Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have pushed out Joe Biden, but will their gamble ultimately work?

US Vice-President Kamala Harris and then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi applaud as US President Joe Biden delivers his first State of the Union address in 2022. Picture: AFP

Joe Biden’s belated decision to quit the presidential race draws a line under a disastrous year for the Democrats and puts them back as an outside chance in the race for the White House.

Although Vice-President Kamala Harris, the clear frontrunner to be the party’s nominee, would start as underdog against Donald Trump, her candidacy completely up-ends the election and injects huge uncertainty into what had looked like an easy win for Trump.

The first challenge for the Democrats will be to decide quickly, without acrimony or division, whether the 59-year-old Harris should be their candidate with just over three months until the November election. This is unprecedented territory; no president has ever bowed out of a race under these circumstances.

Whoever takes over as the candidate will inherit a massive challenge. They will have to unite a divided Democratic Party and run a coherent and persuasive campaign against a well-funded frontrunner in Trump. All in just a few months.

The President has endorsed Harris, which will cement her as the early favourite and most likely successor. Yet the Democrats will have to decide whether to have a rapid-fire open contest between all potential candidates or quickly endorse Harris as the consensus candidate.

The Democratic Party, not Biden, will determine who is the candidate and powerful voices in the party, including Nancy Pelosi, have indicated they favour an open contest between potential candidates rather than just anointing Harris.

Several key Democratic leaders such as Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer pointedly did not endorse Harris in their statements on Biden, which suggests they also want an open contest to decide who the candidate should be.

The most likely scenario is that there is technically an open contest, but no serious challenger to Harris will emerge, or at least no one who has a chance of defeating her.

Within hours of Biden’s announcement, two of the most likely challengers, California Gover-nor Gavin Newsom and Trans-port Secretary Pete Buttigieg, endorsed Harris. The other potential challenger, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has said previously she would not challenge Harris.

It will be difficult for challengers to contest the nomination against Harris, knowing the President has endorsed her and fearing they might be blamed for any divisions that would be created.

Biden’s decision to step aside as the candidate delivers a major challenge to Trump. The former president has been riding high in the polls against Biden, in part because the 81-year-old Biden was widely seen as too old and infirm to serve another term.

Both Trump and the Republican Party desperately wanted Biden to stay in the race because they believed Trump would easily defeat him. Now Trump will face a much younger candidate whose potential to attract disaffected voters is untested.

It may be that Trump will easily defeat Harris or any other candidate, but there is a danger for him that a large chunk of voters may be attracted to the notion of generational change.

These are big unknowns for Trump.

Biden’s decision to step down was a case of bowing to the inevitable. His candidacy became untenable the moment senior Democrat leaders, including party elders Pelosi and Obama, made it clear they believed he would lose and should step aside.

The President’s poll numbers have been heading south against Trump, showing he was now losing to him in every important battleground state. The polls showed Harris would perform better than Biden against Trump, if not by a large margin.

Biden’s bid for a second term was effectively doomed by his disastrous debate appearance in June where he bumbled his way through, giving Americans a clear and shocking perspective on his cognitive decline.

What is remarkable was the President’s own lack of awareness of how fast he was declining. His family, his aides and Democrat leaders bear much responsibility for letting it go this far, such that his successor now has just over three months to try to pull off a come-from-behind win.

The President gave a string of press conferences and interviews after the debate to try to reassure voters but it was the gaffes in those interviews that grabbed the headlines.

When Democrat members of congress started calling on him to quit the race, Biden initially dug his heels in and insisted he intended to run. But as he recovered from Covid at his holiday house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, he had time to examine the polls and the feelings of his party colleagues. He reportedly made the decision only in the past two days.

The Democratic Party and major donors no doubt had a collective sigh of relief when Biden posted his bombshell tweet announcing his withdrawal.

The decision delivers generational change for the Democrats and means they go from having almost no chance of defeating Trump to having a candidate with an unknown chance of winning.

For the party, that was a gamble worth taking.