Biden isn't the first president to drop a reelection bid

If 2024 has taught us anything, it's that no presidential election is ever the same. This year's contest featured the first major-party nomination of a former president — Donald Trump — since Democrats backed Grover Cleveland in the 1892 election. And this past weekend, President Joe Biden became the first presumptive nominee to abandon a reelection bid since the modern presidential primary process took shape in the 1970s.

These unfamiliar circumstances make it easy for observers to throw around the term "unprecedented" to describe what's happening, and in some respects, that word absolutely hits the mark. However, as is often the case, a longer view of American political history offers more commonalities with the current political situation than one might expect. Here then is a look at some of those past comparisons, many of which echo what we're seeing today.

Several presidents didn't win (or seek) renomination

Biden is the 13th president (of 46) to have served fewer than two terms as chief executive but not end up as his party's nominee in the ensuing presidential election.* That group consists of five presidents who won election to the White House (including Biden) and eight vice presidents who became president due to the death of their predecessor. Four of the vice presidents-turned-president did win a term in their own right but opted against seeking another four years after that. Overall, Biden is the fourth incumbent on this list to abandon some sort of reelection effort, while four others lost renomination at their party conventions, and the remaining five retired rather than run again.

The two most recent examples on this list involve incumbents who actively sought a second term before exiting the race following poor performances in early primaries. In 1968, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson had seemingly begun his reelection bid, but he surprised the country by announcing that he would not accept his party's nomination following a weak performance as a write-in candidate in the New Hampshire primary. (Behind the scenes, Johnson kept his options open about reentering the race, but that didn't pan out.) In 1952, Democratic President Harry Truman similarly announced that he wouldn't run again after losing the New Hampshire primary, although he received a handful of votes at the convention.

Of course, contrary to his Democratic predecessors, Biden publicly sought renomination well beyond the spring (although both those races predate the modern primary process as we know it today). But similar to Johnson and Truman, Biden has faced low ratings for his job performance — his approval rating is only 38 percent in 538's tracker, while Johnson's stood in the mid-30s in March 1968 and Truman's the low 20s in March 1952. Interestingly, Johnson's approval rating rose sharply after his departure from the race, so we'll be watching to see if Biden gets any bump for abandoning his candidacy.

The last presidential dropout actually predates the modern two-party system. Like Johnson and Truman, Vice President John Tyler acceded to the presidency in 1841 after the president's death, in this case William Henry Harrison. Tyler had been elected as a Whig, but he was a former Democrat whose views stood sharply at odds with those of his adopted party, which quickly made him persona non grata. To retain any hope of winning the 1844 election without support from either major party, Tyler pressed the issue of annexing Texas to boost a third-party bid. But James Polk, running as the Democratic nominee, adopted much of Tyler's platform regarding Texas, which led Tyler to drop out and endorse Polk in August 1844. Polk went on to narrowly defeat Henry Clay, the Whig standard-bearer.

Two of the other vice presidents-turned-president in this table went out more on their own terms, winning and serving four more years but retiring as opposed to seeking another term. Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901 following the assassination of Republican President William McKinley. He won a landslide victory in 1904, but said following his win that he wouldn't run in 1908 — a decision he later came to regret (Roosevelt famously ran again in 1912). Almost two decades later, Calvin Coolidge took over the White House in 1923 after Republican President Warren Harding's death and handily won the 1924 election. "Silent Cal" then told the press in 1927, in his famously laconic style, that "I do not choose to run for president" in 1928.

Now, we have to go back quite a ways to find another elected president who was serving in their first term but didn't end up seeking their party's renomination at a major party convention. Nearly 150 years ago, Republican President Rutherford Hayes had made it clear that he would not seek a second term after winning the controversial 1876 election, so he didn't run in 1880. Prior to that, Democratic President James Buchanan didn't seek reelection in 1860 in the lead up to the Civil War, and Polk also retired ahead of the 1848 election. Unlike Biden, Hayes and Polk were both in their 50s at the end of their presidencies, but Buchanan was 69, about tied with Andrew Jackson as the oldest president to leave the office at that time. More broadly, exhaustion from difficult circumstances surrounding the Mexican-American War, the coming of the Civil War and a fraught contested election surely discouraged Polk, Buchanan and Hayes, respectively, from running again.

The four remaining presidents each lost out on their party's nomination at the convention after one term or less, indicative of how they struggled to garner and maintain intraparty support to a far worse extent than Biden did. Vice President Millard Fillmore acceded to the presidency after the death of President Zachary Taylor in 1850, but Fillmore lost out on the 1852 Whig Party nomination after 53 convention ballots. Democratic President Franklin Pierce easily won the 1852 election, but his actions amid growing sectional strife left him unpopular, so his party chose Buchanan over him at the 1856 convention.

As the Civil War ended, Vice President Andrew Johnson took over after the assassination of Republican President Abraham Lincoln, but he clashed with the GOP-led Congress — he'd been an anti-secession "War Democrat" who'd become Lincoln's running mate in 1864 — and went on to lose a bid for the Democratic nomination in 1868. In 1881, Vice President Chester Arthur succeeded the assassinated Republican President James Garfield, but Arthur fell short of the GOP nomination at the party's 1884 convention while battling kidney disease.

Biden wasn't the first to face calls to step aside

Perhaps surprisingly, Biden also isn't the first incumbent president who faced appeals from within his own party to abandon a reelection bid after clinching renomination in a party primary. In 1992, Republican President George H.W. Bush had turned back a primary challenge from his right flank by paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan and positioned himself as the GOP's presumptive nominee. But amid dissatisfaction with the economy, the mood for change seemed set against Bush. By late July, he'd fallen behind Democratic nominee Bill Clinton by double-digit margins after independent contender Ross Perot dropped out of the race.

That's when some Republican voices started calling for Bush to step aside and let someone else earn the nomination at the party's national convention in August. Editorials in notable outlets like The Orange County Register — paper of record in the long-time citadel of California Republicanism — asked Bush to "stand down." GOP fundraiser Richard Viguerie, who helped develop direct mail political communication, went on CNN to call for Bush to "follow the example" of Truman and Johnson, which Viguerie said would "preserve his place in history" and "do his party and his country a great service." (We heard similar statements from elected Democrats about Biden.) Beyond this, Vice President Dan Quayle also attracted similar calls, as his low approval prompted many Republicans to see him as a liability to the ticket: A former Florida state GOP chair even took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post that urged Quayle to quit the race.

The coverage of these pleas was significant enough to force a response. Although Bush ignored questions while out on the campaign trail, his campaign and allies pushed back on the idea that Bush would even consider stepping aside. Now, no members of Congress publicly called on Bush to leave the race — a major contrast to Biden — but New York Rep. Bill Green did tell reporters just two weeks before the GOP convention that Bush should replace Quayle with someone like Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and later President George W. Bush's secretary of state).

Unlike this year's push for Biden to leave the race, though, a concerted campaign to encourage Bush to drop out never took off, in part because pressure came predominantly from the party's right, which had never liked Bush much to begin with. That November, Bush ended up losing to Clinton, albeit by around 6 percentage points nationally instead of the double-digit poll margins released during the summer (in part because Perot reentered the race in the fall).

The party decides? The will of the voters? Or both?

With Biden's departure, Democrats are set to nominate a candidate who wasn't on the ballot in the presidential primary — a move by the party that some perceive as at odds with popular democracy. And not only did party leaders play a part in pushing Biden out, but they also quickly coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris as the party's likely successor. There were likely few "smoke-filled rooms" this time around, given the public nature of Democrats' efforts to compel Biden's departure, and the relatively straightforward move to replace him with the sitting vice president. But American politics has a long history of party leaders putting their thumb on the scale to get their preferred choice.

The last time a party chose a standard-bearer who didn't really go before primary voters was in 1968. Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced his entry into the Democratic race in late April, about a month after the incumbent, Johnson, said he wouldn't run. Humphrey's main competitors, Sens. Robert F. Kennedy (Sr.) and Eugene McCarthy, slugged it out in the few major primaries at the time to prove their mettle to party leaders, but Humphrey captured much of their support as the establishment choice. Overall, Humphrey won just 2 percent of the primary vote — mostly as a write-in — but he easily captured a delegate majority on the convention's first ballot in an era when primaries didn't hold as much weight as they do today.

Yet that 1968 Democratic race precipitated reforms that brought about the modern primary system. Democrats wanted a more open and representative process that better reflected the desires of the party faithful, and their changes ahead of the 1972 election ended up having long-running ramifications for how both parties choose their nominees. Such an approach didn't necessarily have to involve more primaries — that actually wasn't the reformers' intention — but that was the result: A more voter-driven process that significantly, although not entirely, reduced the sway of party leaders.

With that in mind, some observers — including some Biden allies and many Republicans — have accused Democrats of ignoring the will of primary voters by encouraging Biden's departure. After all, Biden won about 87 percent of the vote across the 45 Democratic primary contests in 2024. That mark placed Biden in the vicinity of recent Democratic incumbents who went on to win reelection, like Bill Clinton in 1996 (88 percent) and Barack Obama in 2012 (91 percent).

But like most incumbents, Biden faced no meaningful opposition in the primary, making that contest's outcome a less useful indicator of what Democrats truly preferred. While Democrats had a positive view of Biden, their enthusiasm for him running again was never more than lukewarm. And after his woeful debate performance, many surveys found that a majority of Democrats wanted Biden to step aside. That might suggest that the party was responsive (if belatedly) to its voters' desires by encouraging Biden to leave the race — though it still doesn't guarantee that Harris would've won an open primary race.

Nevertheless, Biden's exit illustrates at least some remaining strength within the Democratic Party apparatus. Our current political era has been defined by weak parties that have struggled to organize and manage our politics even as strong partisanship has made things more polarized and tribal. Yet Democrats compelled Biden to leave the race, then rapidly rallied to Harris right after he stepped aside. This was a striking example of "the party deciding," somewhat akin to 2020, when Democrats consolidated behind Biden ahead of Super Tuesday. In both cases, the desire to defeat Trump and the growing fear of nominating a candidate who might be unable to — Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020, Biden in 2024 — prompted party leaders to act.

Footnotes

*The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1951, restricts any person from being elected president more than twice and forbids any person who has acted as president for more than two years from seeking more than one additional term. However, incumbent President Harry Truman could have still run again in 1952 because the amendment did not apply to the current officeholder. George Washington set a precedent of serving no more than two terms, but there was no legal prohibition until this amendment, which was precipitated by President Franklin Roosevelt's four consecutive electoral victories.