But political analysts say as long as Biden refuses those calls, replacing him with a different candidate ahead of the November election will be difficult and unlikely.
The Biden campaign and the White House have acknowledged Biden’s poor performance at Thursday’s debate, where his voice sounded soft and raspy and he struggled to make coherent arguments. However, they have also stressed he had a cold he was still recovering from Tuesday and simply had “a bad night.”“We really want to turn the page on this,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday of the intensifying calls for Biden to bow out of the race.
“There have been these concerns about President Biden for quite some time, and the debate kind of supercharged those concerns,” said Eric Schickler, a political science professor and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California Berkeley.
The last time a candidate dropped out before the convention was Democratic president Lyndon Johnson in 1968, amid intense criticism over U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The eventual nominee, then-vice president Hubert Humphrey, lost the election to Republican Richard Nixon.Court hears accused in Coutts blockade thought protest could lead to ‘war’