The Democratic National Committee is considering formally nominating President Joe Biden to run for president in the November elections as early as mid-July, that is, before the party convention in August, Bloomberg reports.
According to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity, the potential date for Biden’s nomination is July 21, when the Democratic convention’s credentials committee will hold a virtual meeting. Democrats were already planning to nominate the 81-year-old Biden before the August convention to ensure he is on the ballot in Ohio, where candidate certification expires on August 7.
The DNC denied that the early nomination was a response to the fallout from Biden’s debate performance, saying it was “false” and pointing to Ohio’s previous ballot deadline as an incentive. Democratic National Committee communications director Rosemary Boeglin said in a statement:
“We’ve said for weeks that the DNC would hold a virtual roll call in the lead-up to our in-person convention as a result of the OH GOP’s bad-faith attempts to keep Joe Biden off of their general election ballot.”
The actual nomination of Biden before the convention ensures that Biden will be on state ballots, but the timing is good. It will allow the party to rally even more around its candidate despite insiders calling for him to step aside and pick a new candidate after his poor debate performance on June 27.
In the days since the debate, Biden’s allies have taken a defiant stance, angrily rejecting calls for the oldest president in US history to stop running for re-election. The incumbent president won about 99 per cent of his party’s delegates in the 2024 primaries, giving him a lot of influence over the party establishment.
However, even before the debate, polls showed that Biden’s re-election would be difficult due to voters’ concerns about his age and ability to serve a second term.
Meanwhile, the world media are discussing the failure, in the opinion of many experts and ordinary viewers, of US President Joe Biden’s performance at the first debate with his future election rival Donald Trump. Not much was expected from Biden, but he failed to live up to even those expectations, experts believe. CNN stated:
“Biden’s performance at the debate was a wake-up call for top Democrats. So alarming, in fact, that some of them have spoken out loud about whether the Democratic Party should field another candidate in the upcoming presidential election.”
US Vice President Kamala Harris tried to defend Biden from the attacks, saying that he “took a long time to swing” but picked up the pace by the final debate. She said the debate “made it abundantly clear that Joe Biden is fighting on behalf of the American people.” She said:
“One can argue about the style of the speech but ultimately the outcome of the upcoming election and who becomes president of the United States should depend not on form but on content. And in that sense, the contrast with Trump is obvious.”
