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President Biden has just announced that he is ending his reelection bid. When it finally happened,
It felt both inevitable and unfathomable. The president tweeted out, "It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, 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." President Biden was out. And shortly after, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris.
Biden had finally fulfilled his promise to be a bridge to the next generation, albeit under pressure. Harris issued a statement later in the day. She says that she was honored to have received President Biden's endorsement and intends to earn and win the nomination for the presidency. Today, in a special episode of The Run-Up, a top Democratic donor on what ultimately toppled the Biden campaign and an inside look at where Democrats go next.
From the New York Times, I'm Ested Herndon. This is The Run-Up. So, there were three factors at play in the week since the debate. The first was the voters, who, for more than a year, had been pretty open about their concerns with Biden's age and whether he should serve a second term. But following the debate, Biden fell even further behind in battleground state polling, which contributed to the second factor at play.
The elected officials. As more and more of them saw the bleak polling numbers, Biden's hold on the party started to break, which led new elected officials to come out against him, including people in crucial House and Senate races, like Cher Brown of Ohio and John Tester of Montana. But the third factor was mostly happening behind closed doors, and ultimately may have been the thing that did it. The donors. Hello. Hello.
Hey, Ested. How are you doing today? I'm sure this is a crazy one. Insane. So I call longtime Democratic mega-donor Robert Wolf, who's a member of Biden's National Finance Committee. I was formerly CEO and chairman of UBS Americas and president of the investment bank Globally.
And I'm very close with both President Biden and his administration and have known Vice President Kamala Harris since 2006 when she was DA. And I've been very close for her almost two decades and know her family and her sister and her nieces and nephews and everyone quite well. So a very exciting day for the home team.
Roberts started to get concerned about Biden around the same time a lot of other folks did the night of the debate. At 9.03 p.m., I was in disbelief. That's about three minutes in. Three minutes in. I couldn't believe it. I was my wife and I were watching it. We were looking at each other in shock, like what the F is going on.
I don't view myself as an enabler. I view myself as kind of a hard-nosing, straightforward, hard-charging type of guy. We've been with President Biden multiple times in the past three to six months before that. Yes, he was old. He was frail. His voice was a bit raspy. But
We never wavered. We were all in. We actually liked the idea that there was no big primary and that President Biden as incumbent could raise a lot of money and get ready for this choice election versus former President Trump. But that night changed me. I would say, Astead, the three things I was, as I said, I was in disbelief. I was in a bit of grief and I was a bit pissed off.
I'm curious at the last piece. I mean, to your point, you, unlike a lot of other people, have had the privilege of being on one-on-one personal spaces with Biden. And I know you're saying that you did not see the kind of candidate that showed up at that debate. But who are you directing that kind of pissed-offness to? Who are you pissed off at? Believe it or not, I'm not sure if I'm pissed off at myself. I guess what I failed to realize is that as a candidate...
he was not going to be able to effectively do the one thing we need him to do, and that's win. I hear you. I think for a lot of regular baseline voters, there has a long time been a view that Biden's age was a bit of a problem. In fact, some of the things that we saw at the debate was more that political class, the insider class, who are realizing that in real time. Can you tell me, like, with your kind of cohort of people who give a lot of money to campaigns, what were you hearing that night? Um...
That night, I mean, everyone was like, what's going on? What are we seeing? What didn't we know? And the one thing I would say is I think it was the next day they did a donor call for the National Finance Committee. And it was, I'm going to say 600 people. And there were really two questions that were asked and the only two questions people want answered. What happened? And is he okay? And they did not answer that.
And the second question was, if the polls crack, then what? And they did not answer that. Interesting. And I will tell you, 20% of the donors went off the call after those two questions. Left the call. Left the call.
And then it kind of went downhill from there. So again, this is a really helpful context because, you know, folks like us aren't often in those rooms. Take me step by step. So the donors to feel like they're not getting a good answer immediately after the debate. But you did see Biden try to do some public cleanup efforts like the NBC interview, a couple of interviews after that.
Did that affect, you know, I'm saying, were those not enough? Were you all having follow-up conversations? How did we get from the moment of that call then to where we are today, you say? I would have told you I was one of the minorities. I felt like it was almost enough for me. I'd actually say it was enough for me. How Biden kind of came back, whether it was during NATO or
or the interview. That was, you know, it was like, okay, maybe that debate was something that was truly the one-offs of all one-off, but it seemed like he was starting to get his legs. I thought he was great in Detroit. So I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, but maybe that's because I wanted to. I would say 75% of donors thought he should exit. And I think that
Three things happened over the last two weeks, which is I would call the perfect storm. The polls cracked, the electoral map broadened, and the donor base softened. I mean, for the most part, it's over when those three things happened.
There's not enough time for that comeback. Yeah. And thank you so much for shedding that insight, because I think for a lot of people, it's helpful to get the answer to what we're going to go at today, which is just why did this happen now? And then what can we look for going forward? You know, because polling says the voters have been concerned about Biden's age for a long time. And so I think the next question for people was, OK, then what other parts of that shifted? But here, what you're saying right there is what shifted, you think, is that
Once you saw things moving in the opposite direction in terms of polling and the electoral map, you knew that something had to change. Yes, because you need if the electoral map broadens, you need more money. You have to start fighting in New Mexico and Virginia. And also, you know, I did an interview two days ago and, you know, I said that the party's fractured.
We had a coalition forming to stay with Biden, the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the progressives with Bernie and AOC and the labor. And then we had a huge amount of the rest of the base going the other way. And it was being fractured. And you can't beat former President Trump.
with a fractured party. You need to get out the vote. We need to do better than we did in 2020. I wanted to ask you partially about something that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said. She said last week that she was partly sticking with Biden because she thought a huge amount of the donor class in the elites pushing for the president not to be the nominee also did not want to see Vice President Harris be the nominee. Can you give us a little bit about that?
Give us an insight to that take from her. When you were hearing from people, especially kind of donor class over the last couple of weeks about fear about Biden, did that also extend to uncomfort with Harris at the top of the ticket?
So I was not uncomfortable, but certainly there, I wouldn't say it's about the discomfort with Vice President Harris as much as people like James Carville. If you look at Clooney's op-ed or if you look at, you know, what Pelosi's been saying, there are many who want a process that's more of an open primary style as opposed to a coronation. I oppose that.
I don't think we should have an open process. I actually think that that would be chaotic. And you only need something like 300 delegate votes to put your name on the ballot. And I think actually the Biden-Harris presidency has been incredibly successful. They won the primary and we should pass the torch to Kamala, Vice President Harris.
But, you know, I would say it's split. I would say half of us don't want this chaotic open primary. It also, let's be clear, it didn't work well in 68, okay, which is the last time we had it with Hubert Humphrey. And the party being challenged in 1980 with Kennedy and Carter didn't work well. We are much better unified, and I believe we should get our shit together
now. And so when we have the convention, it's three days of a Kumbaya moment where we're all unified and all holding hands. And I hope and believe it will be for president candidate Kamala Harris.
The last question I wanted to ask you is about something that Ron Klain tweeted today. He said, now that the donors and electeds have pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump, it's time to end the political fantasy games and unite behind the only veteran of a national campaign, our outstanding VP Kamala Harris. Now, the first part of that tweet was kind of interesting to me because he seems to certainly be pinning the blame for pushing Biden, as he says, out of the race on donors and elected officials.
I'm curious for you, if you're going to act as our proxy for the donor class, is there any concern that, as Klain says, that, you know, a small group of people maybe put the nail in the coffin of a candidate who is the only one who has a track record of beating Donald Trump? Well, I'm a huge fan of Ron. And I mean, if you look at the facts, you know, there was no question that
you know, those in Congress, the 30 plus members and more to come and the comments by Pelosi and the donor community kind of shutting the spigot. Yeah, I would say that that made the possibility of President Biden's comeback more difficult when you coincide that with, you know, more difficult polling in the swing states and
and the electoral map that broadens. So it's not the sole reason. And as much as I, you know, would have been all in for President Biden, we saw that debate. And the reason these congressional, you know, senators and
have come out was from that debate. I mean, yeah. Because I hear him, you know, I mean, they can make a point about the kind of like, you know, donors and electeds making a concerted effort. But that is where the coup language kind of falls apart for me. Like, this all happened because of something that everyone saw, including millions in the public. Right.
Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much again for your insight into this world. And I think for this moment, especially, it's really valuable because even hearing you describe the call that kind of campaign have with donors is a type of insight I don't think people get all the time. So thank you again for helping us out. Thank you. I look forward to listening to it. Awesome. Thank you so much. You have a great rest of your day. All right. Bye bye. Following President Biden's announcement on Sunday, Democrats raised more than $50 million online.
making it the single biggest debt for online Democratic contributions since the 2020 election. Next, I call my colleague. Okay, can you introduce yourself and tell me what you cover? I'm Reid Epstein, and until about nine hours ago, I covered the Joe Biden campaign for The New York Times. Ha ha ha!
And now I'm not sure what I'm doing, except I am running around like a chicken with a Ted cut off like everyone else on our staff. I wanted to ask him about what to expect from Democrats in the coming weeks and how real is the unity that Wolf is projecting.
The question we get often and that we're trying to answer in this episode is just why did this, how and why did this happen? Now, we know the debate kind of started a political firestorm that remagnified the issue that voters have had with him for a long time. But we are, that's not really what changed over the last couple of weeks. Our sense is that, you know, the drumbeat from elected officials and loss of support within his own party, and then this loss of support from donors are really what did the Biden campaign in. Is that your sense?
Yeah, I mean, you guys have on this show for months and months been talking about how actual living, breathing Democratic voters did not want Joe Biden to run again. And so it didn't take the debate for those people to decide that they were done with him. What the debate did and the subsequent cratering in Biden's polling was
was that it got the Democratic elected officials and party elites who rallied behind Biden without regard to what their voters thought
It got those folks to realize that their own political viability was at risk by supporting Joe Biden. And that's when we saw the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate go up to Delaware and sort of tell him the facts of life and what their polling showed. And eventually, the Biden team's own polling came back with similar answers about why
how he did not have a plausible path to the presidency. And by the end of last week, we were seeing polling circulating in Democratic circles that showed Biden behind in all the battleground states and only up by a couple points in states like Colorado and New Jersey that are safe blue states.
Once that information was shown to Biden and his most senior advisors who had wanted him to stay in the race, they didn't have much choice but to come to the conclusion they did. And this is really helpful because it speaks to what we just talked to with Robert Wolf, a big Democratic donor who I just got off the phone with, who was saying that in their circles, what really did the president in was polling showing the race going in the opposite direction, as you mentioned, and the map really expand.
So much so that it made a lot of donors wary of even giving anymore. But I wanted to pose some questions about looking forward, specifically following up on the unity that Wolf said he expects the party to have around Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee. Does that line up with your reporting? What is your sense of how united Democrats will be around the Harris candidacy in the weeks going forward?
well some of that remains to be seen what we've seen in the first few hours of the harris for president campaign is a flood of democrats who had been with biden coming out for her you know from bill clinton to the president himself there's been groups of delegates for the convention from a handful of states that have come out and said they're for for kamala harris
And the donors are also on board. And so all signs point to the party coalescing behind her. But more importantly, I think, than that is there's nobody who has come out and said that they're opposing her within the party. And there's been all of this kind of Aaron Sorkin style pie in the sky fantasy talk about a contested process or a battle at the convention.
And to do that, somebody has to run against her. And that's not happened so far. Yeah. I wanted to ask you, you know, we see the kind of signs of unity as you're laying out. But then we've also seen some other things. We've seen folks like Pelosi and former President Obama call for what they have described as an open convention or a more open process. Can I stop you on that? I was setting you up to go in on the idea. Let's never use the phrase open convention or open process. What do you mean?
Because the process is what it is. It's not open. It's not closed. It's the process that the Democratic National Committee has laid out to nominate a candidate in the event that their candidate withdraws.
And so what those people mean when they say open convention or open process is they want somebody to run against Harris. That's what that means. Is that what I should take that to mean? That means they want a competitive process and they want someone to provide her with competition. Their problem for the people who are saying that at this moment is there is nobody else.
And a handful of people who were thought to be, if not interested, but possible candidates have come out and endorsed her. And nobody is making any kind of a play to
to speak to the delegates who will make the decision, the 4,600 Democratic delegates who will vote on the next nominee for the party. There's nobody out there who is contacting those people and trying to win them over. And those are the types of things that if there was a serious candidate opposing Harris for this nomination, like that work needs to be happening right now and it's not taking place.
So how should I fit that understanding with the reporting that says that someone like Senator Joe Manchin has been considering putting his name in the race? Wouldn't that be a someone else? So I did hear from somebody close to Manchin this afternoon that he said he is considering getting in, you know,
He might be considering that. I guess I would be surprised if he goes through with that. We know that Manchin is somebody who likes to have his name in the center of conversations in Washington, and he has frequently toyed with running for office before. If you remember, he was in talks with the No Labels people for a long time about running as an independent candidate on their line. And he has, it seemed like every time he was up for reelection, he talked
played it out until the last minute for maximum attention. He loves a float. The sort of work that would be required is not something that we have seen in Manchin's record so far as a candidate. And this kind of contest is really a scut work of an election. If you were going to challenge Harris, because it would, I mean, there's 4,600 candidates
delegates to the convention and you'd really have to get on the phone and start calling these people individually to win them over. It's not the sort of race that you can win with television advertising or running across the country to campaign. It's almost like an election for the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, where there's just a small and finite universe of people who are important in voting. And those are the ones you have to convince. And
There's nothing in Manchin's record that suggests that he's going to go through with something like that, let alone the sort of political issue of...
a moderate white candidate trying to push aside a black woman nominee of a party. Yeah, yeah, it definitely does feel like if the issue here is age, I don't know if 76-year-old centrists are a solution for that, but we'll see how it goes in the weeks ahead. I wanted to say, though, it does feel like the picture you're laying out gives a sense of sort of Harris inevitability here. Is that how we should think of it? And is there anything that can kind of throw us off
from the train where it does look like the DNC in Chicago will be kind of presentation of Harris's nominee. Yeah, I mean, you should think of this as a Harris production from here on out. Okay. And the vote to confirm her as the nominee or whoever they nominate is not going to happen in Chicago. It is almost certainly going to happen before the delegates arrive there. We won't get too deep in the weeds here, but there's some ballot deadlines to get on states' ballots
in big states that happen during the week of the convention that are going to require the party to hold that vote virtually before the convention begins.
Harris has said she wants to earn and win the Democratic nomination. And I've heard other Democratic officials say they want to avoid the appearance of a coronation. But one question I had for you is what would it even look like to earn the nomination, considering there's so few days before we get to the DNC convention in Chicago? She's going to earn the nomination by having everyone endorse her and nobody running against her, right? That's how she's going to earn it. As Biden did last year. Yeah.
You know, there just does not appear to be much of an appetite for
to challenge her in the party. The reality of it is she's sitting on not just the money that they raised today, but the $96 million that the Biden campaign had in its bank account as of the end of June, the 1300 campaign staff members it has on board, anybody running against her starts from zero. And so it's hard to fathom the sort of candidate who could go from, who could, you know, stand up a campaign campaign
on short order with that kind of money. You know, even a campaign where there's only 4,600 voters, Kamala Harris has access to that list of 4,600 voters and the other candidates don't because at this moment, the only people who have the list of those voters are the
are the DNC and the Biden campaign. And so if you're Joe Manchin or J.B. Pritzker or any of these other kind of fantasy candidates, you don't even know who the voters are in this election, let alone have a campaign apparatus. Yeah. The last question I have is about what to expect in the coming week. Is there anything you're looking for this week? And what should we expect from Biden's speech that he said he would give on this topic?
Well, we don't know yet when Biden will give the speech. He has been sick. He has COVID. I think part of the reason why he didn't speak today was that he's pretty sick and it would not be a great look to for him to come out in the condition he's in.
Harris is going to have a busy week. She's going to be in Wilmington, Delaware on Monday visiting the campaign headquarters. She is going to Milwaukee on Tuesday for a campaign stop. She's going to be in Indianapolis on Wednesday to speak to one of the Divine Nine sororities there.
And I would expect that in the coming days and weeks after that, we're going to see a lot more of her now than we have up to this point. And we'll see a lot more of her on the campaign trail than we saw of Joe Biden. Thank you, Reid. I appreciate your time. Thank you, Astead. That's The Run-Up for Monday, July 22nd, the day after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race. More from us later this week. The Run-Up is reported by me, Astead Herndon.
and produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Caitlin O'Keefe, and Anna Foley. It's edited by Rachel Dry and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Sophia Landman, and Alisha Ba'i Tut. It was mixed by Alyssa Moxley and fact-checked by Caitlin Love.
Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Sam Dolnick, Larissa Anderson, David Halfinger, Maddie Macielo, Mahima Chablani, Jeffrey Miranda, and Elizabeth Bristow. Do you have questions about the 2024 election? Email us at therunupatnytimes.com. Or better yet, record your question using the voice memo app in your phone. That email again is therunupatnytimes.com. Thanks for listening, y'all.
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