Former President Barack Obama tacitly joined calls for Joe Biden to end his reelection campaign, which lawmakers say could happen as early as this weekend, Axios and the Associated Press reported Thursday.
Democrats told Axios that Biden, 81, risks wiping out his legacy if he stays the course and is defeated by Donald Trump—a once-distant fear that recent polls suggest may soon be reality.
And now, according to The Washington Post, Obama is telling allies he thinks Biden has little choice but to bail out and save face, both for himself and for the Democratic Party.
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Biden has remained defiant publicly, insisting he’s staying the race despite appearing more unsteady than ever in the last three weeks, punctuated by a disaster of a debate performance on June 27 and a COVID-19 diagnosis that has sidelined him from events this week.
The president’s campaign denied the Axios report, stating firmly that Biden is “running for reelection” and that “baseless conjecture from anonymous sources isn’t a scoop.”
But the denial did nothing to tamp down the mounting feeling among senior Democrats that the end is nigh for Biden.
The tipping point came Wednesday, when Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who has tight connections to powerful party donors and is a close ally of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, went public and asked Biden to end his campaign for the good of the party.
Biden principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks told reporters in Milwaukee Thursday morning that Biden is “not wavering” on his resolve to stay in the race.
“There are no plans being made to replace President Biden on the ballot and President Biden is cognizant this is a margin of error race,” Folks said. “Folks are acting like before the debate we somehow said this was going to the a landslide victory for Democrats. We have always said this race was going to be close.”
Obama’s move to tell his former vice-president to go comes just weeks after the two raised millions together at a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles.
Kevin Lamarque/ReutersAn assassination attempt on Trump briefly cooled down calls for the president to step aside this weekend, but damning polls showing Biden trailing Trump in battleground states and a looming Democratic National Convention have rekindled the party's crisis.
Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), are reportedly pushing him to exit the race. If he doesn’t, they’ve signaled that a ticket with Biden at the top could have a catastrophic effect on down-ticket Democratic candidates for Congress.
Major donors—starting with George Clooney—have also piled on, publicly and privately urging President Biden to abandon his race to make way for a younger candidate who they believe will fare better in a general election matchup against Trump. Clooney was one of the co-hosts for a Los Angeles fundraiser which featured both Biden and Obama. It was organized by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the billionaire movie executive who this week told Biden in a one-on-one meeting in Las Vegas that donations were drying up.
One major West Coast donor, as The Daily Beast reported exclusively Wednesday night, even drafted a "victory speech" that Biden could give as a way of bowing out gracefully, preserving his legacy and helping his party defeat Trump, as Biden did in 2020.
