet the public mustn’t forget that the murder rate skyrocketed under Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, “The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 — and possibly ever.”That’s a human catastrophe, and it’s one that occurred on Trump’s watch. Republicans want to erase 2020 from the American mind, but we judge presidents on how they handle crises. Trump shouldn’t escape accountability for the collapse in public safety at the height of the pandemic. And while we can’t blame Trump for the riots that erupted in American cities over the summer of 2020, it’s hard to claim he’s the candidate of calm when he instigated a riot of his own on Jan. 6.It’s particularly rich for Trump to claim to be the candidate of order when the crime rate rose during his presidency and is plunging during Joe Biden’s. In 2023, there was a record decrease in the murder rate, and violent crime, ABC News reported, “plummeted to one of the lowest levels in 50 years.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Aaron Sorkin: How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats

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      The Paley Center for Media just opened an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The West Wing,” the NBC series I wrote from 1999 to 2003. Some of the show’s story points have become outdated in the last quarter-century (the first five minutes of the first episode depended entirely on the audience being unfamiliar with the acronym POTUS), while others turned out to be — well, not prescient, but sadly coincidental.Gunmen tried to shoot a character after an event with President Bartlet at the end of Season 1. And at the end of the second season, in an episode called “Two Cathedrals,” a serious illness that Bartlet had been concealing from the public had come to light, and the president, hobbled, faced the question of whether to run for re-election. “Yeah,” he said in the third season opener. “And I’m going to win.”Which is exactly what President Biden has been signaling since the day after his bad night.Because I needed the “West Wing” audience to find President Bartlet’s intransigence heroic, I didn’t really dramatize any downward pull that his illness was having on his re-election chances. And much more important, I didn’t dramatize any danger posed by Bartlet’s opponent winning.But what if the show had gone another way?What if, as a result of Bartlet revealing his illness, polling showed him losing to his likely opponent? And what if that opponent, rather than being simply unexceptional, had been a dump truck of ignorance and bad intentions? What if Bartlet’s opponent had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people? And was a hero to white supremacists?We’d have had Bartlet drop out of the race and endorse whoever had the best chance of beating the guy.The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More