At 1:46 E.S.T. on Sunday afternoon, President Biden announced on social media that he would end his re-election campaign, following weeks of mounting pressure from voters and politicians across the aisle. Soon after, Mr. Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Biden’s announcement arrived just weeks ahead of the Democratic National Convention. It’s the latest a sitting president has withdrawn from a race in American history.
As soon as Mr. Biden posted his statement, Reid J. Epstein, who has spent the last 20 years writing about politics and who joined The New York Times in 2019, sprung into action. As a reporter covering the 2024 presidential campaign, he began making calls to colleagues and sources, discussing articles that were already prepared and brainstorming coverage to come. He did all of this in the car home from his son’s birthday party.
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Epstein shared his reaction to the news and what he expects moving forward. This interview has been edited and condensed.
What were you doing when you heard the news?
Well, I was at my son’s birthday party at a swimming pool. We had finished the cupcakes and I saw a Slack message that said Biden was out. I told my wife that I had to go. I gave my son a hug, and said that I was very sorry that I was missing the end of his party, but I would see him at home. I called a car.
I went back to my house and went into our home office — and spent the rest of the day there.
Were articles already prepared? Were you diving into new ones as well?
The H.F.O. stories — hold for orders, articles written and edited ahead of certain highly anticipated news events — were already done. Before I got into the car, I was on the phone with sources, people in the Biden world, trying to figure out how this had happened, what they knew and what the landscape was going forward.
I was on the phone with my colleague Lisa Lerer shortly thereafter, gaming out what to do. She was also at a pool with her kids. We began trying to figure out who to call and what the lines of reporting needed to be, and what the rest of our afternoons and evenings were going to look like.
What did the rest of the day entail?
We were on the phone pretty much the whole day with different people on the campaign, donors to the campaign, allies of the campaign, people who work for other elected officials and some elected officials themselves.
With the exception of a small handful of people, everybody found out about this at the same time. So part of what was going on Sunday was the collective processing of both the decision and the aftereffects.
Did the timing of the announcement come as a surprise?
I would not say it was a surprise that he ended his campaign. We had been reporting for a couple of weeks about the enormous pressure on Biden to get out of the race. We knew that many of his allies in the party had expressed to him, either publicly or privately, that he needed to make this decision.
I wasn’t surprised that he did it, but frankly, I had a suspicion that it would happen while I was at my son’s birthday party, it being the worst-possible moment for me. But we knew that the end was near for Biden’s campaign. Nobody knew precisely when it would happen, but it wasn’t a huge shock that it happened yesterday.
Mr. Biden has not been very forthcoming with the press during his presidency. Do you expect campaign coverage to shift going forward?
We’ll cover the Harris campaign with the same lens as we did the Biden campaign. Their posture may be different; it remains to be seen. We’ll see how much access she and her team give to the press. We don’t even know who her team is at this point, and whether she is going to maintain the same team or many of the same people who have been working on the Biden campaign.
She’s going to Delaware this afternoon to meet with the campaign staff. I think we’ll find out in the coming days how many of those people will be in the same positions that they have now.
Vice President Harris raised more than $50 million in less than a day after entering the race. From your experience, how do you expect her to solidify her campaign before the Democratic National Convention next month?
As we speak, midday Monday, she is the presumptive Democratic nominee. Nearly everyone who plausibly could have challenged her has endorsed her. She has the 1,300 staff members from the Biden campaign that work for her. She has inherited not just the money she raised yesterday, but the $96 million that the Biden campaign had on hand as of the end of June. There is no real path for a possible challenger at this point. And there is nobody who has announced that they’re running against her.
She actually is about to speak now, so I have to go hear what she has to say.
The post Biden’s Resignation, a Reporter’s Call to Action appeared first on New York Times.
