The Next Shoe Drops in the Push to Get Joe Biden Off the Democrat Ticket

Though there's been a lot of post-debate chatter about how there are a growing number of Congressional Democrats who want Joe Biden to exit the presidential race, before Wednesday only one had stepped up to the plate.

The first one, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), issued a statement Tuesday saying the time had come for Biden to withdraw.

"Too much is at stake to risk a Trump victory – too great a risk to assume that what could not be turned around in a year, what was not turned around in the debate, can be turned around now," Doggett declared, also saying "I respectfully call on" Biden to bow out.

The next shoe to drop in the mad push to dump Joe has come from another House Democrat, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), who said Wednesday in an interview with the New York Times that the best thing Biden could do at this point was to step aside so Democrats would have a chance of keeping the White House:

“If he’s the candidate, I’m going to support him, but I think that this is an opportunity to look elsewhere,” Grijalva said in an interview. Referring to Biden, Grijalva added, “What he needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.”

It was a rather remarkable call to make considering the Congressman had tweeted this out not quite 24 hours after Biden confirmed via the debate that much of what his critics have said about his mental acuity is true:

This election is a clear choice: protect our freedoms and democracy with @JoeBiden, or succumb to a convicted felon's unhinged vengeance and reckless desire to destroy everything to save himself. To stop Trump, we must win AZ. I'm ALL IN and will do all I can to make sure we win.
— Rep. Raúl Grijalva (@standwithraul) June 28, 2024

As we previously reported, another House Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), wrote an op-ed that appeared Tuesday in the Bangor Daily News in which he addressed the fallout from Biden's debate performance.

Though he stopped short of calling on Biden to exit the race, Golden said Democrat fears of democracy or whatever being at stake were way overblown:

While I don’t plan to vote for him, Donald Trump is going to win. And I’m OK with that.
There are winners and losers in every election. Democrats’ post-debate hand-wringing is based on the idea that a Trump victory is not just a political loss, but a unique threat to our democracy. I reject the premise. Unlike Biden and many others, I refuse to participate in a campaign to scare voters with the idea that Trump will end our democratic system.

And as further evidence of how the sense of urgency on the Democrat side has grown, at least 25 Democrats in competitive districts have also reportedly been mulling over the possibility of formally writing a letter to Biden asking him to walk away from his reelection campaign.

It's hard to see how Biden gets out of this, but as he announced earlier, he's not going anywhere and has vowed to win the election. But a second disastrous debate will seal his political fate, and at that point, it will be all over but the crying.