Daniel Ponder*

On August 2, 2024, merely twelve days after President Joe Biden ended all speculation and officially dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, and Vice President Kamala Harris secured enough delegates for President via virtual roll call of delegates.  In this post, I want to step back and examine the recent history of presidents who faced significant intra-party opposition or dissension.  For these presidents and their parties, the (re)election did not end well.  With Biden stepping down, Harris and the Democrats may have avoided that fate.  This post briefly examines those presidencies and places 2024 in that context.

But for starters, a little speculation is in order.  After Biden was elected in 2020, I thought he might wait until the 2022 midterms and announce he would not seek a second term. His accomplishments were already formidable.  Not only had he defeated an incumbent, which is rare, but he could have rightly laid claim to a surprisingly productive two years as president.  He could have announced that he was stepping away, ready, as he would say in 2024, to “pass the torch,” thereby launching a potentially robust nomination contest to identify his successor.  

Instead, after much consternation within the Democratic ranks, exacerbated by a disastrous debate with Donald Trump,  President Joe Biden did step aside and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Calls for him to do so began almost immediately as the White House scrambled to calm the frayed nerves of party elites and the party faithful as soon as the next day.  Biden’s subsequent attempts to right the ship either failed or were lackluster, and the pleas for him to step aside accelerated through the first three weeks of July.  By the time he relented and withdrew his candidacy, it had been a matter of “when” and not “if.” 

The purpose of this post is two-fold: First, I survey examples of presidents who faced significant intra-party opposition when running for reelection, with what consequence, and ultimately draw a few conclusions as to why Biden’s decision to drop out, though barely a month before the Democratic convention, bolster Democrats chances in November. The second is to survey what the race looks like now and what some implications might be. 

Presidents and Intra-Party Opposition.  

Presidents as candidates face myriad challenges from the opposing party. They have to, among other things, reshuffle staff and staffing priorities, consider their position in Congress, and formulate a path forward that will satisfy the most rock-ribbed partisans without alienating important swing or undecided voters.  What they don’t need is significant, vocal dissension and calls to drop out from prominent members of their own party.  Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests this rarely if ever ends well for the President. 

Consider 1968.  President Lyndon Johnson had amassed a significant, even historic domestic achievements, encapsulated in the Great Society, including the War on Poverty and civil rights had been widely celebrated.  But credit for those achievements soon was soon shunted aside when the increasingly unpopular and intractable Vietnam War devoured the president’s time and attention.  Johnson, facing significant opposition from partisans, entered the New Hampshire Democratic primary, though he had not officially declared his intention to seek reelection.  On March 12, Johnson won the primary.  However, Eugene McCarthy, an anti-war Senator from Minnesota, pulled 41%, losing to LBJ by only 8%, raising serious questions about the President’s viability in the election.  Nineteen days later on March 31, LBJ shocked everyone when his remarks in an Oval Office address, ended with the following words:   “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”  The race for the nomination was on, including Vice President Hubert Humphry, and Senators Robert F. Kennedy, George McGovern, and McCarthy.  1968 was a particularly chaotic year.  Four days after Johnson withdrew, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  Two months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the same night he won the California primary.  In August, tensions between war hawks and doves as well as significant intra-party feuds erupted at the Democratic convention in Chicago.  Humphrey ended up with the nomination, but lost a tightly contested three-way race that included Richard Nixon and former (and future) Alabama Governor George Wallace, a southern Democrat running as a Dixiecrat.  Wallace managed to win forty-six Electoral Votes in the then- heavily Democratic South, effectively handing Nixon the presidency. 

 In 1976, President Gerald Ford, the only person to hold the offices of Vice President and President without ever having been elected to either, ran for election outright.  However, his nomination was far from certain, and former California Governor Ronald Reagan saw an opportunity.  Ford had pardoned Nixon for any Watergate-related crimes exactly a month after becoming president. While it is unlikely this was the only or even principal reason for his loss to a nearly unknown Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia, it certainly opened up a fissure in the party.  Reagan attacked Ford’s record on the issues, effectively arguing that Ford was not sufficiently conservative, and that the Republican party needed rebranding.  Ford managed to stave off the challenge, but the damage had been done.  Ford’s prospects for victory did improve against Carter in October, but were hindered by various missteps, including a gaffe in a debate with Carter where he said there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.  Ford ended up narrowly losing in November.  

In 1980, President Carter faced his own intra-party from Senator  Ted Kennedy , who challenged Carter in the primaries. Kennedy, an icon of the liberal wing of the party, challenged the Southern Democrat Carter as being too conservative, and questions of leadership dogged Carter into the election year.  The lagged effects of the Vietnam War and OPEC’s oil embargo fed stagflation, a situation where inflation and unemployment are simultaneously high and economic growth stagnates.  But the most serious challenge to the perception of Carter’s leadership was the Iranian Hostage crisis, which dogged the president’s last year in office.  The inability to rescue the hostages fed a growing discontent in the country.  These and other issues spurred Kennedy’s challenge, including a very public contest to release the delegates at the Democratic convention. Carter had garnered enough delegates to win but Kennedy posed a challenge to release the delegates, allowing them to vote from whomever they pleased.  Carter’s delegates stayed firm and he won re-nomination.  But the Kennedy challenge laid bare serious dissension in the party and Republican nominee Ronald Reagan cruised to victory in a three-way race, winning an electoral college landslide.  Doing so, he wooed disaffected Democrats who, without necessarily changing party affiliation, crossed party lines.  These so-called Reagan Democrats, generally stayed in the Republican camp in 1984 and 1988.   

Finally, in 1992, President George H.W. Bush, whose approval ratings barely a year before the election were the highest on record, lost to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.  As a popular incumbent president, Bush was expected to win reelection easily. But toward the end of 1991 and into 1992, conservative pundit and former Nixon aide  Pat Buchanan challenged Bush from the right.  Bush had famously pledged at the 1988 Republican Convention, “Read my lips.  No new taxes.” Political reality set in, though, and in 1990 Bush tried to eek out a compromise with congressional Democrats that would allow him to keep his pledge.  Unable to do so, he agreed to increase some existing taxes. Predictably, this opened an opportunity for Republicans to pounce, and Buchannan did exactly that.  He charged Bush with abandoning conservative principles, breaking his pledge, and, in a speech at the 1992 RNC, where he paid lip service to uniting the party, he continued his elevation of culture war issues such as abortion, implicitly indicting the President for abandoning those matters.  Though Buchannan never won a primary, he did pull nearly 23% of the total Republican vote.  For example, he won nearly 38% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary.  In fact, he earned more than 30% of the vote in each primary through the end of March, and then mostly in the teens and twenties until June.  This continued frontal assault by Buchanan, as well as a recession, opened wide the split in the Republican party.  To make matters worse, Texas Billionaire “populist” Ross Perot staged a will-he-won’t-he run Independent campaign, and even led in the polls against both Bush and Clinton as late as June. Perot dropped out in July, but reentered in October and in November got nearly 19% of the vote.  While he pulled votes from both candidates, many believe he hurt the already reeling Bush more, leading the Clinton’s victory in November. 

What does this mean for 2024

The brief narratives above suggest a few things for the 2024 race. First, unlike LBJ, Ford, Carter, and Bush, Biden faced no significant formal challenge in the primaries.  However, the question of his age had lurked for some time and was brought into immediate focus at the June 27 debate when he appeared at times lost, confused, and fragmented; in a word, the embodiment of all the Republicans were trying to do in order to paint the President as too old.  As noted above, calls for the President to step down started almost immediately and gained momentum as efforts to assuage Democrats concerns, such as a sit-down interview with George Stephanopoulos fell flat.  Biden withdrew on July 21. 

Once Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, the Democrats quickly fell in line, rejuvenating an electorate that seemed all-but-resigned to a Trump presidency.  In less than two weeks, the mad dash to raise campaign cash, often seen as a proxy for support and enthusiasm, netted some  $310 million.  Polls in key battleground states adduced further evidence of a “new race,” recalibrated to a Harris candidacy.  

Of course, this does not mean Harris will win.  Significant challenges still face her, not least including a tight electoral college landscape.  Following the 2020 census, distribution of electoral votes following the 2020 census slightly increases the advantage of Republican and Republican-leaning states.  But as noted above, battleground states may have been rejuvenated, and a  Brookings analysis suggests that Harris’s campaign has rejuvenated several parts of the Obama coalition that may have waivered over the last four years.  

Other issues have already come to the fore that still exhibit division within the party.  To be sure, Biden stepped aside, and while that solves some but certainly note all issues, some from the Republicans and others and how they will be received and dealt with, There is also the issue of the war in Gaza, which was certainly a point of contention if not an outright fissure in the party, and how it may affect her as the candidate, having been Biden’s Vice President.  And while it is unlikely to be a direct historical analogue to 1968 convention, it is likely there will be protests outside the convention (or even inside), and could hurt Harris and possibly help Trump. Finally, some accounts indicate that the push for Harris to choose a nominee emerged from competition among the various parts of the Democratic party, signaling some divisions.  But parties always have factions, and the big issue will be how can Harris deal with them.[1]

But regardless of the outcome on November 5, the 2024 race has taken on a decidedly different flavor.  It has already rejuvenated the Democrats, putting Republicans on offense, with some attacking her as a “DEI hire.” As Julia Azari has written, race is still an issue in presidential politics.  But the new candidacy can build on the administration’s significant record of accomplishments, try to distinguish itself on its own terms, and changes 2024 in ways that didn’t seem likely just two short weeks ago.

[1] As I was writing this post, it was announced that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz  was selected to be Harris’s Vice Presidential running mate.

* Many thanks to Elijah Ponder for reading a draft of this post, and who provided excellent, perceptive comments and suggestions for improving this piece.