Milwaukee: President Joe Biden is facing renewed, and intensified pressure, from within his own party to drop out of the presidential race, with the party’s Congressional leadership telling Biden that his presence at the top of the ticket could cause an electoral rout for Democrats across the presidential, Senate and House races.
Biden, who was diagnosed with Covid on Wednesday and is in self isolation at his home in Delaware, is also reported to be more open to “listening” to this viewpoint after adamantly refusing to quit after his disastrous debate performance on June 27 that brought his age-related deficits to the centre stage of American politics. The pressure comes even as the Republican National Convention nominated Donald J Trump as its candidate this week and the momentum appeared to shift towards the Grand Old Party after the assassination bid on Trump.
In what appeared to be a set of coordinated public statements and private leaks to American media outlets on Wednesday and Thursday, supplemented with the publication of dismal poll figures that showed voters wanted a new candidate, Democrats began reading the riot act to Biden.
First, Adam Schiff, among the closest confidantes of former House speaker and Democratic elder Nancy Pelosi and the party’s candidate for a sure-shot Senate seat in California, said, “While the choice to withdraw from the campaign is President Biden’s alone, I believe it is time for him to pass the torch.. A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the President can defeat Donald Trump in November.”
Then, ABC News reported that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, in a private meeting with Biden on Saturday, had told him that it would be best for him to drop out of the race. Officially, Schumer’s office only said that the leader had conveyed the view of his caucus to Biden, without denying the story. Last Thursday, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries too had met Biden and communicated the view of his own caucus, where the mood against Biden continuing is even sharper with close to two dozen representatives having already publicly called on Biden to quit.
The Congressional leaders fear that if Biden contests, he will drag down others fighting on the Democratic ticket; this, in turn, in case Trump is elected, will leave Democrats with no way to check his tendencies. A Democratic House staffer who believes Biden should quit told HT on Thursday, “We are facing a real threat of Trump controlling the White House, Republicans flipping the Senate and retaining the House, and arch-conservatives controlling the Supreme Court. The stakes are too high to indulge Biden in his fantasies”.
A new AP-Norc Center of Public Research poll said that 70% of the respondents polled wanted Biden to drop out of the race. Sixty-five percent Democrats, according to the poll, wanted the same; this figure went up to 75% among Democrats aged between 18-44 years, younger voters who are crucial for Biden to have any chance of a win in the elections and who have already shown signs of discontent and apathy in this election cycle.
On Thursday, New York Times reported that Pelosi had spoken to Biden and told him that she was “pessimistic” about his prospects and countered Biden’s claims that polls did not show him that was the case. And soon after, Washington Post reported that former American president Barack Obama, who remains a towering figure among Democrats, had told aides that he was seriously concerned about the viability of Biden’s candidacy.
In an interview on Wednesday, before it was public that he had Covid, Biden said that he would be willing to drop out if a doctor told him that he had a condition that didn’t allow him to continue. Last week, Biden said that he would be willing to drop out only if his team told him that he couldn’t win. And before that, in an interview, Biden had said that he would drop out only if the Lord Almighty told him too.
This shift in position — from leaving it to God to his pollsters to his doctor — comes amid reports that Biden has been open to listening to different point of view on the issue and checking out polls that pit his vice-president Kamala Harris, the most likely candidate to replace him, against Trump.
Some Democrats believe that Biden should time his announcement to drop out for Thursday, right ahead of Trump’s convention speech to shift the story and energise the base. But, publicly, Biden has maintained that he is the nominee of the party, 14 million Democrats in the primaries voted for him, and that while had a “bad night” during the debate, he wanted to “finish the job” and would contest in November. But the mood in the party may be increasingly making the President’s position untenable.
