Joe Biden.
Before Biden, you have to go back to LBJ and Truman.
I suppose technically Truman, but his ascension in 1945 would mean that he couldn’t get elected after 1948 today.
Ford, also, but there is a special case.
Biden wasn’t really “voluntary”. Technically he could have chosen to stay in the race, but it wasn’t exactly his own idea to drop out. Likewise, LBJ didn’t run for re-election because it was obvious he couldn’t win, and might not even have been re-nominated. I think Truman is the answer, though I understand he was also pretty unpopular by the end of his second term (he was in office when the 22nd Amendment was ratified, so he was grandfathered in and could have run again).
Huh? Ford did run for re-election, and lost.
Even Truman didn’t withdraw until after the New Hampshire primary in 1952; his advisors were telling him he wasn’t popular, but it took getting trounced by Estes Kefauver in New Hampshire to convince Truman to step aside.
Reluctantly.
Wiki- Ford reluctantly agreed to run for office in 1976, but first he had to counter a challenge for the Republican party nomination. Former Governor of California Ronald Reagan and the party’s conservative wing faulted Ford for failing to do more in South Vietnam, for signing the Helsinki Accords, and for negotiating to cede the Panama Canal.
But yes, you are right, he did try to run.
Pretty much anyone who loses does so reluctantly.
Kamala Harris: 107 Days, Her Book on the Election Campaign, is to be Published Sept. 23
Editor’s Note: The biggest surprise in Kamala Harris’s forthcoming account of her rough-and-ready, intense, and absurdly condensed campaign for president, 107 Days, may be that it is filled with surprises. I read it last week, expecting lawyerly calibration and discretion. This careful Harris is present, but so too is another Harris: blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt—and throughout this newsworthy book—she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.
107 Days begins with the events of July 21, 2024, the very late date on which Joe Biden told his vice president, and the world, that he would exit the presidential race. The chapter below details the events of July 24, as well as some of Harris’s acute observations about the absurdity and unprecedented nature of that political moment. 107 Days will be released by Simon & Schuster on September 23.
Kamala was ok, but the Democratic party is overall extremely impotent. They can’t beat an overweight, orange, uneducated, narcissistic, entitled rich boy?
It seems easy to me…offer every American household $1000 more a month with a combination of higher wages, more affordable healthcare, more affordable goods, with laws against planned obsolescence, and infrastructure bills to promote jobs.
We need to move away from social issues and get the government back to talking about economy issues.
There’s not one of those characteristics that would AFAIK make a political candidate easy to beat.
And I’m wondering whether Churchill had all the characteristics except orange.
Not even his worst enemies would call the author of “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” uneducated.
Vice presidents just don’t seem to do very well when they run for president. They find themselves in the awkward position of needing to distance themselves from the previous president yet still support him.
Bush Sr. made it but, he was following an enormously popular Ronald Reagan. People wanted a third term but Bush was as close as they could get. He also had only one term.
Other recent vice presidents that ran were Gore, Ford, Humphrey. They lost. Nixon lost his first attempt. Truman won but a real squeaker. The nation was still in shock from the Kennedy assassination when Johnson won in 1964. His real test came four years later and he didn’t make it.
The reasons for selecting a vice president do not always have a lot to do with how good they would be as president. Balancing the ticket is important. They need to be different but then spend four or eight years being the same. After that, it’s time to appeal to the voters.
As well, while Veep, they need to sort of hide the fact they’re an ambitious politician and mostly be a competent administrator of [whatever].
Meanwhile, during the same term, all the various ambitious governors and senators & reps can do their damnedest to create and maintain a high profile in public as one of, if not the, heir apparent of their party.
Obviously we’re not in normal times, but contrast the current public profile of Vance, DeSantis, and Rubio or Cruz.
So not very well that folks don’t even remember us. ~ Walter Mondale
So no comments on that extract? My impression is that she is going to follow Hilary Clinton and blame lots of other people (but not herself) for defeat.
Eh, that was obvious several months ago when news of her book first came out. I’m still convinced that had Biden announced in 2023 that he wasn’t running there would be no way she would have done any better than she did in 2020.
I don’t see much to blame her for. She did a good job. Blame the voters.
Well, overall, I think she realizes that her political career is effectively over.
I read through the extract: what she seems to be blaming others in the Biden administration for is:
(a) not defining her vice-presidential role well, possibly for fear of her overshadowing Biden
(b) not coming to her defense when she was attacked by the right
(b) is, IMO, spurious, because MAGAs wouldn’t listen to anything that the Biden White House said anyway. She may well have a point with (a).