Congressional and Democratic leaders have no plans to press President Biden to drop out of the presidential race.
CNN’s Manu Raju reported:
Dem leaders not planning a direct intervention to press Joe Biden to drop out of the race after his widely panned debate performance last night, per multiple Dem sources.
Dems want to let the dust settle with the public and assess the strength of Biden’s campaign.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters today that Biden shouldn’t drop out.
Asked about his reaction to Biden’s performance, Jeffries said: “We are going to win the House in November.”
The Biden campaign and the President need to own his bad performance and chart a strategy for changing course and moving on. Biden can easily make voters forget about a debate that happened months before election day.
What the President and his campaign can’t afford to do is assume that voters will forget about his bad debate by election day. Biden’s answers were good. In terms of knowledge, there was contest between him and Trump.
Donald Trump didn’t come out of this debate a winner. While polls show that voters thought Trump did better, most also weren’t confident that Trump could lead the country, and the ex-president bombed the debate with swing state voters.
The door is wide open for Biden. It would be fooling for the Democratic Party to throw itself into chaos by forcing Biden out. Republicans have been dreaming about turning the 2024 election into a replay of 1968 when Nixon returned to power in large part thanks to Democratic chaos after LBJ decided not to run for reelection. Just because the Democratic convention is in Chicago in 2024, the party should learn from the mistakes of 1968.
Biden and his campaign need to fix this, but don’t expect top Democrats to try to push the President into retirement.
