Outside the Beltway

How Schumer Pushed Biden Out

The Majority Leader has a bigger role than previously reported.

James Joyner · Friday, January 17, 2025 · 8 comments

NYT congressional correspondents Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater are the latest to engage in a practice that I continue not to understand: hawking a forthcoming book in their employer’s paper based on material that they uncovered while on their employer’s dime but withheld in order to have juicy information for said book. I mean, I fully understand it from the perspective of those trying to sell books. But it baffles me why the employer allows it, much less why it isn’t considered a breach of journalistic ethics.

That said, the excerpt, “‘I’m Urging You Not to Run’: How Schumer Pushed Biden to Drop Out,” is interesting. While it mostly fleshes out details of a story we broadly knew months ago, Schumer’s behind-the-scenes role was much bigger than I understood before reading the feature. Indeed, it was arguably as large as Speaker Emeritus Pelosi’s, which was much more public.

The key bits:

It was July 13, 2024, a humid summer afternoon just before four o’clock, and Mr. Schumer, the Democratic leader of the Senate, was about to make a blunt case to Mr. Biden that he needed to drop his bid for a second term.

If there were a secret ballot among Democratic senators, Mr. Schumer would tell the president, no more than five would say he should continue running. Mr. Biden’s own pollsters assessed that he had about a 5 percent chance of prevailing against Donald J. Trump, Mr. Schumer would tell him — information that was apparently news to the president. And if the president refused to step aside, the senator would argue, the consequences for Democrats and Mr. Biden’s own legacy after a half-century of public service would be catastrophic.

“If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that 50 years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window,” Mr. Schumer said. “But worse — you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

He would end with a directive. “If I were you,” Mr. Schumer said, “I wouldn’t run, and I’m urging you not to run.”

The roughly 45-minute conversation, which took place on a screened-in porch overlooking a pond, was more pointed and emotional than previously known, and helps to explain how Mr. Biden came to the decision just over a week later to end his campaign.

It is a central piece of the untold story of how Mr. Schumer and congressional Democrats, who spent years batting away suggestions that Mr. Biden was too old and mentally frail to be president, ultimately led the effort to pressure him to step aside.

[…]

When Mr. Schumer arrived at Mr. Biden’s beach house that summer day, he could hear the president shouting.

Mr. Biden was finishing up a contentious Zoom call with a small group of lawmakers who were expressing their concerns about his viability as a candidate, and his back was up. This was exactly the kind of scenario Mr. Schumer had been hoping to avoid for the past three weeks, as he stalled for time and dragged his feet about having this awkward conversation at all. He worried that the famously stubborn president would feel cornered and dig in even more.

For months, Mr. Schumer had been concerned that Mr. Biden was going to lose to Mr. Trump and cost Democrats Congress. It wasn’t that he thought Mr. Biden was not capable of the job. During their weekly conversations, the president often rambled, but he had always rambled. Once in a while, Mr. Biden would forget why he had called, but Mr. Schumer thought little of it. He was convinced that Mr. Biden could handle the job.

But with the Republican messaging machine deriding him relentlessly as old and senile, Democrats were hard pressed to land any attacks on Mr. Trump. Long before the president’s disastrous debate performance, Mr. Schumer had privately concluded that the barrier of Mr. Biden’s age was too much for him to overcome.

Still, the Senate majority leader felt he was in a box. If he tried to convene a group to discuss other candidates, made calls or expressed his discontent in any semiprivate way, it might leak out, only weakening the president more. Not to mention how deeply unpleasant it was to offer unsolicited advice to the commander in chief about his political future. Instead Mr. Schumer, like every other Democrat in a position of power, had chosen to do nothing.

So when Mr. Biden bombed during his June 27 debate with Mr. Trump, Mr. Schumer regarded it as something of a gift, a forcing mechanism to start an overdue discussion about the president’s political viability.

[…]

He gave a detailed blow-by-blow of what each Democratic senator had told Mr. Biden’s top aides on Capitol Hill days earlier, leaving the president wide-eyed and leading Mr. Schumer to conclude that his aides had not briefed him on what had transpired.

“If there’s a secret ballot, Mr. President,” Mr. Schumer said, “my guess is you at most get five yeses.”

“Really?” Mr. Biden responded.

“I know my caucus,” Mr. Schumer told him. “You know I know my caucus.”

Mr. Biden nodded.

Then Mr. Schumer delivered the speech he had been rehearsing. Some people go into politics for money and power, he said, but some do it to leave a legacy.

“You’re certainly one of those,” he told Mr. Biden, adding that he hoped he was too. He ticked through an impressive list of the policies they had enacted together, including the assault weapons ban and other gun control measures, the Violence Against Women Act and Mr. Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda during the first two years of his presidency.

“If I had to leave politics tomorrow for whatever reason, I would say to myself, ‘All the shit we take in this job was worth it for making the world a better place,’” Mr. Schumer said. “And your legacy is 20 times mine.”

Then as the president listened silently, Mr. Schumer told him he risked going down in history as one of the “darkest figures.”

Mr. Schumer said if he had even a 50 percent chance of winning, he would probably keep going. “Fifty-fifty, to do this, to stay here; it’s worth it,” he said. “But, Mr. President, you’re not getting the information as to what the chances are.”

When he asked whether Mr. Biden had talked to his pollsters about his chances of winning the race, the president shook his head.

“Well, I have talked to them,” Mr. Schumer said. “My guess is you have about a 5 percent chance. None of your pollsters disagree with me.”

Only twice did Mr. Biden interrupt to ask a question, and both times it was: “Do you really think Kamala can win?”

Mr. Schumer said that he didn’t know, but that she had a far better chance than Mr. Biden did. 

While there are multiple reports that Biden resents having been shunted aside and still believes he would have won had he stayed in the race, there’s no indication that Schumer or other Democratic leaders harbor any regrets. Nor, I think, should they.

While I thought early on that Biden should have been a one-termer, dropping out in time for a primary, I never really pushed for that simply because no President who thinks he has a realistic shot at a second term passes it up. Only after the debate debacle did I think he had to quit the race.

My only recrimination about how it was handled, which I had in real time, was that I thought handing the nomination of Vice President Harris without some sort of contest was a mistake. But she actually surprised me with her performance on the campaign trail, which I found hard to fault. Further, as Steven Taylor reminded us yet again this morning, this has been a bad cycle for incumbents globally. It’s not at all obvious that any Democrat would have beaten Trump, although I do think it would have been easier for someone outside Washington to run away from Biden’s unpopular economy.*

*I think it’s quite possible that we’ll look back on his policies favorably. But voters, even Democrats, were frustrated with inflation and the general state of the economy, regardless of fault.