Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, makes his way to the House votes at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, June 5, 2024.
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Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett called on President Joe Biden on Tuesday to “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential campaign.”
Doggett, 77, is the first incumbent Democratic lawmaker to formally call on his own party’s incumbent to drop his re-election bid against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
The call significantly ratchets up the pressure on Biden, 81, whose disastrous debate against Trump last week sent waves of panic among his supporters about his ability to win in November and serve another four years in the White House.
But Biden and his team have so far rejected any suggestion that he might leave the race.
In response to Doggett’s statement, a Biden campaign official told NBC News, “He’s staying in.”
Doggett explicitly linked his decision to Biden’s performance in the debate.
“President Biden continues to trail Democratic senators significantly in key states and trails Donald Trump in most polls,” Doggett said in a news release.
“I was hoping that the debate would provide an impetus to change that. That was not the case.”
“Instead of reassuring voters, the president failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies,” the lawmakers said.
“Our primary consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang,” Doggett wrote in the statement. “There is too much at stake to risk a Trump victory – too great a risk to assume that what couldn’t be changed in a year, what couldn’t be changed in the debate, can be changed now can.”
“President Biden saved our democracy by ridding us of Trump in 2020. He can’t hand us over to Trump in 2024,” Doggett said.
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2024-07-02 17:27:22
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