President Joe Biden, right, and former President Donald Trump left, on a television screen at Tillie's Lounge during the presidential debate Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Cincinnati.
Coming out of Atlanta with a horribly received debate performance, demands now arise from the Democratic Party environment and the American mainstream media to ask US President Joe Biden to step down from the presidential race.
However, the 81-year-old President and his campaign apparatus asserted that he is audacious to go on further and gunning for a successful run in the November 5 presidential polls.
"Mr. Biden is the Democratic Party's nominee. There will be no change in nominee," the campaign leadership has said.
Biden won as the 46th President of the United States, thus clinching the Democratic Presidential Primary.
By June 29, he had won 3,894 delegates, far more than the 1,975 needed to capture the party's nomination. All these delegates will meet in Chicago from August 19 to 22 to formally choose their primary winner for presidential elections on November 5.
It was an embarrassing moment for the reelection bid of Joe Biden, as he stumbled through a televised debate with predecessor Donald Trump in Atlanta Thursday, conspicuously misarticulating key messages to such an extent that top Democrats are now questioning whether he has the stamina for the rigors of demanding campaign season that culminates November 5.
The 78-year-old Trump is the presumptive Republican candidate who sparred with Biden from the word go itself, giving ample material for critical editorials, opinions, and social media memes at the end of the 90-minute debate.
It's now been 50 hours since the presidential debate in Atlanta; somewhere between then and now, many media voices like The New York Times have leaned theirs toward the side of Biden—a man whose poor performance juxtaposed against Trump galvanized his own party loyalists and key decision-making people to ask him to step out.
"Mr. Biden's most patriotic option is to drop out," Saturday's Atlantic editorialized.
"To serve his country, President Biden should exit the race," the New York Times editorial board wrote after the debate.
The New York Times editorialized, "That is no longer enough to justify why Mr. Biden must be the Democratic nominee in 2024." Some Democrats are now starting to make the same argument.
Still, those close to Biden are sticking by the president.
Indeed, a post-debate poll shows 10 percent of independent voters moving toward Joe Biden post-debate, his team highlights.
"It wasn't my best debate ever, as Barack pointed out. I understand the concern after the debate," Joe Biden told his fund-raiser in New Jersey. "I get it. I didn't have a great night, but I'm going to fight harder," he said.
"Research during the debate shows us converting more undecided voters than Trump did, largely due to his conduct on January 6," Biden said. The former president's falsehoods were the greatest takeaway, he argued, because "people remember the bad things during his presidency."
"I didn't have a great night, but neither did he," he added about Trump.
Quite a number of influential columnists—including Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Alter, and David Ignatius— feel that the possibility of an emaciated Biden losing to Trump is too great to take the gamble.
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