Vice President Kamala Harris has stirred up new uncertainty about whether President Biden will run for president in 2024 by revising comments she previously promised he would “completely stop.”
“Joe Biden is running for re-election, and I will be his ticket mate,” Harris said Monday in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. a point.’
On Wednesday, a reporter for the vice president’s pool said in an email widely circulated to other reporters: “The White House said VPOTUS wanted to clarify comments it made on CNN a few days ago.” When asked if Biden was definitely running, Harris replied. “The president intends to run and if he does, I will be his ticket mate. We will run together.
The new statement seemed less confident about the Biden-Harris ticket than the original version, and it’s unclear why the vice president’s office chose to put in less emphatic wording two days after the fact.
A Democrat close to the White House told Los Angeles Times That Harris’ review wasn’t a sign that Biden’s plans to run again had changed. Instead, the follow-up statement was to avoid using “teasers” that would lay out the FEC’s requirements for Biden to establish an official campaign and begin fundraising.
Vice President Kamala Harris has stirred up new uncertainty about whether President Biden will run for president in 2024 by revising comments she previously promised he would “completely stop.”
“Joe Biden is running for re-election, and I will be his ticket mate,” Harris said Monday in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. a point’
Biden, who was 81 when he ran for office for the second time, faced a myriad of debates about potential primary challengers than the other first-term president had earlier in office.
Lawmakers within the president’s party have been reluctant to get behind him at this point. Earlier this month, controversial Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declined to say she would support the Biden 2024 campaign during an interview on CNN.
Should he run again, I think I — you know, I think he — he is, we’ll take a look at it,” said the New York Democrat. “But right now, we need to focus on winning a majority, rather than a presidential election.”
Nor did he tell conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia The New York Times Whether he would support Biden, deflecting the question, “We’re just trying to do our day-to-day stuff, bro.”
“Trying to do what we need to do that’s good for the country,” said the senator, who has reportedly fielded requests from wealthy donors to run as a third-party candidate in 2024.
But Biden and his team see perceptions of him being a “lame duck” less than halfway through his first term as “disrespectful,” according to the Post’s reporting based on anonymous conversations with people who regularly speak with the commander-in-chief.
The report notes that Biden’s allies believe his ability to defeat Donald Trump in 2020 is reason enough to support his candidacy, which comes amid the former president’s ever-increasing hints that he is looking to run for office for the third time.
He cites left-wing Democratic voters’ frustration with party leaders at their failure to provide an adequate response to the Supreme Court overturning federal abortion protections in Roe v. Wade.
Many felt that Biden and congressional Democrats had not lived up to expectations after having spent more than a month preparing since a draft opinion written by Judge Samuel Alito was leaked to Politico early last month.
Progressives like “Team” members Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar have publicly called for broad letters to “go vote,” pushed by the Biden administration, without offering a more detailed plan for what Democrats could do with that support.
Cedric Richmond, a Biden adviser, told the Times that Democrats were also “putting too much into these polling numbers” that reflect a preferential problem that has plagued the president since about the middle of his first year in office.
As of Wednesday, Biden’s average approval rating across the full suite of polls is 39.2 percent, according to FiveThirty Eight.
On Tuesday, Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger declined to commit to supporting Biden-Harris’ ticket in 2024. “I’m looking squarely at 2022 and my re-election is in front of me,” she said.
Pressed on whether Biden was the best fit of the Democrats to take on Trump, the congresswoman said, “I’ve been very clear that I think there are incredible leaders across the Democratic Party and that it’s time to start new leadership.”
Meanwhile, 85% of adults in the United States say the country is on the wrong track, and 79% describe the economy as poor, according to dire findings in a new survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The Monday Times report notes that the timing of Biden’s official re-election announcement will not come before the November midterm elections, a period Trump has derided for his potential bid.
White House aides have also questioned challenges rumored to be brewing from current state leaders such as Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and California Governor Gavin Newsom.
They told the Times that Pritzker gave Biden advance notice before a recent speech in New Hampshire, a popular land for presidential aspirants, and that the popular moderate is also courting party leaders for the 2024 nominating convention in Chicago.
Newsom’s rant was written off as “a politician feeling his oats” after a decisive victory over opponents’ recall efforts.
