Joe Biden's reelection effort was dealt a double blow on Wednesday when veteran Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi said Biden must make a “decision” about his future and actor George Clooney said Biden should be replaced as the party's presidential nominee.
The intervention of Pelosi and Clooney, who hosted a major fundraiser for Biden in California last month, was a major setback for the president, who was trying to prevent an all-out rebellion against his candidacy following last month's disastrous debate with Donald Trump.
“It's up to the president to decide whether he's going to run, and time is running out and we're all urging him to make that decision,” Pelosi, a former House speaker and one of the most influential Democrats, said in an interview on MSNBC.
Biden signaled to Democrats this week that he is determined to continue his reelection campaign, securing the support of some of his party's most powerful members.
But Ms. Pelosi's ambiguous comments suggest there remains deep uncertainty among rank-and-file Democrats about whether she should remain in the race. Though the 84-year-old Pelosi is one of Mr. Biden's most staunch supporters, her comments stopped short of an outright endorsement.
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Clooney separately retracted his support for Biden's reelection bid in a New York Times opinion piece, writing that while he loves Biden, “the only battle he can't win is against time.”
He added, “No one can say that. And it's shocking to say this, but the Joe Biden I was with at a fundraiser three weeks ago was not the 'big' Joe Biden of 2010. He wasn't even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same person we all saw at the debates.”
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut stepped up the pressure on the president on Wednesday, saying he was “deeply concerned that Joe Biden will win in November because a victory for Donald Trump poses an existential threat to our nation. I believe we need to reach a decision as quickly as possible.”
Senate Democrats were scheduled to meet over lunch on Thursday and with Biden campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon and senior White House officials, including Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, campaign officials said.
New York Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan later told The New York Times that Biden should withdraw “for the good of the country.”
Biden later faced another defection when veteran Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer also called on him to drop out of the race.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said lawmakers would continue to have a “frank, comprehensive and calm conversation” about Biden but believe the president will win the November election and Democrats can retake control of the House. But they are expected to convey their concerns to Biden, a congressional aide said.
Republicans are determined to exploit the turmoil within the Democratic Party. Republican Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, on Wednesday subpoenaed three of Biden's top aides for creating a “protective bubble” around the president to hide Biden's “declining cognitive abilities.”
Biden is scheduled to hold a news conference Thursday evening following the conclusion of a NATO summit he is hosting in Washington this week, before heading to Michigan for a campaign rally on Friday.
Speaker Pelosi urged Democrats on MSNBC to stop publicly voicing their discontent until after the NATO summit in Washington. “Leave it to him on the NATO meeting. You don't need to say what you're thinking until you've told somebody privately or you've seen how this week unfolds,” she said.
One of the most scathing rebukes to Biden's ongoing campaign came on CNN on Tuesday night by Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, who warned that Trump could win “a landslide victory.”
“President Biden certainly has a different view than I do about the prospects in this election, but we should have that discussion,” Bennet said. “And I don't think the White House has done anything since that disastrous debate to indicate that they have a plan for winning this election.”
Trump leads Biden by 2.1 percentage points, according to the FiveThirtyEight average of national polls, though Biden had a slim lead at the time of the debate in late June. Trump also has an advantage in battleground states that will decide the election in November.
In a sign of deepening anxiety among Democrats about the outcome of the November vote, New York Democrat Ritchie Torres warned on social media that “whoever we nominate must seriously consider the impact on lower-ranking candidates. It's not about how we feel, it's about what the numbers say.”
Meanwhile, Biden's former communications director, Kate Bedingfield, said the campaign still needed to show it could win the election. “If the campaign has data that supports a path to victory, they should make it public now and help rally around that data to those who desperately want to beat Trump. They want to know the path,” Bedingfield wrote on X.
