A former advisor to Bill Clinton doesn’t think President Joe Biden will be on the ballot this November.
“I don’t predict things. I’m just telling you it’s inevitable,” James Carville, 79, told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo on Monday.
“He will come to the conclusion. People will get the message to him. He will understand. His family will understand,” Carville, who is best known for masterminding Clinton’s winning presidential campaign in 1992, said of Biden.
Calls for Biden to drop out have grown following his disastrous performance at last month’s presidential debate with GOP rival, former President Donald Trump. The 81-year-old’s stumbling responses at the debate raised concerns over his mental acuity and fitness for the presidency.
Biden, however, has repeatedly insisted that he’s staying on.
“The question of how to move forward has been well-aired for over a week now. And it’s time for it to end,” Biden said in a letter to congressional Democrats on Monday. “It’s time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump.”
But Biden’s overture won’t stem the Democratic Party’s waning confidence in him, Carville wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times on Monday.
“Mr. Biden says he’s staying in the race, but it’s only a matter of time before Democratic pressure and public and private polling lead him to exit the race,” Carville wrote. “The jig is up, and the sooner Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders accept this, the better.”
In his op-ed, Carville said the Democrats should “hold four historic town halls between now and the Democratic National Convention in August — one each in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West.”
The town halls, Carville wrote, can be moderated by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and will see eight candidates battle it out to succeed Biden.
He added that the town halls will also be a good opportunity for the party’s delegates to get to know Vice President Kamala Harris, who is widely seen as the best replacement for Biden if he were to drop out.
Carville isn’t the only Democratic strategist who has joined the chorus of calls for Biden to step aside. On Sunday, former Obama advisor David Axelrod told CNN that he expects Biden to “lose by a landslide than win narrowly this race.”
“If the stakes are as large as he says, and I believe they are, then he really needs to consider what the right thing to do here is,” Axelrod said.
Representatives for Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
