President Joe Biden “needs to drop out” of the 2024 election race, a Biden campaign official told NBC News, as a growing number of Democrats called for the president to exit the contest against former President Donald Trump.
“He will never recover from this,” one Biden campaign official said, according to NBC News.
NBC reported that several of Biden’s closest allies, among them three people involved in his reelection bid, now say they believe the president has no chance of winning the race. Those people also said there is a growing likelihood that if Biden remains as the party’s nominee, Democrats running for election to Congress and other offices will suffer.
“No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” a second Biden campaign staffer told NBC News.
NBC also confirmed a New York Times report that the campaign is polling voters on the question of Vice President Kamala Harris’ viability as the party’s presidential nominee in a head-to-head race against Trump.
A Democratic operative who spoke to the outlet noted that such polling would help in showing Biden how Harris would perform against Trump in comparison to the president.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Thursday that the party’s leadership plans to ask every one of the 213 Democrats in the House about their feelings on whether Biden should remain as the party’s nominee.
Three more House Democrats on Thursday called on Biden to drop out: Reps. Brad Schenider of Illinois, Hillary Scholten of Michigan, Greg Stanton of Arizona and Ed Case of Hawaii. There are now more than a dozen House Democrats who have asked Biden to step aside.
“I do not believe President Biden should continue his candidacy,” Case said in a statement. “This is solely about the future, about the President’s ability to continue in the most difficult job in the world for another four-year term.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of Congress, Biden’s senior advisors me with Senate Democrats amid growing fears in the caucus that the president is not the party’s best candidate against Trump.
“Our goal is to talk to every single person” in the Democratic caucus, said House Minority Leader Jeffries, who represents a district in New York City.
“It’s a process to make sure that every voice is authentically being clearly heard,” Jeffries said.
The leader said he hopes to finish those conversations “as soon as we can,” saying that after that, “we’ll convene as a leadership team and figure the next step.”
At a news conference later, Jeffries said, “I’m going to respect the sanctity of those conversations until we conclude that process,” when asked if Biden’s decision to remain as the nominee was final.
He also said, “No,” when asked if he feared Biden’s presence on the Democratic ticket being a liability to other party members running for office.
Biden himself is set to face reporters at a potentially make-or-break solo news conference later Thursday, a day after the first Democratic senator joined growing calls for Biden to drop out of the 2024 election contest, citing his “disastrous debate” two weeks ago against Trump.
“For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race,” Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont wrote Wednesday in an op-ed in The Washington Post.
“The stakes could not be higher. We cannot unsee President Biden’s disastrous debate performance. We cannot ignore or dismiss the valid questions raised since that night,” Welch wrote.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat who retains both her House seat and powerful sway there, on Wednesday refused to say she wanted Biden to remain in the race, suggesting he might drop out despite nearly two weeks of his adamantly saying he would not do so.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Pelosi said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short.”
Biden is likely to be asked about both Welch and Pelosi at his news conference, his first since the debate, scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. ET on Thursday at the end of a two-day NATO summit in Washington.
Biden is also likely to face questions about whether he is healthy enough to serve a second, four-year term in office.
On Wednesday, the actor George Clooney – who participated in a major fundraiser for Biden in Los Angeles three weeks ago – wrote that the Biden he saw at that event “was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010 … He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020.”
“He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote in a New York Times op-ed urging Biden to quit the race.
“We are not going to win in November with this president,” Clooney wrote. “On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate. This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.”
This is developing news. Check back for updates.
