First came donors who expressed concerns about President Joe Biden’s suitability to run for reelection.
Then this week, elected Democrats began wondering aloud whether the 81-year-old should step aside.
Now, an exclusive poll for DailyMail.com reveals that half of all voters believe he should give up while there is still time to find a replacement candidate, including more than a third of Democratic voters, after his disastrous debate performance.
On Wednesday, Biden said he had no intention of giving up on winning a second term.
“I’m running. I’m the leader of the Democratic Party. Nobody’s going to kick me out,” he said, according to a senior official who posted his comment on social media site X.
JL Partners surveyed 1,000 likely voters on the state of the race after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance sparked calls for him to drop out.
But Biden is under intense pressure to reconsider his position after a halting debate performance, during which his answers either stalled or wandered into meaningless questions.
The White House has even had to defend itself against questions about whether he suffers from dementia.
Democrats are increasingly concerned that Biden is no longer the best candidate to beat Donald Trump in November.
A poll of 1,000 likely voters by JL Partners found that 50 percent thought he should step down as a candidate.
About 34 percent of Democrats support that view, as does 29 percent of people who said they planned to vote for him this time around.
Whether or not he runs is up to Biden, but one in three Democrats also believe the party should act against him at its convention in Chicago next month if he does not voluntarily withdraw.
The drip, drip, drip of worry risks becoming an unstoppable stream, said James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners.
“It’s hard to win an election in America. It’s even harder to win an election when almost half the country thinks you should resign,” he said.
‘It’s very difficult to see how this can change for Joe Biden.
“This poll tells me that Biden cannot turn things around and if Democrats want a chance of winning they need to find another candidate.”
Biden struggled during a debate last week. The White House admitted he didn’t have a great night, but said he was suffering from a cold and a busy international travel schedule.
A day later, he put in a better performance during a rally in North Carolina, where he was able to rely on a teleprompter and the roar of the crowd to get him through the presentation.
The Biden campaign has been in damage limitation mode since last Thursday, when they faced off in their first televised debate of the campaign.
Biden’s team had pushed for such an early showdown in hopes of using it to remind viewers of the chaos of Trump’s years in power. The strategy backfired miserably.
Biden’s halting performance, at times stopping mid-sentence and gaping as Trump spoke, dominated headlines.
Two campaign calls to donors and party officials over the weekend failed to allay concerns, and some people on the calls said they were surprised the debate performance was ignored.
Over the weekend, donor Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund manager, broke ranks and called for Biden to drop out of the race. Several elected officials followed suit.
Adding to the pressure, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it was now legitimate to ask whether his performance was an “episode” or a condition.
Last year, Biden was leading Trump, but the former president has since taken the lead. Trump now has a six-point lead, according to our exclusive poll.
Biden’s allies and the White House continue to insist that he should not be defined by one “bad night” in June.
But the Daily Mail poll showed Biden had fallen to his lowest position against Biden since we started tracking the data last year.
He found that if the election were held tomorrow, Trump would win by six points, beating Biden by 43 points to 37.
The former president has extended his lead by two points since our last poll in March.
Women still prefer Biden over Trump, but he is losing support among men. The former president’s lead has gone from 10 points at the time to 18 points today.