By Maria Ortiz
02 Jul 2024, 22:24 PM EDT
House Rep. Lloyd Doggett has become the first Democrat to publicly call for President Joe Biden to step down as a presidential candidate in the 2024 election, citing Biden’s failure to “effectively defend his many accomplishments” in his debate performance against Donald Trump.
Texas Rep. Doggett argued that the Democratic Party should reflect on who has the best chance of beating Trump in the Nov. 5 election and considered Biden’s performance in the debate failed to change the trend of the pollswhich puts him behind the Republican presidential candidate of the past year.
“We must consider who has the greatest hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang. The stakes are too high to risk a Trump victory, too high a risk to assume that what could not be changed in the debate could be changed now,” Doggett said in a statement.
“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020. He must not hand us over to Trump in 2024,” the Democrat added.
Doggett, who has served in the House of Representatives since 1995, said the debate was expected to give Biden some momentum and help him improve his poll numbers, “but it was not like that”.
“Instead of reassuring voters, the president failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments or expose Trump’s lies,” he said.
Doggett, 77, just four years younger than Biden, concluded by recalling that the president’s “first commitment” has always been to the good of the nation and not to himself, which is why she hopes he will make “the painful and difficult decision to withdraw” from the race for the House of Representatives.
“I respectfully ask you to do so,” he concluded in his statement.
Doggett’s petition has great symbolic power not only because He is the first member of Congress to publicly call on Biden to step downbut because it represents a large part of a Texas district that also elected Lyndon Johnson, president from 1963 to 1969, who made the decision not to run for re-election.
Johnson’s decision caused deep divisions among Democrats and led to a tumultuous convention to elect the party’s candidate in August 1968 in Chicago, where the Democrats will hold their own convention this year.
Biden has so far given no indication that he wants to drop out of the race for the White House after the debate against Trump, in which he projected an aged image, with a hoarse voice and difficulty finishing some of his sentences.
Among those who have publicly questioned Biden’s performance are former Democratic Senator from Missouri Claire McCaskill (2007-2019) and Democratic legislator Jamie Raskin, who said in an interview on MSNBC that the party is having “very honest, serious and rigorous conversations” on the matter.
The New York Times, in its editorial, called on Biden to abandon the campaign, and several columnists have also echoed that call, including the influential Thomas L. Friedman, a personal friend of the president.
However, leading figures in the Democratic Party, such as former President Barack Obama, have rallied around him.
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