Former President Joe Biden defended his eleventh-hour decision to end his 2024 re-election bid, telling the BBC Wednesday “I don’t think it would have mattered” to the election outcome if he stepped aside sooner.
Biden, now 82, bowed out of the race on July 21 following a Democratic Party revolt over his disastrous performance in a June 27 debate against former — and future — President Donald Trump.
That left then-Vice President Kamala Harris 106 days to ramp up her campaign for the White House before she ultimately lost to Trump.
“We left at a time when we had a good candidate,” Biden told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” in his first broadcast interview since leaving office on Jan. 20. “She was fully funded, and what happened was, what we had set out to do, no one thought we could do.
“We had become so successful in our agenda, it was hard to say, ‘I’m gonna stop now.’”
Biden also insisted that he fully intended to serve a single term as a transitional figure following his defeat of Trump in 2020.
“I meant what I said when I started, that I’m preparing to hand this to the next generation … but things moved so quickly, and it made it difficult to walk away.”
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