U.S. President Joe Biden waves during a news conference at the NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington, U.S., July 11, 2024.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign began Friday, facing the very real prospect that more Democrats will call on him to step down from the race against former President Donald Trump and allow a new candidate to take the lead.
Just after Biden held a rare news conference on Thursday to address concerns about his cognitive health, three House Democrats said he should drop out of the race, and at least 18 Democrats have urged him to do so so far. There are 213 Democrats in the House and 47 in the Senate.
But Biden reiterated during the meeting his intention to run for a second term and said nothing would make him reconsider that decision unless polls showed he had no chance of winning.
“Nobody says that,” Biden said, scheduled to deliver a campaign speech in Detroit later Friday. “No poll says that.”
Biden concluded his hour-long news conference, answering reporters’ questions and using the opportunity to declare victory over his opponents.
But his sloppy speeches and misleading statements (like calling Vice President Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”) did little to win over party members, as did his arguments for why he was staying in the race.
“I believe I am the best person to run for president,” Biden said. “I beat Trump once, and I will beat him again.”
Biden briefly acknowledged his low approval ratings, but only said, “There were at least five presidents who had lower approval ratings than me late in the campaign.”
“There’s a long way to go for this campaign. So I’m going to keep moving, I’m going to keep moving, because, look, I have more work to do. We have more work to finish.”
Still, few Democrats are arguing that Biden should remain the party’s nominee. And several leading party figures have blatantly ignored Biden’s repeated claims that he has made up his mind, instead emphasizing how much time remains until the party’s August nominating convention.
Rep. James Clyburn, a longtime Biden ally, said Friday morning that the president “must continue to make decisions about his future.”
The South Carolina Democrat also hinted that Biden might eventually agree to step down.
“If he changes his mind later, we will respond to him,” Clyburn said on NBC’s “TODAY” show.
“We have until August 19 to hold the convention, so we need to focus now on the record we’re going to set for the American people and remind them of what will happen to them if Project 2025 becomes law in any form. That’s what we need to focus on,” Clyburn said.
Project 2025 is a 900-page treatise on hard-line conservative policy proposals compiled by the right-wing Heritage Foundation that is intended to set the policy agenda for Trump’s second term in the White House. Trump said last week that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, but several of his allies and alumni from his first White House term were involved in putting it together.
“We need to stop talking about ourselves and start talking about who we’re competing against,” a Biden campaign official told NBC News. “Every day that we’re not talking about Trump or Project 2025 is a waste,” the official said.
But the past three weeks of campaigning have failed to quell calls for Biden to drop out of the race.
The calls stem from the president’s poor performance in the June 27 debate with Trump, where Biden often trailed off or lost track of his thoughts.
Since then, there have been more reports from Democrats and Biden’s allies expressing concerns about the 81-year-old president’s mental acuity.
This is a developing news story. Check back for updates.
