Step aside: Poll finds nearly 3 in 4 voters say Biden should drop out

Nearly three in four registered voters now think President Joe Biden should not seek a second term, including nearly half of surveyed Democratic voters, according to the the most recent polling after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump last week.

The majority of voters surveyed for a CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday say they’ve seen enough, and that’s it’s time for the 81-year-old Biden to throw in the towel and clear the way for a younger candidate to take up the party torch at their mid-August convention.

A national sample of 1,130 registered voters polled in the pair of days following the debate found 72% think Biden should not be campaigning for a second term, up from 63% since February, and the same number of voters doubt the elder statesman has the mental acuity required to serve as president, up from 65% since June.

Trump, by way of comparison, is thought to be mentally fit enough for a second term by just 50% of those polled.

Nearly half of polled Democratic voters, or 46%, said following the debate that Biden should not be running, compared to 36% from before Biden’s debate balk.

Biden ended the week with a return trip to Camp David late Saturday evening, the same Maryland retreat where he spent several days in the lead up to his disastrous first presidential debate.

He spent Friday and Saturday on the campaign train doing damage control and attempting to assure supporters that his unimpressive performance wasn’t indicative of his abilities to manage the lofty office he holds.

“I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job. I know I don’t walk as easy I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to. But here’s what I also know: I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job. And I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get kicked down, you get back up. And we’re back up,” Biden said at a campaign event held at a private residence in East Hampton, New York. He made similar remarks in Raleigh, North Carolina while displaying the sort of energy he entirely failed to find through 90 minutes of debate against former President Trump last Thursday.

As Biden campaigned, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison was doing his own damage control, telling top committee members during a conference call that the party is still backing Biden despite hjis performance in the debate.

Not everyone on the call bought into the sunny forecast.

“There were a number of things that could have been said in addressing the situation. But we didn’t get that. We were being gaslit,” Joe Salazar, a Colorado DNC member who was on the call, told the Associated Press.

Biden’s campaign staff downplayed his shaky debate, accusing instead the “beltway class” in DC of “counting Joe Biden out” even as they spent Sunday flooding the airwaves with campaign surrogates.

Senior campaign advisor Jen O’Malley Dillon claimed voters were “fired up” in a post-debate campaign memo.

“The data in the battleground states, though, tells a different story. On every metric that matters, data shows it did nothing to change the American people’s perception, our supporters are more fired up than ever, and Donald Trump only reminded voters of why they fired him four years ago and failed to expand his appeal beyond his MAGA base,” she wrote.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania, told Fox News Sunday he expected Biden to win.

“Biden is one and Trump is still zero. And he’s the only person that’s ever beaten Trump. And I really believe that Joe Biden will do that again despite all of the Democrats wetting the bed over that kind of thing,” he said.

Trump, in a message shared to his Truth Social media platform on Saturday, said that Thursday’s debate wasn’t just bad for Biden, but the entire “Radical Left Democrat Party and the Fake News Media who have been lying to the American People as our Country was being destroyed.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Previous post US offers Boeing plea deal over deadly crashes – media
Next post Post-Brexit Border Delays Threaten UK and EU Horticulture Trade, Industry Leaders Warn