U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley on Friday urged President Joe Biden not to run for a second term, making him the first member of the Illinois Democratic delegation to join a small but growing group of party members urging Biden to withdraw from the race against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“Mr. President, your legacy is set. We owe you the utmost. The only thing you can do now to cement that forever and prevent total ruin is to step down and let somebody else take over,” Quigley said in an interview Friday night on MSNBC's “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Quigley's comments came just hours after Biden repeatedly declared during an event in Madison, Wisconsin, and in a television interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he would continue to campaign defiantly, despite his poor, at-times confused and even ineffectual, performance in last week's debate with Trump.
“You all know we had a little debate last week, not my best performance, but since then there's been a lot of speculation. What is Joe going to do? Is he going to stay in the race? What is he going to do? Here's my answer: I'm going to run and I'm going to win again,” Biden said at the Madison event, held in a middle school gym. “They're trying to throw me out of the race. I'll be very clear to you, I'm going to stay in the race.”
Other Democrats, including Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, have also called for Biden to step down, but Quigley is the first prominent Democrat from Illinois to join the call. Quigley, who first ran in 2009, is also a Chicago native, and the city will host the Democratic National Convention next month, where Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have long been expected to celebrate their renomination to face off against President Trump in November.
Quigley's comments came just two days after the 81-year-old Biden met with Democratic governors from around the country to try to ease concerns about his age, mental health and ability to beat Trump a second time. Among those meeting with Biden at the White House was Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has been mentioned multiple times as a possible successor to Biden and has White House ambitions.
After the meeting, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said of Biden that his state's governors “support him.”
“The path to victory in November is our No. 1 priority and it's the president's No. 1 priority, so we're going to get that done,” Walz, who is chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, told reporters outside the White House on Wednesday. “The feedback has been good, the conversations have been honest and open, and the actions that come out of that will ensure we get that message across.”
But despite Biden's efforts to reach out to governors, some Democrats said privately that the meeting was too little, too late, as questions swirled about whether the president's reelection campaign would survive.
A spokesman for Pritzker's political team said Wednesday that the roughly 90-minute conversation was “candid and the governor appreciated hearing directly from the president.”
