An Arizona Democrat became the fourth party member in the House of Representatives to deny that President Biden can win re-election — and the second to call for him to exit the race.
“If he’s the candidate, I’m going to support him, but I think that this is an opportunity to look elsewhere,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told the New York Times Wednesday.
“What he needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.”
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) was the first House Democrat to tell the oldest-ever president it was time to call it quits on Tuesday, citing Biden’s lackluster debate performance against former President Donald Trump that worsened the 81-year-old’s lagging poll numbers.
Reps. Jared Golden (D-Me.) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), who co-chair the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, declared the same day that they thought Biden would lose to Trump, but stopped short of directly calling on the president to drop out.
“Biden’s poor performance in the debate was not a surprise,” Golden wrote in an op-ed for the Bangor Daily News.
“It also didn’t rattle me as it has others, because the outcome of this election has been clear to me for months: While I don’t plan to vote for him, Donald Trump is going to win,” he added. “And I’m OK with that.”
“About 50 million Americans tuned in and watched that debate. I was one of them for about five very painful minutes,” Gluesenkamp Perez admitted in an interview with Portland, Ore.-based KATU News.
“We all saw what we saw, you can’t undo that, and the truth, I think, is that Biden is going to lose to Trump,” she said. “I know that’s difficult, but I think the damage has been done by that debate.”
While the latter two are relative newcomers to Capitol Hill, Grijalva, 76, and Doggett, 77, have served decades in the House and are Biden’s peers in age.
According to a CBS News/YouGov survey released Wednesday, 69% of registered voters — and 78% of independents — agree that Biden should step aside after his catastrophic June 27 verbal slugfest with Trump, 78, in Atlanta.
A slight majority of likely 2024 voters (51%) in battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — prefer the 45th president to the 46th as their candidate of choice, the poll also found.
Grijalva represents Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, a Democratic stronghold that stretches across much of the state’s border with Mexico.
Biden huddled with campaign staff on Wednesday afternoon, vowing that he is “in this race to the end and we’re going to win because when Democrats unite, we will always win.”
The president privately admitted to a close ally, however, that if upcoming campaign stops in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as a high-stakes interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, don’t change his fortunes — he may have to withdraw, according to the New York Times.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates damned the Times report as “absolutely false.”
