First US House Democrat calls for Biden to drop out of presidential race
- ‘I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw. I respectfully call on him to do so,’ said Lloyd Doggett of Texas
“Recognising that, unlike Trump, President Biden’s first commitment has always been to our country, not himself, I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw. I respectfully call on him to do so,” Doggett said in a statement.
Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Biden’s campaign has hoped to reassure US voters, most of whom say they believe Biden is too old to work in government, that the president was the best choice against his predecessor Trump.
But Biden’s stumbling performance during the debate had the opposite effect. His team has since scrambled to reassure key donors that Biden’s appearance was a fluke.
Biden on Tuesday blamed his exhaustion on jet lag after global travel for the poor debate, Agence France-Presse reported.
“I wasn’t very smart. I decided to travel around the world a couple of times,” Biden said. The president added that he “didn’t listen to my staff” about travel and joked that he “fell asleep on stage” during the debate.
But Democratic leaders were increasingly signalling that they were not buying White House attempts to brush off Biden’s performance in the face-off as a momentary lapse, after he gave halting and nonsensical answers and trailed off at times.
Although Doggett is the first congressional Democrat to explicitly call for Biden to withdraw, others have suggested such a move may be worth considering.
“He has to be honest with himself,” Democratic congressman Mike Quigley, a moderate from Illinois, told CNN on Tuesday. “It’s his decision. I just want him to appreciate at this time just how much it impacts, not just his race, but all the other races coming in November.”
In addition to the White House, Democrats are defending several vulnerable seats in the Senate, where they hold a 51-49 majority, and are trying to recapture a majority in the House.
Doggett pointed to that dynamic.
“President Biden has continued to run substantially behind Democratic senators in key states and in most polls has trailed Donald Trump,” Doggett said. “I had hoped that the debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not.”
Following Doggett’s call for Biden to drop out, Democrats urged the US president on Tuesday to be transparent about his mental fitness.
Nancy Pelosi, a former House speaker and a grandee of the Democratic Party, said in her own statement it was “legitimate” to ask whether Biden’s debate disaster was indicative of a deeper problem rather than a one-off.
She praised Biden’s vision and “strategic thinking” in an interview with cable network MSNBC – but admitted he had had a “bad night” and said it was fair to raise the mental acuity of “both candidates”.
Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse also asked for reassurances, saying voters needed to know there would be no repeat of Biden’s sub-par showing.
Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, told WPRI-TV he was “pretty horrified” by the president’s performance during the 90-minute CNN match-up, watched by more than 50 million Americans.
02:48
US presidential debate: Biden and Trump spar over economy, war in Ukraine
Biden will sit down for his first televised interview with ABC News following last week’s presidential debate with Trump, the news network said on Tuesday. Excerpts of the interview will be broadcast by ABC on Friday.
The polling margins between the president and his Republican predecessor have been razor-thin and almost static for months, with Trump showing a slight advantage in the all-important swing states.
Biden pushed for an unusually early first debate in hopes that he could jolt the race while there was still time to build on any momentum gained – but the plan backfired.
The White House has always dismissed questions about Biden’s mental acuity, sometimes with marked irritation.
His campaign – under pressure over its tactics – hit out at “self-important podcasters” in a memo widely seen as a swipe at a group of former Barack Obama staffers and slammed demands from “the bedwetting brigade” for Biden drop out.
“I really do criticise the campaign for a dismissive attitude towards people who are raising questions for discussion,” Vermont Senator Peter Welch, a Democrat, told news website Semafor on Tuesday.
Observers say Biden has visibly slowed over the last year.
It has been several months since the president, who has fallen in public on several occasions, stopped using his plane’s wide gangway, preferring a shorter, more stable staircase.
He has also surrounded himself with aides for the short walk from the White House to his helicopter on the lawn, preventing cameras from focusing on his slow, deliberate walk.
Biden, who has always been gaffe-prone, has not given a long press conference since January 2022 and spends almost every weekend in one of his Delaware homes, with no official schedule.
When he recently visited France to commemorate the 1944 Allied landings, he went straight from the airport to his hotel, where he remained locked up for an entire day, with no public appearances
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
