President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he will not run for reelection in November. The dramatic move upends the presidential race and threatens to reshape a handful of New York congressional races, which could determine the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden wrote in an open letter posted on social media. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
Since the president’s disastrous debate performance against Republican rival Donald Trump in June, his campaign has been plagued by concerns over his health, age and mental acuity. Polls showed Biden doing poorly in deep-blue New York even before the debate, and Democrats have worried privately and publicly that his continued candidacy would discourage Democratic turnout rather than drive it.
The Democratic president threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris, endorsing her to become the party’s new nominee to take on Trump in November.
Some Democrats feared Biden would prove a liability for members of his party running in close congressional contests on Long Island, in the Hudson Valley and in Central New York. Those areas are home to a handful of battleground districts that helped Republicans win a razor-thin House majority in 2022.
In an interview with Gothamist, New York state Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs said he believes Biden made the right call.
“I am very proud of President Biden for putting not just the party but the country ahead of his personal desire to stand again for president,” Jacobs said. “I think it was a noble act. He’s always demonstrated greatness and no more so than now.”
One congressmember with his future at stake, Rep. Pat Ryan of the Hudson Valley, wrote an op-ed in the Poughkeepsie Journal earlier this month calling on Biden to end his campaign “for the good of the country.”
Ryan was the first New York congressmember to publicly request that Biden step aside. First elected to Congress in a 2022 special election, Ryan is facing a competitive challenge from Republican Alison Esposito, who lost a bid for lieutenant governor running alongside former Rep. Lee Zeldin last cycle.
While waves of congressional Democrats joined calls for Biden to drop out — 37 as of Sunday afternoon — Ryan remained the only one from his state to take the stand publicly.
But he’s far from the only Democrat whose race could hinge on turnout at the margins. Also in the Hudson Valley, former Rep. Mondaire Jones is trying to oust first-term Republican Rep. Mike Lawler. Biden won the district by 10 points in 2020, but just two years later, Lawler beat former Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney after redistricting shifted the area’s boundaries.
Now, Jones faces a tight contest to take the district back for the Democrats.
Three of the four congressional districts on Long Island are considered swing districts. In southern Nassau County, Democrat Laura Gillen is running in a rematch against first-term Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, who beat her by less than 10,000 votes last time. Since Biden was elected, the district has been shifting to the right.
Biden’s withdrawal comes on the heels of the Republican National Convention, where former president Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance accepted nominations to the official GOP ticket. The president’s decision has the potential to launch next month’s Democratic National Convention into chaos as the party scrambles to appoint a new nominee.
Less than three days before Biden’s announcement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat running in a safe reelection race in the Bronx, expressed doubt that the process would go smoothly.
“I have not seen an alternative scenario that I do not feel sets us up for enormous peril,” she said in an Instagram Live early on Friday.
Also that day, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer that he was confident Democrats could win with Biden at the top of the ticket. Still, Jeffries did not say he believed that Biden was the singular choice to beat Trump.
Multiple outlets have reported that Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, also a Democrat from New York, privately pressured Biden to continue stepping aside in the weeks before his decision.
A June poll from Siena College found that Biden had just an eight-point lead over Trump in New York. That’s a small margin in a state that hasn’t backed a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan won in a national landslide in 1984.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, both Democrats, lauded Biden in social media posts following his announcement Sunday.
“Joe Biden is an American hero, a true statesman, and he’ll go down in history as one of the greatest champions of working families our nation has ever known,” Hochul posted on X.
Murphy said Biden “will be remembered as one of the most successful and impactful presidencies in American history.”
In his letter Sunday, Biden, who has been recovering from COVID-19 in Delaware, said he would address the nation later this week.
“I believe today what I always have: that there is nothing America can’t do — when we do it together,” he wrote. “We just have to remember we are the United States of America.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.