How Joe Biden launched his career by beating two unbeatable Republicans

The end of President Joe Biden's reelection campaign brings with it the end of a long political career that almost never came about in the first place. As is our tradition at Daily Kos Elections, we're taking a look at Biden's rapid and surprising rise in Delaware politics that began in the early 1970s, when he went up against a pair of Republican incumbents whom almost everyone else thought were unbeatable.

The First State was far from the Democratic bastion it is now back in 1970 when Biden, then a 27-year-old attorney, first sought a seat on the New Castle County Council. Richard Nixon had in fact narrowly taken Delaware's three electoral votes two years earlier by beating Democrat Hubert Humphrey 45-42; the balance went to George Wallace, the longtime segregationist who was campaigning on a third-party ticket.

Democrats were in worse shape further down the ballot. Republicans held both of Delaware's U.S. Senate seats and its lone House district, and the 1968 elections had left them in control of the governorship and with large majorities in both chambers of the legislature. And Democrats didn't seem to be in any position to make gains in the foreseeable future.

"There was a party, but it was not what you'd call a party," Henry Topel, who held the unenviable role of serving as party chairman, would tell Jules Witcover decades later for his book "Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption." "It was a token."

It was during this bleak time that John Daniello, a member of the Democratic minority on the New Castle County Council, sought to recruit Biden to run against a Republican colleague, as he would recount to Witcover.