“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,” Biden wrote.
Edit: He’s endorsing Harris. all the news sites have live feeds.
- https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-pulls-out-presidential-race-live-2024-07-21/
- https://apnews.com/live/biden-trump-election-campaign-updates
- https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4784442-live-updates-biden-drops-out-2024-race/
- https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/biden-trump-election-07-21-24/index.html
This was the right decision in 2023. Making it now, a month before the DNC, means they have completely circumvented the primary elections and robbed voters of their chance to select the nominee. We’ve gone from millions of people having a voice in the nomination process, to a group of less than ten thousand, and that is disenfranchisement on a massive scale.
Don’t get me wrong, I would vote for a dead raccoon before I’d vote for Trump. But we deserve better than to have Trump’s opponent hand-picked on our behalf like this. I’ll vote for whoever that is, but we should absolutely give the Democrats hell once this is all over. The duopoly in our elections needs to end, if they can’t be trusted to honor the basic fundamentals of the system.
As a non American I’ve never understood the primaries concept either. I get how it works but I’ve never seen it anywhere else in the world. So I don’t think it’s that big of a deal having the party leadership decide their candidate.