How the party decided.
Less than two weeks after President Biden sent a letter to congressional Democrats insisting that he would stay in the presidential race and demanding an end to any discussion of his withdrawal, his candidacy was over. The president made the formal announcement that he is no longer running for reelection. But this was not really his decision. Key figures in the Democratic Party did not want Biden as their candidate — and created so much opposition that it would have been hard for the president to move forward.
The effective removal of the presumptive nominee of a major party after the primaries is highly unusual. Even considering how bad Biden was in last month’s debate and his deficit to former president Donald Trump in polls, I’m still stunned this happened.
I’m sure that in the future, historians and political scientists will have more conclusive takes on the end of Biden’s campaign. But at least right now, I view five groups in particular as having forced the president’s hand.
While he positioned himself as a more centrist Democrat, Biden had reached a kind of détente with the progressive wing of the party: He adopted some left-wing positions; the left campaigned hard for him and other centrist Democrats. This alliance helped Democrats win the 2020 elections and do much better in the midterms two years ago than the incumbent’s party usually does.
Biden’s embrace of Israel as it killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and destroyed Gaza created a huge fissure with the left. Liberal activists were showing up at the president’s events and disrupting them. Some who had campaigned for him four years ago refused to do so this time. Perhaps most important, Arab Americans in Michigan, a must-win state for Democrats, were saying they could no longer vote for Biden.
Anger among progressive activists over Gaza ensured that the left largely did not come to Biden’s side as his candidacy flagged, even though........