President Joe Biden and his allies are frustrated by the “lack of respect” toward him from Democrats and the media, according to a New York Times report.
A new report Monday suggested that President Joe Biden and his top aides are “furious” about the cold reception his projected 2024 re-election bid has received from fellow Democrats and the media.
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.
The president’s supporters also appear concerned about his low approval rating, which is less than 40 percent as of Tuesday
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 Tuesday, Biden’s average popularity rating across multiple polls is just 39.6 percent, according to poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight.
His unpopularity rating is 55.6 percent, just below an all-time high of 56.1 percent for Biden on June 26.
But Richmond brushed off his boss’s skepticism by directing it to other Democrats who simply saw an opportunity to put their nominee back in the race.
He said it was “a wing of our party that wanted a different candidate and I’m sure they’d like to get theirs back into the mix again.”
While establishment leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer have confirmed they will support Biden’s re-election bid, younger Democratic leaders like South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Joe Cunningham have called on him to pass the torch to a “new generation of leadership,” as the former representative. He said on CNN.
Lawmakers on the left spectrum from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Sen. Joe Manchin dodged questions about whether they would support Biden at 2-24.
However, speculation about a primary challenge to Biden has grown so high that even Vice President Kamala Harris was asked about it during a CNN interview on Monday.
“Joe Biden is running for re-election, and I will be his ticket mate,” Harris said. ‘a point. That’s it.’
Monday’s report indicates that the timing of Biden’s official re-election announcement will not come before the November midterm elections, the period Trump has teased in an effort to 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.
