Joe Biden will meet with Democratic governors on Wednesday as the president faces increasingly troubling polls and growing calls to withdraw his candidacy, including from a Democrat in Congress.
Biden Will Talk to Governors and Capitol Hill Leaders This Week, Officials he said on Tuesday, to reassure them of his competence and address the growing discontent among party leaders following last week’s calamitous debate performance against Donald Trump. News of the meetings comes after Lloyd Doggett, a congressman from Texas, became the first Democrat in the House of Representatives to publicly urge the president to step aside.
A Reuters/Ipsos Poll released Tuesday also found that one in three Democrats said Biden should end his re-election campaign after the debate in Atlanta, where he delivered a skewed, low-energy performance.
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At a campaign event in Virginia on Tuesday night, Biden attributed his poor debate to international travel leading up to the event, saying: “I wasn’t very smart. I decided to travel the world a few times, passing through about 100 time zones… before… the debate. I didn’t listen to my team and came back and almost fell asleep on stage. This is not an excuse, but it is an explanation.”
His campaign, he noted, has raised $38 million as of last week.
As senior party figures continued to offer public support to Biden even amid fevered behind-the-scenes concerns, Doggett openly aired his own misgivings, saying he hoped the debate would “give some momentum” to the president’s stagnant polling ratings in a field important battle. States.
“It didn’t happen,” he said. “Instead of reassuring voters, the president has failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies.”
He urged Biden to follow the path of a previous Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, and announce that he would not accept the party’s nomination as its candidate — a potential move that commentators dubbed an “LBJ moment” (after Johnson’s full initials).
“I represent the heart of a congressional district that was once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw,” Doggett said. “President Biden should do the same.”
Johnson withdrew from the 1968 election race amid a popular wave of opposition to the war in Vietnam and major challengers in his own party, including Robert F. Kennedy, whose son is running as an independent candidate in the 2024 election and voting for levels that could further hurt Biden in a tight race.
Doggett – 77, just four years younger than the 81-year-old president – praised Biden’s legislative achievements in office, but said the time has come to hand over power to a younger generation, noting that he was committed during the 2020 election campaign to be a transitional figure.
“While much of his work was transformational, he promised to be transitional,” he said. “He has the opportunity to encourage a new generation of leaders from whom a candidate can be chosen to unite our country through an open and democratic process.
“My decision to make these strong reservations public is not taken lightly nor does it in any way diminish my respect for all that President Biden has achieved.
“Recognizing that, unlike Trump, President Biden’s first commitment has always been to our country, and not to himself, I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw. I respectfully ask that he do so.”
It remains to be seen whether Doggett’s public stance will encourage other concerned Democrats to put their heads above the parapet, amid a steady drip of anecdotal and polling evidence that last Thursday’s debate on CNN had a corrosive effect on the position of the president.
A new poll in New Hampshire – a state Biden won by 10 points in 2020 – now shows him two points behind Trump since the debate.
While Biden’s campaign has tried to frame the debate as a one-off and promised a fierce response, there have been murmurs of discontent within Democratic ranks., including some state governors who reportedly complained that the president had not contacted them personally.
Some ostensibly supportive figures, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn, a representative from South Carolina, issued statements that hinted at ambivalence.
“I think it’s a legitimate question to say: Is this an episode or a condition? When people ask that question, it’s completely legitimate — from both candidates,” Pelosi told MSNBC, adding that she had heard “contradictory” opinions about whether Biden was suitable for the presidential campaign.
In another sign of simmering discontent, Peter Welch, a Democratic senator from Vermont, criticized the Biden campaign for dismissing concerns about the president’s age as “bed-wetting.”
“But this is the discussion we need to have,” he said Traffic light. “It has to be from the highest levels of the Biden campaign to the election captains on the South Side of Chicago. …The campaign itself raised the concerns…So to be indifferent to others who raise these concerns, I think is inappropriate.”
