Former President Joe Biden defended the timing of his decision to withdraw from the presidential race in favor of his Vice President, Kamala Harris, in a new interview this week, suggesting it didn’t affect the outcome.
When asked if he left the 2024 presidential race too late, Biden said that he didn’t believe his decision ultimately changed the results of the election in an interview with BBC News reporter Nick Robinson.
“I don’t think it would have mattered,” Biden said in his first interview since leaving the White House.
“We left at a time when we had a good candidate,” Biden said, speaking of Harris, who succeeded him as the de facto Democratic nominee after Biden announced that he was dropping out of the race. Biden added that Harris was “fully funded” and supported by the Democratic Party.
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“It was a hard decision,” Biden said. “I think it was the right decision. It was just a difficult decision.”
Harris went on to defeat at the hands of President Donald Trump, and Democrats have since wondered if Biden put Harris in a difficult spot by not giving up on his re-election bid earlier, or didn’t give the party a chance to have a true primary process to pick a replacement.
“i don’t think so,” he added, when pressed again by BBC whether he left too late. “I don’t know how that would have made much difference.”
Biden argued his term was so successful, it was difficult to hand over leadership to a new generation immediately, as he’d initially intended.
“What we had set out to do, no one thought we could do,” he said. “I’d become so successful in our agenda, it was hard to say, ‘I’m going to stop now.’ I meant what I said when I started, that I’m preparing to hand this to the next generation, the transition of government. Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.”
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Biden faced increasing calls from journalists, pundits and eventually senior members of his own party to withdraw from the presidential race following his disastrous debate performance against Trump last year.
Biden, who sounded raspy in his BBC interview, also appeared frail and shaky during the debate with Trump, later blaming his performance on a cold. This followed years of liberal defense of his mental fitness and castigation of any reporting that suggested he’d lost a step. His debate showing sent off shockwaves among Democrats, who effectively pushed him out of the race less than a month later.
Some reporters now say that they did not do enough to cover Biden’s declining mental state.
At last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Axios reporter Alex Thompson acknowledged that the press fell short in covering the story of Biden’s decline.
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“Being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story… Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said.
Fox News’ Brian Flood and Hanna Panreck contributed to this report.
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