“I am hopeful that he will make the difficult and painful decision to step down. I respectfully call on him to do so,” wrote Texan Lloyd Doggett mid-day. “He must not hand us over to Trump in 2024,” added the Democratic congressman, the first to publicly call for the president to throw in the towel.
“I think it’s legitimate to ask whether this is just an episode or a lasting state,” said the very influential Nancy Pelosi, former Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, on Joe Biden’s favorite channel, MSNBC.
She is obviously referring to last Thursday’s calamitous debate, in which the 81-year-old Democrat lost ground to his Republican rival Donald Trump.
Since then, party officials have seemed hesitant, perhaps giving Joe Biden a chance to really calm concerns with a teleprompter-free press conference or a long interview without a safety net.
This should be done on Friday, ABC News having announced that the president would grant an interview to the channel which will be broadcast in its entirety on Sunday.
But the Democrats’ patience is clearly already running out.
“We have to be honest with ourselves that it wasn’t just a horrible night,” he said Tuesday on CNN House Representative Mike Quigley, a Democrat from Illinois.
A poll published Tuesday by CNN has enough to further fuel the anxieties of the Democratic camp: 75% of voters questioned believe that the party would have better chances in November with a candidate other than Joe Biden.
Donald Trump is credited with 49% of the voting intentions at the national level, against 43% for his rival, a gap unchanged from the last poll of this type, conducted in April.
Vice President Kamala Harris, without winning, would be better placed, at 45% against 47% for the former Republican president of 78 years, in the margin of statistical error.
Other potential Democratic candidates, some of whom are little known to the general public, would face Donald Trump with scores similar to that of the current president, despite their lack of notoriety, for example California Governor Gavin Newsom, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
