California Rep. Adam Schiff is the most prominent Democrat calling on U.S. President Joe Biden to abandon his re-election bid.
The statement comes as the party pushes ahead with plans to hold a virtual vote in the first week of August to officially name Biden as its nominee before the Democratic National Convention begins in person two weeks later.
Schiff is the 20th Democrat in Congress to publicly call on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race.
“A second Trump presidency would undermine the foundations of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about the president’s ability to defeat Donald Trump in November,” Schiff, a Democrat from California who is running for Senate, was quoted as saying by the Los Angeles Times.
Democrats’ concerns about whether the 81-year-old incumbent can beat his Republican challenger Trump or remain in office for another four years grew after Biden’s hesitant performance at the June 27 debate.
Trump is currently in Milwaukee, where his Republican colleagues are officially nominating him as a candidate, just days after he narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
Nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters think Biden should step aside and let his party nominate another candidate, according to a poll released Wednesday by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, contradicting Biden’s post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still behind him even as some “big names” turn against him.
“While the decision to withdraw from the campaign rests solely with President Biden, I believe it is time for him to pass the baton,” Schiff said in a statement.
“And thereby secure his legacy as leader by enabling us to defeat Donald Trump in the upcoming election.”
Schiff’s announcement comes after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to delay plans for a virtual vote to re-nomination Biden by a week, which could have taken place as early as Sunday, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The DNC’s Rules Committee will meet Friday to discuss plans for virtual voting and finalize them next week, according to a letter to members obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The letter from co-chair Bishop Leah D. Daughtry and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said the virtual roll call vote will not take place before August 1, but the party remains committed to holding a vote before August 7, the deadline for registration to be placed on Ohio’s presidential ballot.
“We will not rush into a virtual election process,” Daughtry and Walz wrote, “but we will begin our important considerations of how a virtual election process would work.”
The Democratic Party convention begins on August 19 in Chicago, but the party announced in May that it would hold early roll calls to ensure Biden qualifies for the Ohio ballot.
Ohio had originally set a deadline of August 7, but has since changed its rules.
Biden’s campaign team insists that the party must act under Ohio’s original rules to ensure that Republican lawmakers cannot take legal action to disqualify the president from the election.
Even if the Democrats were to hold a virtual roll call vote ahead of their convention, it would not necessarily nominate Biden as a candidate.
The DNC’s legislative arm could vote to hold a personal roll call in Chicago, says Elaine Kamarck, a longtime member of that committee and an expert on the party’s nomination process.
But since the law in Ohio does not take effect until September 1, there remains great concern that Biden could appear on the state’s ballot, Kamarck said.
“This is a safeguard for the Democrats,” Kamarck said, adding that “the convention is the highest authority” in the nomination process.
The AP-NORC poll, conducted as Biden works to salvage his candidacy two weeks after his debate flop, also found that only about three in 10 Democrats are extremely or very confident that he has the mental capacity to serve effectively as president, down slightly from 40 percent in an AP-NORC poll in February.
with AP