Joe Biden faced growing calls within the Democratic Party over the weekend to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, despite public appearances aimed at demonstrating his mental ability to take on Donald Trump.
Biden is scheduled to hold two campaign events on Sunday in Pennsylvania, a state he is considered a frontrunner, after a major prime-time interview Friday night that failed to reassure fellow Democrats who were taken aback by the 81-year-old’s shaky debate performance last week.
“It’s the worst possible outcome,” one veteran Democratic operative told the Financial Times after Biden’s interview aired on ABC News. “It’s not strong enough to make us feel good, but it’s not weak enough to convince Jill. [Biden] “I urge him to pull the plug.”
David Axelrod, who helped engineer Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, warned after the interview that Biden was “dangerously out of touch with the concerns people have about his future capabilities and his standing in this race.”
Angie Craig, a swing-district representative in Minnesota, joined the list of Democrats calling for Biden’s resignation on Saturday.
“President Biden is a good man and I appreciate his lifetime of service,” Craig wrote on social media platform X.
“But I believe he should step aside to allow for the next generation of leadership. The stakes are too high.”
NBC News reports that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is scheduled to discuss a presidential run with colleagues on Sunday.
Throughout the nearly 20-minute interview on ABC, Biden denied national polls and polls showing he was behind Trump in key battleground states that could determine the outcome of the election.
“I don’t think there’s anybody more qualified to be president or more qualified to win this race than I am,” Biden said.
The president also dodged questions about whether he would be willing to undergo cognitive and neurological testing, at one point saying, “I take cognitive tests every day. I take them every day.”
“You know I’m not just running a campaign, I’m running the world… For example, today, before I came here, I was on the phone with the prime minister, and I won’t go into the details anyway, but I was on the phone with Netanyahu,” Biden added, appearing to refer to calls he had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and Britain’s new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on Friday.
In another conversation, Biden said no one could convince him to stop running for reelection, adding, “If the Lord Almighty told me to do it, I could do it.”
“It seems like Biden is the only one who still believes he should be in the race,” said one major Democratic donor. Another Democratic donor called the interview “disappointing,” and another said it was “too little, too late.”
Many Democratic lawmakers, party leaders and influential donors privately called on Biden to suspend his reelection campaign after last week’s debate raised questions about the president’s age and fitness for office. But in recent days, more critics have voiced their concerns publicly.
Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey became the first governor to suggest Biden step down on Friday. Healey was one of the governors who met with the president at the White House this week for an emergency meeting.
She issued a statement urging him to “listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he is our best hope to defeat Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported Friday that Virginia Sen. Mark Warner is trying to get a group of Democratic senators together to ask Biden to drop out of the race. A spokesperson for Warner did not respond to a request for comment.
On Friday morning, Biden delivered a defiant speech in Wisconsin, a state with a strong showing of supporters, telling them that despite growing pressure to resign, he would not give in.
“Let me be as clear as I can: I will remain in the race. I will beat Donald Trump.”
Journalists traveling with Biden found several people standing outside his speech in Wisconsin holding signs urging him to “step down” and “pass the torch.” Another sign read, “Give it up, Joe.”
His campaign said Friday it would spend an additional $50 million on advertising in July, including ads that will run during the Republican National Convention this month and the Olympics.
Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have all been mentioned as possible candidates if Biden were to step down, and have publicly pledged their allegiance to the president’s campaign. At a White House celebration on Thursday evening, July 4, Biden held hands with the vice president, and some in the crowd chanted “Four more years.”
But other prominent Democrats are more reluctant to share the stage with the president. When Biden visited Wisconsin on Friday, he was joined by the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, but not by Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, who is far ahead of the president in the polls.
According to the latest FiveThirtyEight polling average, Trump leads Biden by 2 percentage points in Wisconsin.
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