Democrats go public with fears of GOP ‘landslide’ that could jeopardize US democracy
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
(CNN) — President Joe Biden and his advisers keep issuing unequivocal declarations that he’s staying in the 2024 race, but Democrats aren’t hearing it.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” repeating her position of a week ago as if Biden had not made any declaration at all.
“Speaker Pelosi fully supports whatever President Biden decides to do,” a spokesperson said in a subsequent statement. But the comments from such a senior member of the party had already essentially reopened the debate about whether Biden should go.
Vermont Sen. Peter Welch on Wednesday evening became the first Democratic senator — and the 10th congressional Democrat — to call for Biden to step aside as the nominee, writing in a Washington Post op-ed, “The stakes could not be higher.”
That all came on the heels of Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet on Tuesday evening voicing the concerns other Democrats have shared privately.
“Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
Another Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith from Washington, agreed with that landslide assessment and implored Biden to reconsider.
“Don’t let this be your legacy, that you refused to step down and got him back in the White House,” Smith said, referring to Trump, during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “the Situation Room.”
And New York Rep. Ritchie Torres — a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has been strongly supportive of Biden — put the potential down-ballot effects of a Biden candidacy bluntly. “If we are going on a political suicide mission, then we should at least be honest about it,” he told CNN.
Clooney: step aside to ‘save’ democracy
George Clooney, the actor and Democratic fundraiser, is a Biden ally who spent time with him in Los Angeles and cohosted a record-breaking fundraiser for the president’s campaign recently. The Biden that disastrously appeared on the debate stage is the same one that he saw in California, Clooney wrote in The New York Times on Wednesday.
Now he argues that Biden needs to step aside so that capable Democrats can come forward to compete for the nomination or face losing control of the entire government. Democrats have been so “terrified” of a second Trump term that they ignored warning signs about Biden during the primary, Clooney said.
“Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024,” Clooney wrote, appealing to Biden’s sense of duty. He’s not the only bold-faced Hollywood name raising the alarm. Rob Reiner and Michael Douglas, both Democratic fundraisers, are also on the record.
And there are other fundraising concerns: Organizers for at least one Chicago fundraiser scheduled during the Democratic National Convention have decided to not to proceed with the mid-August event, a source with knowledge of the discussions told CNN.
A test every day
Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos during a high-stakes interview last week that he doesn’t need to take a cognitive test and prove his fitness to lead because every day in the presidency is a cognitive test.
That’s going to be Biden’s curse going forward. No matter how many fiery teleprompter speeches he gives, he likely won’t be able to suddenly walk without shuffling or talk in conversation with the steadiness he once did.
The next of his daily tests will come Thursday, when the president conducts a rare solo news conference at the conclusion of a NATO meeting taking place in Washington.
Biden should be talking about his successful efforts to expand the treaty organization and mobilize it to stand up to Russia, but instead he will face question after question about his fitness to do the job.
Stephanopoulos, by the way, who spent time in direct contact with the president, told a passerby secretly recording him on a New York City street that he doesn’t think Biden can serve another four years.
Next week, Biden will sit down with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt for an interview that will tape and air Monday, the network announced
Fear of a ‘landslide’
Bennet, the Colorado Democrat, became the first senator in his party to publicly say he doesn’t believe Biden is capable of winning reelection. Sens. Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester — the two most vulnerable senators facing reelection — also said Biden would not win during a meeting in the Capitol, according to a source familiar, CNN reported Tuesday.
“It’s a moral question about the future of our country,” Bennet said on CNN. “And I think it’s critically important, for us, to come to grips with what we face, if together, we put this country on the path of electing Donald Trump again.”
He continued: “The White House, in the time since that disastrous debate, I think, has done nothing to really demonstrate that they have a plan to win this election.”
Democrats are already in a difficult position in the race to control the Senate, since they are defending a larger number of seats than Republicans this cycle. About a third of the Senate is up for election every two years.
CNN’s senior political analyst Ronald Brownstein argued Tuesday that a Biden loss could cost Democrats the Senate, which would reverberate for decades since it would give aging conservative justices on the Supreme Court, like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, cover to resign and solidify the court’s conservative majority.
Trump is currently ahead
CNN’s Road to 270 assessment of the electoral map shows Trump in position to win the election. Georgia, Michigan and Nevada — all states that Biden won in 2020 — are all leaning toward Republicans. If Trump wins those three state and all the states he won in 2020, he would have 272 electoral votes, enough to win the election.
CNN Senior data reporter Harry Enten said polling clearly shows Trump is ahead at this point. But he notes that polling this far from the election does not generally represent the final vote.
“When we’re looking at this data we should keep in mind that it’s still just July and the election is in November,” he told CNN’s Jim Acosta. “So we’ll just have to wait and see how things shift as things go on from here.”
Is Biden hearing this?
The Democratic leader in the House, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, has publicly backed Biden, but he has told nervous lawmakers he will take their concerns to the White House, according to CNN’s Annie Grayer and Manu Raju.
But Jeffries brushed off questions about whether Biden is the most effective nominee and said he has no plans to meet with him on Wednesday.
“Over the last few days, the members of the House Democratic Caucus have had conversations that are candid, constructive and clear-eyed about the path forward, which primarily includes doing everything we can to make sure that we take back the majority in November of this year,” he told reporters on his way into a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.
Some Democrats want to move on from this debate, worrying that it only boosts Trump. “Donald Trump and the Republicans have loved every minute of watching this discussion,” Rep. Debbie Dingell, who represents the battleground state of Michigan, told CNN’s Jessica Dean.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
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