When President Biden leaves the White House in January, it will mark the spectacular end of a career in politics that spanned five decades.
Biden, 81, ended his 2024 re-election effort Sunday in the wake of his disastrous June 27 debate performance against former President Donald Trump, which precipitated calls from the Democratic establishment for the octogenarian career politician to drop out of the race.
Here’s a look back at the president’s more than 50 years in public office:
When President Biden leaves the White House in January, it will mark the spectacular end of a career in politics that spanned five decades. Getty Images
It all started in Delaware
Biden got his first taste of politics in 1970, after winning a seat on the New Castle County Council two years after graduating from Syracuse Law School.
The then-27-year-old ran for the Wilmington, Del., county’s 4th District seat on a liberal platform, which included calling for more public housing, and flipped it blue when he defeated Republican Lawrence Messick.
He served on the county council until 1973.
Seeking ‘national prominence’ in the Senate
In 1972, while still in his first term on the New Castle County Council, Biden launched his first Senate campaign, challenging two-term Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-Del.).
Democratic Senator-elect Joseph Biden, of Delaware is seen here after he took his oath of citizenship as he checks in at the office of the Secretary of the Senate in 1973. Bettmann Archive
HIs campaign succeeded in part by playing on the 33-year age gap between then 29-year-old Biden and the 62-year-old Boggs.
Biden defeated the Republican incumbent by less than 3,000 votes and assumed office in 1973 as one of the youngest senators in US history.
In his early days in the upper chamber, Biden worked with segregationist Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.) to oppose busing as a way to desegregate public schools – a position which Vice President Kamala Harris slammed him on during a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate.
Biden became one of the youngest U.S. senators in American history. Penske Media via Getty Images
Biden “sought prominence as a national figure” throughout his first term in the Senate, an essay on the president from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs noted, including by criticizing President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal and President Gerald Ford after he pardoned his predecessor.
Biden, a longtime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, controversially recommended that the Senate reject President Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987.
He also helmed the 1991 hearings on Clarence Thomas’ nomination which put his former law clerk, Anita Hill, under intense scrutiny when she alleged that the then high court nominee sexually harassed her.
In 1994, Biden pushed for a massive federal crime bill which critics argued during his 2020 presidential campaign contributed to the mass incarceration of racial minorities in recent decades.