Biden vows to stay in presidential race amid candidacy concerns

Washington: US President Joe Biden has said he has no intention of stepping back from his bid for a second term in the office— even though some in his Democratic Party have asked him to leave the presidential race.

Biden, 81, has been under growing pressure to assuage doubts about his physical and mental fitness following a stumbling debate performance last week against his Republican challenger, Donald Trump.

Three elected Democrats have publicly called on Biden to step aside since Thursday’s debate, during which the president stumbled over his words and lost his train of thought on several occasions.

Several other Democratic lawmakers have publicly warned that they expect him to lose to Trump in November’s presidential election.

Since then, Biden has been working to show he is still vigorous and capable, but that hasn’t quieted the calls for him to drop out.

On Friday night, Biden told Democratic lawmakers that he had received 87% of the votes in the primaries and had almost 3,900 delegates. “I’m the nominee of this party because 14 million Democrats like you voted for me in the primaries,” he told a rally in Detriot, Michigan.

“You made me the nominee. No one else. Not the press, not the pundits, not the insiders, not the donors,” he said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

At his recent press conference, Biden was asked about a potential challenge at the convention, if delegates have second thoughts.

“Obviously, they’re free to do whatever they want, but I get overwhelming support,” Biden said. “And so tomorrow, if all of a sudden, I show up at the convention, everybody says ‘we want somebody else,’ that’s the democratic process.”

But analysts say it’s not actually that simple.

At this point, President Biden is the only person qualified for the nomination, according to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), it was pointed out.

Under DNC rules, requests to nominate a candidate must be presented in writing and include written approval from the proposed nominee – as well as a petition with signatures from at least 300 convention delegates.

While there has been a lot of speculation that leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris or any of younger Democratic governors could be replacements for Biden, at this point no candidates have stepped forward to challenge him, and they have all said they are backing the president.

Delegates to the convention are currently “bound” to Biden because he handily won the primaries and caucuses earlier this year. And while Biden said they are free to do whatever they want, the DNC rules say “all delegates to the National Convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”

The New York Times editorial board, along with many of its highest-profile opinion columnists, called for President Biden to leave the race after the June 27 debate. The editorial board described Biden as “the shadow of a great public servant.”

Another factor: a plan announced by the Democratic National Committee long before Biden’s disastrous debate to do a virtual roll call vote sometime before the convention.

The DNC originally had made that decision to get around a deadline in an Ohio law to get the nominee on the November ballot. But now, it means delegates are expected to vote virtually well before the start of the convention on Aug. 19.

Two DNC committees are slated to meet July 19 and July 21 to finalize this plan and set a date for the virtual vote. But what this would likely mean is that by the time delegates show up at the convention hall in Chicago in August, Biden will already officially be the nominee.

If Biden decided to drop out, that would set off a series of events not seen in more than 50 years.

The party would then be headed for an open convention that could go to multiple rounds of voting if Democrats – and more importantly, convention delegates – don’t coalesce behind a single candidate before they convene in Chicago on August 19.

The convention could be preceded by something resembling a highly accelerated presidential campaign where the voters being wooed are the approximately 4,700 convention delegates. The delegate voting process is spelled out in Democratic party rules.

“You might not really know where it was going until we actually got to the convention and the delegates actually got there,” one expert said.