Political science professor and Pitt College Democrats react to Biden dropping out of presidential race

Henry Cohen said he was watching a baseball game on TV with his dad when he received an X notification informing him that President Joe Biden was dropping out of the 2024  presidential race.

“My first reaction was kind of shocked. It’s a pretty unprecedented thing in political history,” Cohen, co-president of Pitt College Democrats, said. “After that, it was ‘what do we do now?’”

On July 21, Biden posted a message via X that he would no longer seek a second term as president and endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, as the Democratic nominee. To understand the historical and political context behind Biden’s decision and how Democratic voters are responding to it, The Pitt News spoke with members of Pitt College Democrats and a Pitt political science professor.

Associate professor Kristin Kanthak from Pitt’s department of political science said a major party candidate dropping out of the race this close to the election is “essentially unprecedented.” The most recent example of a candidate dropping out around this time in the election cycle was independent candidate Ross Perot in 1992, according to Kanthak.

“Perot was a third-party candidate, but his dropping out essentially hit the reset button on the election,” Kanthak said. “George Bush consistently polled ahead of Clinton before Perot dropped out, but never really got his footing back after Perot left, even in October when Perot got back in.”

The last time an incumbent president dropped out of their reelection campaign was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, but that situation differs from today’s in that Johnson dropped out in March and the 1968 election was “unusual for a variety of reasons, even beyond Johnson’s decision,” Kanthak said.

In terms of what political science can tell us about the rest of this election cycle, Kanthak said since we have “never seen this before,” her analysis relies heavily on speculation.

According to Kanthak, primary elections usually inform the party of how electable a candidate is, but this time Biden ran unopposed, so the Democrats didn’t get a chance to gauge his electability this way.

“It wasn’t until the first debate of the general election that worry about Biden among Democrats really took off. One of the little-known secrets of presidential primaries is that voters are really never voting for a candidate. They are voting for delegates to the party conventions that pick the president,” Kanthak said. “In this case, the delegates learned something at the debate that voters didn’t know when they voted.”

Kanthak said this is exactly why the system works the way it does — parties nominate the candidate they think is most likely to win the general election, and usually that’s the candidate that wins the primary.

“But it doesn’t have to be the candidate who wins the primary, which is why Biden leaving the campaign at this point seems very disruptive, but really doesn’t make much difference in terms of the rules,” Kanthak said.

According to Kanthak, the only difference now is that the Democrats will not pick the person who won the most primaries. She said this could have been bad news had the party not coalesced around Kamala Harris as the new candidate.

“Part of the reason you want to know who the nominee is before the convention is that divisive convention fights are not good for the party’s chances in the general election,” Kanthak said. “What ended up happening, though, was there was widespread support for Kamala Harris even before Biden dropped out.”

Following the June debate, which was widely regarded as “disastrous” for Biden, Mary Boyd, communications director for Pitt College Democrats, said Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race didn’t come as a shock.

“I have to say I wasn’t entirely surprised,” Boyd said. “With all the talk of Democrats trying to push Biden to drop out of the race, I didn’t think it was totally impossible for it to happen.”

Cohen shared a similar sentiment to Boyd.

“I’m not going to lie and say that nobody could have seen this coming because it’s been talked about for a while and debated about for a while,” Cohen,  a junior political science and urban design major, said. “It was very clear that we needed to pass the torch to somebody else.”

Cohen, who previously interned with the Biden campaign and is currently interning with the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, said although he believes Biden has done “a great job,” the President’s decision to drop out of the race was the correct one.

“It’s very refreshing to have somebody who’s under 60-years-old and who seems to enjoy the process of making people’s lives better, which at its core is what politics is and what it should be,” Cohen said.

Mary Boyd, communications director for Pitt College Democrats, said Biden’s decision to drop out was “noble.”

“I was going to vote for Joe Biden anyway…but I wasn’t going to the polls very enthusiastically,” Boyd, a junior political science and communication major, said. “I feel like a lot of young people especially have felt that way with Joe Biden running as the nominee.”

Both Cohen and Boyd said they have seen a largely positive online response to Harris stepping up as the Democratic nominee.

“We have an Instagram account for the College Democrats that we have been posting Kamala Harris content on and we’ve gotten more followers and likes than we’ve gotten in the past on pretty much everything that we’ve done so far,” Cohen said. “More people are following the account, more people are even texting me asking how they can get involved, things like that.”

Boyd added that she’s seen her less politically active peers posting online about the presidential election.

“I think that Kamala not only being younger, but having this more resonating energy, I feel like that has been very attractive to voters of all ages,” Boyd said. “It just seems like Kamala being the nominee has just fired up a lot of voters that are much more excited to vote.”

When discussing the likelihood of Harris winning the election, Cohen said he believes she will win come November.

“I think that Kamala Harris wants to bring the country together and the country wants to be brought together,” Cohen said. “She is very energetic and very pumped up and ready to go, and I think that’s been really refreshing to a lot of people.”

Boyd said she believes Harris has a better chance of winning the election than Biden did, adding that the Democratic party feels “much more united.”

“I think overall, she just kind of brings this energy that is getting a lot of people very hopeful and excited to vote,” Boyd said. “I feel like [with] Joe Biden being the nominee, there was a lot of division over whether he was an adequate nominee, and now it feels like the Democratic party has become more of a united front in the past week, which is something I’m really excited to see.”