One in three Democrats believe Biden should step down from the presidential race and want to see an intervention at the convention next month as pressure intensifies
First, donors expressed concerns about President Joe Biden’s fitness to run for re-election.
This week, elected Democrats began asking out loud whether the 81-year-old should step aside.
An exclusive poll for DailyMail.com now shows that half of all voters think he should give up while there is still time to find a replacement candidate. This includes more than a third of Democratic voters, after his disastrous performance at the debate.
Biden said Wednesday he has no plans to give up on winning a second term.
“I’m in. I’m the leader of the Democratic Party. Nobody’s pushing me out,” he said, according to a senior aide who posted his comments on the social media site X.
JL Partners polled 1,000 likely voters on the state of the race after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance prompted calls to withdraw
But Biden is under intense pressure to reconsider his position after a fraught debate in which his answers stalled or descended into rambling musings.
The White House even had to deflect questions about whether he suffers from dementia.
Democrats are increasingly concerned that Biden is no longer the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump in November.
A poll of 1,000 likely voters conducted by JL Partners found that 50 percent believed he should resign as nominee.
About 34 percent of Democrats agree, and 29 percent of people said they plan to vote for him this time.
The decision whether or not to run is Biden’s, but one in three Democrats also believe the party should take action against him at its convention in Chicago next month if he does not voluntarily withdraw.
According to James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners, the constant concern threatens to become an unstoppable tide.
“It’s hard to win an election in the United States. It’s even harder to win an election when almost half the country thinks you should resign,” he said.
“It’s very difficult to see how this will turn out for Joe Biden.
“This poll shows me that Biden cannot turn this around and that Democrats, if they want a chance to win, need to find another candidate.”
Biden struggled during a debate last week. The White House acknowledged he didn’t have a great night, but said he was dealing with a cold and a busy schedule of international travel
A day later, he gave a better performance at a rally in North Carolina, where he was able to rely on an autocue and the cheers of the crowd to get him through the appearance.
Since last Thursday, when Biden went head-to-head with voters during their first televised debate of the campaign, the Biden campaign has been trying to limit the damage.
The Biden campaign had pushed for such an early clash in the hopes that they could use it to remind viewers of the chaos of Trump’s years in power. The strategy backfired.
Biden’s halting performance, which sometimes included him pausing mid-sentence and standing with his mouth open as Trump spoke, dominated headlines.
Two campaign meetings with donors and party officials over the weekend failed to allay concerns. Some people who attended the meetings said they were shocked that the debate proposal was being shelved.
Over the weekend, donor Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund manager, broke ranks and called on Biden to withdraw from the race, with several elected officials following suit.
The pressure was further increased when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it was now legitimate to ask whether his actions were an “episode” or a condition.
Biden was leading Trump at this time last year, but has since seen the former president steal a lead. Trump now holds a six-point lead, according to our exclusive poll
Biden’s allies and the White House continue to insist that he should not be defined by one “bad night” in June.
But the Daily Mail poll found that Biden had reached his lowest position relative to Biden since we started keeping track last year.
It showed that if the election were to take place tomorrow, Trump would win by six points and Biden would beat him by 43 points to 37.
The former president has increased his lead by two points since our last poll in March.
Women still prefer Biden over Trump, but he is losing support among men, with the former president’s lead jumping from 10 points then to 18 points now.