President Joe Biden delivered his farewell address to the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, while his decision to withdraw his re-election effort unleashed new energy in his party with the promotion of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the list of candidates.
After rising to the top of his party’s influence for 52 years, Biden, 81, received a hero’s welcome when he made way for Harris. Weeks earlier, many in his party had pressured him to abandon his re-election bid. A month after the unprecedented mid-campaign switch from Biden to Harris, the opening night of the party’s convention in Chicago was intended as a handoff from the incumbent to his handpicked successor – albeit four years before he had designated her as his successor.
A visibly moved Biden was greeted with over four minutes of standing ovations and shouts of “Thank you, Joe.”
“America, I love you,” he replied.
Democrats hope the week-long event will provide a dignified exit for the incumbent president and catapult Harris into a confrontation with Republican Donald Trump, whose comeback bid for the White House is viewed by Democrats as an existential threat. Having taken the ticket just a month ago, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz must now win over a divided country that is more positive about her but not yet fully made up its mind about the election.
“Democracy has prevailed, democracy has delivered, and now democracy must be preserved,” Biden said.
“Thanks to you, we have had the most extraordinary four years of progress ever, period,” Biden said. And then he added, “I say ‘we,’ I mean me and Kamala,” sharing the credit for his greatest popularity successes with the vice president who replaced him at the top of the electoral list.
Harris appeared unannounced on stage Monday night as the convention’s primetime program began to thank Biden for his leadership ahead of his later speech.
“Joe, thank you for your historic leadership, for your lifelong commitment to our nation, and for all that you will continue to do,” she said. “We are forever grateful.”
Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance on the first night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday.
Biden’s speech, which was announced as the highlight of the evening, was postponed until late at night because the convention program was more than an hour behind schedule.
The president recalled the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, in which white supremacists marched with torches through Charlottesville, Virginia. This incident strengthened his decision to run for president in 2020, despite his ongoing grief over the death of his son Beau Biden.
“I couldn’t stay on the sidelines,” Biden said. “So I ran. I had no intention of running again. I had just lost a part of my soul. But I ran out of deep conviction.”
Biden celebrated his administration’s successes, including a massive increase in infrastructure spending and a cap on insulin prices. The spending resulted in more money going to Republican-leaning states than Democratic ones, he said, because “the president’s job is to take care of all of America.”
As the crowd often chanted “Thank you, Joe,” he added, “Thank you, Kamala.”
Less than a month ago, Democrats were divided on foreign policy, political strategy and, most importantly, on Biden himself. Biden, after a disastrous debate, held back from claiming he had a better chance than any other Democrat – including Harris – of beating Trump.
The Democratic Party would almost certainly be in a far worse position if Biden had continued to campaign despite growing concerns about his mental and physical health after he struggled to finish full sentences in the debate against Trump.
Democrats took turns praising Biden’s leadership and his choice of Harris as his successor. “I have never known a more compassionate human being than Joe Biden,” said his longtime confidant, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who led the crowd in a “We love Joe” chant.
They sought to link both Biden and Harris to what the party sees as the governing couple’s most popular achievements: leading the country out of the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, driving massive investments in the country’s infrastructure, advocating for lower health care costs and promoting clean energy.
“Thanks to Joe and Kamala, we were able to lower prescription drug prices, repair roads and bridges, and replace lead pipes,” said South Carolina state Rep. Jim Clyburn, whose support in 2020 was crucial to Biden’s victory in the primary election. He added that one of Biden’s best decisions was “selecting Kamala Harris as his vice president and supporting her as his successor.”
Representative Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina) spoke at the Democratic National Convention and predicted better days for the United States. “Our determination to remain a great country with liberty and justice for all will not waver. We will continue our march toward a more perfect union.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, greeted with sustained applause, paid tribute to Harris and stressed her potential to break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” and become America’s first female president. Clinton was the Democratic nominee in 2016 but lost that election to Trump.
“Together, we have broken many cracks in the highest and hardest glass ceiling,” Clinton said, invoking a metaphor she used in her speech eight years ago when she lost the election. “On the other side of that glass ceiling, Kamala Harris takes the oath of office as the 47th President of the United States. When a barrier falls for one of us, it clears the way for all of us.”
Clinton also acknowledged Biden’s resignation, saying: “Now we are writing a new chapter in American history.”
Clinton, 76, underscored the party’s cross-generational reach. She followed 34-year-old New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Harris and made the first mention of the war in Gaza at the convention, addressing an issue that has divided the party’s base since the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent offensive.
Outside the arena, thousands of protesters flocked to Chicago to denounce the Biden-Harris administration’s support of Israel’s war effort.
Harris is “working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home,” Ocasio-Cortez said to cheers from the crowd.
In her speech endorsing Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York urged Democrats to continue fighting for the endangered seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Meanwhile, Democrats tried to shift the focus to Trump, mocking his criminal convictions and claiming he was fighting only for himself and not “for the people” – the official theme of the evening.
Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow lifted an oversized copy of “Project 2025” – a blueprint for a second Trump term created by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation – onto the lectern and quoted from parts of it.
“That’s what we read,” McMorrow said. “Whatever you think, it’s so much worse.”
Former President Trump has publicly denied any interest in the measures outlined in Project 2025, but he has close ties to its authors, and campaign aides have praised their work in the past.
Democrats have continued to make abortion access a central focus of voters’ concerns, banking on the issue to help them win, as it has in other key elections since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago. Among the speakers on Monday were three women whose health care was affected by that ruling. And the convention program included a video in which Trump praised his own role in overturning Roe.
A month after a key union leader spoke at the Republican National Convention, several union leaders took to the floor Monday to appeal to the party’s core constituency. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain shouted “Trump is a scab” to the crowd and praised Biden and Harris for standing with striking autoworkers last year.
At the DNC in Chicago, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain expresses his support for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, while sharply criticizing Donald Trump and saying he is no friend of unions.
The convention program also paid tribute to the civil rights movement, with an appearance by Reverend Jesse Jackson, founder of the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. There were several references to Fannie Lou Hamer, the late civil rights activist who gave a landmark speech at a Democratic convention in 1964.
Hamer was a former sharecropper and a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an ethnically integrated group that challenged the inclusion of an all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer delivered her speech on August 22, 1964—exactly 60 years before Harris would accept the Democratic nomination, becoming the first black woman and first person of South Asian descent to run as a major party presidential nominee.
Associated Press writers Will Weissert and Josh Boak in Chicago, Ali Swenson and Michelle L. Price in New York and Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report.
