As the incumbent president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the presumed Democratic nominee for the 2024 election. He even won Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary without being on the ballot or campaigning. And yet he faces low approval ratings, concerns about his age, and clamoring among his own party about the need to step aside to ensure that Donald Trump does not capitalize on Biden’s weakness to return to the White House.
Were President Biden to drop out, the decision would have only two precedents in modern U.S. history: Harry Truman in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Then, these two moderate Democrats, who each at one point looked like a shoo-in for reelection, suddenly decided to drop out of the race.
First, Truman. With his public approval rating hovering around 23%, on Nov. 5, 1951, about a year before the election, Harry Truman tried to feel out his presumed Republican rival, General Dwight Eisenhower. He asked him directly about his political future, promising, “It will be between us.” Eisenhower’s response was a little disingenuous given later events. “You know, far better than I, that the possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible,” Eisenhower wrote on Jan. 1, 1952.
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Truman could not help but feel misled when Eisenhower’s campaign manager, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., announced his candidacy in the New Hampshire Republican primary five days later. Eisenhower won the New Hampshire primary on March 11 by more than 10,000 votes against the Republican Party’s more conservative candidate, Robert Taft. As a result, once Truman saw that his chance of winning reelection was seriously in jeopardy, he announced he would not seek reelection on March 29—waiting as long as he could so fewer people would interpret the decision as a response to Eisenhower’s surge.
Truman’s announcement at an important fundraising…
