Rep. Ritchie Torres (DN.Y.) on Wednesday called for a “serious reckoning” among Democrats over whether to keep President Biden as the party’s nominee.
“When determining how to proceed as a party, there must be a serious calculation of the negative effect of who we nominate,” Torres said in a post on social platform X.
“What matters is not how we feel, but what the numbers tell us,” he added.
Torres warned of the potential negative consequences of ignoring the president’s declining poll numbers since the first presidential debate, when Biden’s poor performance raised alarms in the party about his ability to defeat former President Trump in November.
Since then, seven House Democrats have publicly called for Biden to resign, while others have expressed similar concerns privately. Many Democrats, however, have redoubled their support for the president amid the ongoing fallout from the debate. Biden, his campaign and his supporters maintain that the president is the best candidate to defeat Trump and is prepared to do the job for four more years.
Torres, just this past Monday, criticized Democrats’ lack of a unified message about Biden, saying that “drip by drip, drip by drip, of public statements of distrust only serve to weaken a president who has been weakened not just by the debate, but also by the debate about the debate.”
“Donors don’t decide the Democratic candidate. The people do it”, Torres said in a separate post on Monday, responding to a headline about Democratic donors calling for Biden to resign.
Now, though, Torres said it’s time for Democrats to look at the “cold, hard numbers.”
“An unsentimental analysis of cold, hard numbers — which have no personal feelings or political allegiances — should inform what we decide and who we nominate,” Torres said Wednesday.
“If we are going to choose a specific path, we must be clear about its consequences. Blindness is not bliss amid the dire threat of a Trump presidency,” he continued.
His Wednesday statement comes after new polls suggest Democrats now face tougher odds of defeating Trump in November.
The nonpartisan election pollster Cook Political Report made six changes Tuesday to its Electoral College rankings — all of them in favor of Republicans: Arizona, Georgia and Nevada moved from “lean Republican” status, while Minnesota, New Hampshire and Nebraska’s entire 2nd District went from “Likely Democrat” to “Lan Democrat.”
Torres responded to Cook’s updates on Tuesday, calling them “alarming and concerning” in a separate post on X.
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