{ Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) said Sunday he wants President Biden to stand down on his 2024 Democratic presidential primary bid to give another Democrat a shot at the White House.
Why it matters: Phillips has previously called on others to challenge Biden in the 2024 Democratic nomination but is not committing himself to running as of yet.
- “I would like to see Joe Biden, a wonderful and remarkable man, pass the torch — cement this extraordinary legacy,” Phillips said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.
- “And by the way, this is not how everybody thinks, but I do believe the majority wants to move on,” he added.
- Phillips said his views on Biden stepping down are not based on the president’s age but rather “how people feel.”
By the numbers: 56% of U.S. adults said they had an unfavorable opinion of Biden, compared to just 32% of those with favoring opinions on the president, according to a CNN poll in June.
- Prospective voters in the CNN poll also had an unfavorable view of former President Donald Trump at 59%.
- An April poll from NBC News revealed that 70% of Americans think Biden should not seek another term. Of those responses, 51% came from Democrats.
- 60% of those polled by NBC also thought Trump shouldn’t run for president again. Of those, a third identified themselves as Republican voters.
- “Joe Biden right now is down seven points in the four swing states that will decide the next election,” said Phillips, who also pointed to Biden’s historically low approval numbers.
- Phillips added that he’s not saying Biden is “not up to a second term,” but that the numbers reflect that Americans want change and a new Democratic candidate. }
I don’t care how old he is himself, he has brought in a shit ton of younger progressive people in his administration, and that’s what matters.
What young progressives are in the Biden Administration? from what I’ve been reading, Biden has actually brought in a bunch of old neoconservatives like Elliot Abrams of Iran-Contra infamy whom Biden has nominated for a key diplomatic position
Biden is doing a much better job than I thought he would, but also I would really like to see someone 40 years younger in the role.
This is a common sentiment for people to have, but their preference runs into a major problem. There is no magic “young Biden” candidate out there that can unify the party.
If Biden announced tomorrow that he was going to retire rather than run for reelection, there would be an absolute clusterfuck circus of everyone and their mom’s roommate’s cousin’s dog jumping into the dem primary. Sanders — who is even older than Biden — has even implied that he would run in this scenario. Harris would get a lot of institutional support, but nowhere near enough to clear the field. Newsom would jump in. A solid half dozen house representatives with no real chance would jump in. As would some other has-beens or insufficiently qualified people. A few governors would take the chance too. It would take months for the race to whittle down to the core 5-6 people with any real chance, and by that time >$100m would have been pissed down the drain. Any establishment candidate that won would be met with instant distrust from large parts of the progressive left, and any progressive candidate that won would be met with similar levels of distrust from the rest of the party.
The primary would be acrimonious, expensive, and long. Dems would toss aside one of their biggest advantages going into next year — money — as Trump is more likely than not to tie up the republican primary comparatively early.
“We need a younger, popular person to be our nominee” is a trivial thing to wish for. It’s an exceedingly non-trivial thing to make happen. Every person pining for such a person is imagining very different democrats as fitting that description.
The time for new is 2028. We picked Biden in 2020 and picking a candidate one year comes with an implicit outcome of picking them in the next election, if they win the first time.
