Slate takes final stock of how Not normal this choice was.

Joe Biden's exit from the presidential campaign in the summer was by far the latest exit from a presidential campaign by a major party candidate. With his retirement at the end of March 1968, Lyndon Johnson set the benchmark for breathtaking upheavals in racing; Biden dropped out more than three months later. Early voting began in some states less than two months after Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. Let's take a moment to appreciate how unusual this all was!

Biden was clearly very reluctant to take this step – and he might well still be in the race today if he hadn't experienced a particularly painful silence during his debate with Donald Trump on June 27. Guh! It was really bad. Even writing about it four months later makes me uncomfortable! Ick!!!!

This debate itself was also unprecedented, as it took place before Biden or his opponent had officially received their party's nomination. It was the first general election face-off ever to take place before September, and Biden's team had reportedly actually pushed for such a schedule because it felt the agreement would give him “time to recover if he goes to the polls.” should stumble.” Well, things Somehow worked like that.

Going into the debate, Biden's position among Democrats and in the race was actually quite strong, considering his approval rating was 16 points lower among the general public. Concerns earlier this year that the 81-year-old president lacked the stamina and verbal coherence to run for re-election were largely dispelled by his energetic State of the Union performance. He was polling roughly neck-and-neck with Donald Trump, and he had just completed a huge fundraiser with George Clooney and Barack Obama. One Democratic congressman, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, had challenged Biden in the primary, raising concerns about his age — and ultimately won just four of the 3,949 available delegates.

In Atlanta, however, Biden was uncertain from the start. “I come from a household where the kitchen table was a problem when things couldn't be set during the month,” he said in his first response. Perhaps he could have messed up the broadcast – and the rest of the election – if he had made just minor mistakes like this. But when he answered CNN anchor Jake Tapper's question about the national debt a few minutes later, things got much worse. From the transcript:

(Trump) had the highest national debt of any four-year presidential term, number one.

Second, he received a $2 trillion tax cut that benefited the very rich.

I'll get the taxes sorted.

For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what happens? They're in a situation where they're actually paying 8.2 percent in taxes. If they had just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either of those two numbers, they would have raised $500 million over 10 years – billions of dollars, I would say.

We would be able to pay off his debts. We could help ensure all the things that we need to do, child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system and making sure that we are able to care for every single individual eligible for what I'm dealing with COVID could do – excuse me for dealing with everything we're dealing with.

Look when we finally defeat Medicare.

That was the end of his answer. As bad as it looks on the page, it sounded and looked even worse live, especially in the context of the uncertain manner in which he walked to his podium, the barely audible voice in which he spoke, and the empty, almost alarmed way he stared into the camera as Trump spoke:

What viewers saw was nearly 15 seconds of largely dead air in which the president tried to remember what he was talking about but failed. (What he apparently wanted to say was something along the lines of Make everyone eligible Discounts on prescription medications that we negotiated with Medicare.)

Liberal-leaning commentators immediately began drafting calls for Democrats to replace Biden on the ballot. The New York Times editorial board urged him to abandon the race the next day, and he almost immediately lost three points in the polls. A poll of viewers found that they thought Trump, himself not a model of verbal clarity or coherence, “won” the debate by a margin of 40 points, a level of consensus unprecedented in modern America. Polls of Democratic voters soon showed that two-thirds of them wanted Biden to resign.

Even George Clooney wrote that he had seen enough.

And given all that, it is Despite it It took more than three weeks and several more extremely reassuring appearances for Biden to drop out of the race. He took this step only after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly told him that it was his only option. We learned that this was a man who believed very, very strongly that he and only he was capable of defeating Donald Trump. If there hadn't been a very, very bad standoff in front of the camera, he might still be on the campaign trail today telling us this.

When he finally resigned, Kamala Harris was likely the party's only alternative to replace him, as no other candidate had stepped forward to publicly campaign or assemble campaign staff. Meanwhile, Trump made gains in the polls. As with the 2020 primaries, when a series of strategic endorsements essentially made Joe Biden the nominee, Democrats decided to prioritize “being able to defeat Donald Trump” over all other considerations. Kamala Harris is always at least four points ahead of Biden in the polls. Therefore, it is safe to say that Biden's resignation was at least the right move. As for everything that happened after that, we'll find out shortly out of.