Actor Clooney and Senator Welch Lead Calls for Joe Biden to Exit Presidential Race
Key Democrats are beginning to question President Joe Biden‘s capacity to defeat Donald Trump in their November 5, 2024, presidential rematch.
Doubts over Biden’s ability to garner enough votes from Americans to remain in power have substantially increased after a disappointing first presidential debate with Trump.
While Biden, 81, the oldest president in American history, has repeatedly stated that he’s staying in the race, key figures within the party have asked him to step aside.
On Wednesday, July 10, Peter Welch, in an opinion piece published in The Washington Post, asked the President to exit the race for the good of the country.
Welch, a long-serving member of Congress from Vermont, is now the first Democratic Senator to ask Biden to withdraw from the race.
“We cannot unsee President Biden’s disastrous debate performance. We cannot ignore or dismiss the valid questions raised since that night. For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race,” Welch wrote.
Age Fuels Calls For Joe Biden To Quit Presidential Race
George Clooney, an actor and film producer who has been strategic in some of the Democrats’ biggest fundraising efforts, alleged that President Biden’s poor performance in the debate and his other public outings is due to his age.
“This is about age. Nothing more. But also nothing that can be reversed. We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate,” he wrote in his recent opinion piece published in The New York Times.
In 2020, Clooney co-hosted a virtual fundraiser for Biden’s presidential campaign that brought in $7 million.
Last month, he also co-hosted what is considered the single largest fundraiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever, which raised at least $28 million for President Biden’s reelection campaign.
But after the June 28 presidential debate, where Biden sounded incoherent most of the time, the four-time Golden Globe Award winner asked for Biden to step aside for a new nominee.
“I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” Clooney wrote.
“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Clooney
However, other Democrats believe that the decision to stay in the race is entirely up to President Biden.
Nancy Pelosi, a senior Democrat and former Speaker of the House of Representatives, when asked if she thinks that President Joe Biden is the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump, said she “thinks the President is great,” adding that “the decision to stay in the race is entirely up to the President.”
Last week, President Biden reiterated that he’s still in the race.
