And the Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast featuring Kate Riga.

It is Sunday afternoon, three minutes before 4 p.m. We are I guess a couple hours now after

President Joe Biden announced that he is dropping out of the presidential race, announced at least first I saw it was his letter on

Twitter. He followed up a short time later by endorsing his vice president, Kamla Harris Harris to be the new nominee and here we are

we're just gonna run through some stuff pretty quickly let me just say for

myself when I saw this I had I had three reactions kind of in succession. The first was honestly,

heartbreak, even though I have come around to seeing that this was an inevitable

decision or at least it was a necessary decision.

And after that I had feelings of relief because politics is something I care a great deal about and I think if you care

about there not being another Trump presidency or just care about kind of the world that we live in.

The last three and a half weeks have been agonizing and agonizing, finding successive different ways to be agonizing.

Awful, awful, and then I started feeling excited, especially as you know, the reactions started coming in. So that's, you know, at

this point we still don't know a lot. So I think Kate and I really just going to give you our initial reactions, maybe make a few other comments, then we'll kind of keep it short and sweet. Kate, where are you on this?

I think I'm similar if maybe I haven't kind of progressed through all those feelings yet like it was a little strange because I've been saying for multiple pods now and thinking he has to drop out.

I mean at this point it's like in a basketball game in the fourth quarter where momentum

has just shifted to the other team.

Like there's there's just nothing you can do and at this point it would have just

been this horrible slog to the election where you have the unending new cycle, the

constant scrutiny on his performance, the blood lust for these like, you know, as you call them kind of feats of cognitive strength.

So, I mean, we were just at the point where there was no path forward for him and every new bad poll we got just kind of made it more and more untenable.

So I do think he had to drop out. I think as I've outlined on the pod before there are a lot of positives to a Harris candidacy

not least because the attention is going to shift so hard to her in a way that will be a huge boon because Democrats,

...