Interviews with dozens of Democrats illustrated an imminent clash between a defiant president and those who question his ability to win. Many rank-and-file party officials remain supportive.
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A growing number of Democrats are urging President Biden to step aside, even as he has vowed to stay in the race.
Numerous officials, lawmakers and strategists in President Biden’s own party increasingly see his candidacy as unsustainable — and their private anxieties are slowly but steadily spilling into public view, interviews with more than 50 Democrats this week showed.
Growing swaths of Democrats now believe that by remaining on the ticket, the president is jeopardizing their ability to maintain the White House and threatening other candidates up and down the ballot. The moment is setting up an extraordinary clash between a defiant president of the United States who insists he is not abandoning his re-election campaign and members of his party who are beginning to suggest that he should.
“I have less and less confidence in this campaign’s ability to win this race,” Representative Scott Peters, Democrat of California, said in an interview. “If we know we’re going to lose, we would be foolish not to look at another course.”
Representative Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota, urged Mr. Biden on Saturday to step aside as the Democratic nominee. “I do not believe that the president can effectively campaign and win against Donald Trump,” she said in a statement.
Lawmakers say they have been deluged with concerns about Mr. Biden’s candidacy from donors and constituents. Among members of the Democratic National Committee, essentially the political arm of the White House, many said that they remained supportive, but even there, fissures are emerging.
And a Democratic member of Congress, a former high-ranking Obama administration official and a senior aide to a prominent Democratic governor all privately used the same word in separate interviews on Friday to describe Mr. Biden’s standing in the campaign: “untenable.”
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Source: nytimes.com
