President Joe Biden’s campaign has dismissed any possibility of the president dropping out of the 2024 election, arguing that Biden is resolved in his goal of beating former President Donald Trump.
Discussions of potentially replacing Biden as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee have gone up significantly since the first presidential debate, with Biden appearing in his first post-debate interview on Friday in an attempt to quell concerns. During the interview, Biden was asked how he would feel if Trump won the election against him this November. The president appeared to accept a loss as long as he did the best job “I know I can do.”
“I think that the president is saying nobody’s going to work harder than he has to defeat Donald Trump,” said Quentin Fulks, the Biden campaign’s principal deputy manager, on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki. “He understands the stakes of this election. I mean, take a look back at why the president ran the first time. He saw Charlottesville, he saw Trump and what he was doing to this country, and he got in the race.”
“This isn’t about Joe Biden thinking that he’s the only person that can beat Donald Trump,” he added. “This is the fact that Joe Biden believes deeply he has a better vision for this country, and that is what we are doing on this campaign to make sure that we are drying the contrast between those two visions.”
Fulks’s comment on Charlottesville referenced a debunked report that Trump once said there were “very fine people on both sides” at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Biden also referenced this report during his debate with Trump, with the former president pushing back and stating the story was false.
Fulks added that there is “broad support” for Biden ahead of the 2024 election, though he argued that people do want “reassurance.” He also said that Biden’s campaign is in “a strong position,” and that the president gets his energy from voters and supporters.
In the wake of the debate, Biden’s campaign announced a $50 million ad buy to “capitalize on pivotal high viewership and political diverse audiences.” Some of these ads will play during the season premiere of The Bachelorette, as well as the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has contended that Biden “should ignore his many critics” and continue “his campaign of American Destruction.” He also joked that Biden ought to “MAKE CHINA GREAT AGAIN,” a play on Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.
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Some Democrats have still expressed worry about keeping Biden in the race, with former Democratic Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan being among those within the party asking the president to step aside. Ryan also predicted that more House Democrats would ask Biden to step aside once they return from their 4th of July break.
Gov. Josh Green (D-HI) suggested that Biden will make a decision about staying in the race within the next couple of days. He added that he thinks Biden will stay in the race “unless he feels that it is not winnable.”
