Slate takes final stock of just how Not Normal this election was.
Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race over the summer was the latest that a major-party candidate has ever quit a presidential campaign—by a lot. Lyndon Johnson had set the previous standard for stunning race shakeups by dropping out in late March 1968; Biden dropped out more than three months after that. In some states, early voting started less than two months after Kamala Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. Let’s take a moment to appreciate just how not normal all of this was!
Biden was obviously very resistant to taking this step—and he might well still be in the race today if not for one particular stretch of excruciating dead air during his June 27 debate with Donald Trump. Guh! It was really bad. Even writing about it four months later makes me uncomfortable! Ick!!!!
That debate itself was also unprecedented, as it was held before either Biden or his opponent had formally received their party’s nomination. It was the first general-election faceoff ever to be held before September, and Biden’s team had reportedly pushed for such a schedule, in fact, because it felt the arrangement would give him “time to recover if he floundered.” Well, things sort of worked out that way.
Heading into the debate, Biden’s position among Democrats and in the race was actually quite strong, considering that his approval rating with the general public was 16 points underwater. Early-year concerns that the 81-year-old president lacked the stamina and verbal coherence to campaign for reelection had largely been quieted by his energetic State of the Union performance. Polls pegged him as being roughly tied with........