A political tsunami rolled ashore on Sunday, July 21, in the form of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. 

This move, about 100 days before Election Day, is unprecedented in American history. Biden’s withdrawal followed his disastrous performance in a debate last month with former President Donald Trump, during which Biden struggled to find words, trailed off mid-sentence and often stared blankly at the camera.

Biden’s meltdown on national TV sparked panic among Democrats, who feared an electoral blowout that could cost them the presidency, Congress and statewide races.

U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., participated in three weeks of fraught discussions among her colleagues over whether to urge the 81-year old president to get out of the race.

Balint said that conversations in the Democratic caucus “were raw, they were honest, there was screaming, there was crying, there (were) people trying to see it from every possible outcome, thinking about their constituents and their relationships with both the president and the vice president.” She said that calls to her office ran 10 to 1 in favor of Biden quitting the race, but among her colleagues “there was a strong diversity of opinion. And we all felt an incredible responsibility to bring into the room what we were hearing from rank-and-file voters.”

Balint pushed back against the charge that Harris has not been adequately vetted by participating in primaries. “She was vetted. She was the vice president…for years,” Balint said. “She's been out making the case for a set of policy priorities that she was right by the president's side passing them.”

Balint advised Harris to “articulate a very forward-looking message for the nation. Because what you have in Trump and [Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s newly named running-mate] is this effort to drag us back to another time when people did not have their rights guaranteed. And we see this not-so-coded language in the last few days around ‘DEI candidates.' They are basically coming right up to the line around racism and sexism. And so she is going to channel the anger and frankly the disgust that many American women feel around overturning Roe, trying to restrict access to mifepristone, threatening to enforce the archaic Comstock Laws.”

Balint insisted that the presidential race “is going to be won and lost around bodily autonomy and freedom.”

The first-term representative wanted “to just name the elephant in the room that is kicking around here where people say, ‘Oh, well, America is not ready to elect a woman — America is not ready to elect a Black woman in particular,’" she said. 

"Let's not have a failure of imagination here,” Balint said. “Of course we can elect a woman… And of course we can elect a Black woman. We have to stop parroting this notion that we are only as good as the most racist and sexist people in this nation. We're not. We're better than that. And we have to believe in what is possible.”

In April, Balint, who is Jewish, voted against sending offensive military aid to Israel, and she boycotted Wednesday’s address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I am disgusted that he was invited,” she said, adding that Netanyahu leads “the most extremist government that Israel has ever seen.”

“Netanyahu should be spending every waking moment bringing about an end to this horrible war, getting the release of the hostages, getting Israeli troops out of Gaza,” Balint said.

Vermont’s lone congressional representative bemoaned “the cynicism that's taken hold in this country. And the sense that everyone's on the take or everybody's out to get you and that sort of permeates the work that I do here.”

Balint said she is focused on “how to not give in to cynicism. And that's where I get a sense of renewal is thinking about the language that I use and how I interact with my constituents and also my colleagues so that we don't lose hope.”