He still thought he could win: Inside Joe Biden’s decision to drop out

WASHINGTON — In the end, he was alone.

Confined to a spare bedroom in his vacation home and fighting off bouts of coughing from COVID-19, President Joe Biden was exhausted when he turned in for the night Saturday, July 20. Whether he slept soundly or fitfully or not at all, people close to him said he took the long hours by himself to mull over the historic decision he was about to make.

He had just been through a brutal two days in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, as he huddled with his wife, Jill Biden, and his closest aides, who rotated from a screened-in porch to a sitting area off the dining room.

Steve Ricchetti, the president’s eyes and ears on Capitol Hill, and Mike Donilon, his chief strategist, had shared internal polling with the president that Saturday that mirrored what Americans had been seeing for weeks: Biden was falling behind, nationally and in key battleground states.

There was still a path to victory, they advised him, but the fight would be ugly. The president would be pitted against his donors, half of his party in Congress and Democratic voters who had concluded that he was too old to win.

For more than three weeks, Biden had insisted he would stay in the race. Only the “Lord Almighty,” he said, could get him to drop out.

But by that Saturday evening, something had shifted.

It was not just about the polls, people close to Biden say. Despite everything, Biden believed he could still claim the Democratic nomination and beat former President Donald Trump. Aides say he still believes that.

What began to change the president’s mind, people familiar with his thinking say, was the realization that if he stayed in the race, he was in for a lonely battle that would rip apart the Democratic Party, the cause he had served nearly his entire life. Would a man who views himself as the ultimate consensus builder in Washington want to wage an intraparty war that would run counter to the fabric of who he is?

That day, Biden asked a key question.

“If we were going to do it,” Biden asked his two advisers, “what would we say?”

A statement was drafted, known only to four other people: the first lady and her closest aide, Anthony Bernal; the president’s son Hunter; and Annie Tomasini, the gatekeeper at the White House and the president’s deputy chief of staff.

But first, he wanted a few hours to think. At 9 p.m. that evening, the president excused himself. It was time to call it a night.

A herculean climb

To many outsiders, it seemed almost inevitable that Biden would have to quit the race.

For weeks, polls had shown large majorities of voters desperate for a new choice. Day after day, more Democratic lawmakers publicly called for him to step aside, saying he could not win. Donors canceled fundraisers and stopped giving money. Hollywood celebrities and liberal TV pundits revoked their endorsements.

Yet those inside the small circle of family members and advisers who were with the president at the very end insist that the story of how Biden went from defiance to acquiescence was not about convincing him that he was destined to lose. That never happened, according to people close enough to Biden to know his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s decision-making in the final hours.

There was no meeting of the Biden family, as there had been in prior years when Biden had to make big political decisions. Ever since the debate with Trump in Atlanta three weeks earlier raised serious questions about the president’s fitness, his children and grandchildren had said they were behind him no matter what he decided to do next. The circle around Biden in the final days had shrunk to its smallest circumference: just his wife and his closest aides. Hunter Biden, who lives in Los Angeles, called in regularly.

People close to the president said that no one hid the grim realities from him, but that he never stopped believing he would have been the party’s nominee had he stayed in the race and that he could have beaten Trump. Just a day before he drafted his letter in Rehoboth Beach, Biden received a call from Ron Klain, the president’s first chief of staff, who urged him to stay in the race.

“That’s my intention,” Biden told Klain on Friday evening.

On Saturday morning, the first lady gathered in the small sitting area off the dining room with Bernal and Tomasini. She had been clear with her husband for days: This is your decision. You need to make a call on your own, but you need to tell us where your heart is, what you are thinking.

Around 4 p.m., Donilon joined Ricchetti at the beach house. Both men had been at the president’s side since the debate, funneling real-time information about the calls for him to step down.

The three men moved to the screened-in porch at the back of the 7,000-square-foot home, close to where the waves crashed onto the beach. Hunter Biden dialed in on speakerphone.

The president’s cat, Willow, was slinking around underfoot.

Donilon and Ricchetti had been around politics a long time and they understood what it meant to have a pathway to victory. There was one, they told the president. The polls were going south, it was true, but by margins that they believed could be made up.

The delegates he won during the primaries were already pledged to him, Ricchetti and Donilon said. It would be almost impossible for someone else to take them away from him if he refused to drop out of the race.

But he was politically isolated, they said.

Too many of his allies wanted him out, and it was only going to get worse.

The president, by this point, was weary. In the weeks since the debate, he had been trying to flip the narrative back to the dangers Trump posed. But nothing seemed to work, even as he waged a war of survival against what he viewed as an unfair campaign to oust him from his rightful spot at the top of the ticket.

Still coughing and hoarse from COVID, Biden was growing more receptive to the calls from his allies that he step aside — though he fundamentally disagreed with their reasoning.

Donilon and Ricchetti told the president they still believed in him. You could still win, they said, but it would be a herculean climb.

If Biden had been determined to stay in the race, he could have argued with Donilon and Ricchetti or asked for more concrete evidence. Instead, he said nothing to challenge the accuracy of the polling, and he did not ask them to get additional data, even after weeks of publicly questioning the accuracy of the polls, according to people familiar with the conversation.

Instead, he asked them about what had once been unthinkable: dropping out of the race. He wanted to get some words down on the page, a draft of an announcement.

The three men came out to talk to the others. Biden did not explicitly announce a decision, but it was clear to everyone in the room that he was leaning toward stepping aside, which did not appear to shock anyone. He directed Donilon and Ricchetti to work on a statement, while the others took a pizza break for dinner.

When the president and the two political advisers convened again, they continued working on the statement until the president said he was going to bed. He wanted to sleep on it.

The next day, he ended his reelection campaign in a brief letter posted on social media, bringing a half-century of service near its close. His decision would cement his legacy as a one-term president and instantly reshape the 2024 election.

‘Personal ambition’

The depth of the fractures in his party seem to have come into focus for Biden that weekend, as he would explain in the days that followed.

“Well, look,” Biden told Robert Costa of CBS News in an interview Sunday. “The polls we had showed that it was a neck-and-neck race, would have been down to the wire. But what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic.”

“I thought it’d be a real distraction,” he said.

But that is only part of the story.

For as long as anyone could remember, Biden had ended speeches with the same optimistic line about the country he had served for so long: “There is nothing America can’t do — when we do it together.”

It was the essence of his political identity.

In the Oval Office remarks the president delivered a few days after he dropped out, he hinted at the argument that had been persuasive to him, saying he could no longer see a way to run for reelection while staying true to that belief.

“You know, in recent weeks, it’s become clear to me that I needed to unite my party in this critical endeavor,” Biden said. “I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term, but nothing — nothing — can come in the way of saving our democracy.”

“That includes,” he added, “personal ambition.”

After his decision was announced Sunday, July 21, Biden spent much of the day on the phone, thanking people such as Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina and former Rep. Cedric Richmond. The president was still recovering from COVID, but his voice was getting stronger.

Over nearly 50 years in public service, Biden had failed to win the presidency twice before finally claiming the prize at the age of 77. Now, at 81, he had decided to call it quits. In the weeks that followed, people close to Biden would describe him as resentful and angry at the Democratic allies who had helped engineer his ouster.

But on that Sunday, at least, he wasn’t showing it.

The president seemed at peace.