The Democrat Who Thinks Biden Didn’t Go Far Enough
6 min read
In the hours after President Joe Biden announced that he was ending his bid for reelection, most congressional Democrats lauded the move as a selfless, even heroic, act of leadership. Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, however, wasn’t satisfied. In a statement, the first-term House Democrat from Washington State praised Biden’s decision to withdraw but said that most of her constituents “do not have confidence in the President’s fitness to serve.”
Gluesenkamp Perez was raising a question that few Democrats—even those who called on Biden to withdraw from the race—have been willing to entertain publicly: Should the president resign?
Republicans, by contrast, can’t seem to entertain it enough. “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement less than an hour after Biden’s announcement on Sunday. “He must resign the office immediately.” A stream of similar demands followed.
Republicans have ample motivation to question Biden’s fitness. But polls taken shortly after his disastrous debate last month found that a majority of respondents—including a significant number of Democrats—agreed that he wasn’t capable of discharging his duties as president.
If congressional Democrats feel the same, they’re not inclined to say. During the past two weeks, I have spoken with more than a dozen of them who pushed, either publicly or privately, for Biden to abandon his reelection campaign; none voiced doubts about his ability to complete his term. Biden and his aides, for their part, have been adamant that he remains capable of governing, just as they were adamant that he would stay in the race until the moment he decided not to. “Over the next six months, I will be focused on doing my job as president,” Biden said during an Oval Office address on Wednesday night while explaining his decision to end his campaign.
Gluesenkamp Perez, who declined through a spokesperson to elaborate on her comments, isn’t entirely alone within her caucus in expressing doubts about Biden’s fitness to serve. “I’m asking the same questions that I know millions and millions of Americans are asking themselves,” Representative Jared Golden of Maine said earlier this month, “which is: What is the physical and mental state of health of the president of the United States?” An adviser to Gluesenkamp Perez, speaking on the condition of anonymity, framed the congresswoman’s statement similarly, arguing that she was giving voice to a “mainstream view” that many of her Democratic colleagues were uncomfortable expressing publicly. “She’s in a political position where she can say things that other people may be thinking but don’t feel like they can say.”
Perhaps—though other Democrats saw Gluesenkamp Perez’s statement differently, interpreting it as a play to her constituents, a majority of whom voted for Donald Trump in 2020. “I want her to win and am happy to have her say whatever she needs to do to win,” Representative Sean Casten of Illinois told me. “But that’s decidedly not a view that’s shared by any number of Democrats.”
After the debate, Biden scheduled a flurry of public appearances in hopes that voters might start to forget his raspy whisper, unintelligible answers, and gaping stares. But the effort yielded another set of stumbles—references to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” and Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump”—that confirmed for many Democrats that Biden wouldn’t be able to win back voters.
Still, some Democrats were reassured that he was at least still up to the job of president. “I think he demonstrated at the NATO conference his ability, even though he mixed up some names,” Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas, who was the first House Democrat to urge Biden to stand down as a candidate, told me. “He answered in-depth foreign-relations questions in a substantive way.” Biden’s appearances may have left a similar impression on voters. In contrast with polls taken before his withdrawal, surveys from this week found that most respondents feel he should finish his term.
In recent weeks, most Democrats have limited their criticism of the president to his electoral chances rather than to his capacity to govern. “I have no concerns over him continuing to serve,” Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania told me earlier this week. She was one of several Democrats to confront Biden privately about his flagging poll numbers during a July 13 Zoom call with members of the moderate New Democrat Coalition. The president’s defensive response frustrated the lawmakers, people on the call told me, but Houlahan said that his forcefulness demonstrated “how capable he is.”
“This has never been about his capability to be the president of the United States,” Houlahan told me. “This has always been about his viability as a candidate.”
Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, another long-serving Democrat who’d urged Biden to bow out, told me the president would benefit from being able to focus solely on governing without having to worry about the campaign. “The things that need to be done now are Joe Biden’s strength,” Blumenauer said, citing the need to aid Ukraine and help negotiate an end to the fighting in Gaza. “He doesn’t have to get up and perform in front of the raucous crowd and be baited politically; he needs to sit down, roll up his sleeves, and work with people on things that he’s done such a superb job on.”
Even if Biden is competent enough to finish his term, he might have good reasons to consider resigning. Handing the presidency to Harris, who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee, would allow her to run as an incumbent—generally an electoral advantage, although not always—and demonstrate to voters her ability to do the job before they go to the polls. The glass ceiling would be broken, along with whatever taboos still exist for some Americans about having a woman lead the country. “What a political legacy!” Garance Franke-Ruta wrote in TheNew Republic when she advanced the idea earlier this month.
Doggett told me that this was “a credible argument,” but one with which he disagreed. “Starting in this race so late, [Harris] needs every moment she can get to go to the key places she needs to be and get her message out there,” Doggett said. “So I think it works to her advantage that she doesn’t have the added responsibility of being the most powerful person in the world.”
Other Democrats were more dismissive. Casten, who had called on Biden to end his campaign last week, derided talk of the president’s resignation as “West Wing–level political pontification” and “a fundamentally stupid idea in the real world.”
With the party newly energized and rallying around Harris, most Democrats want the debate about Biden’s age and fitness to go away. But even as they voice confidence in his ability, the speed with which events have shifted over the past month—the debate debacle, an assassination attempt, Biden’s withdrawal—have given some of them pause about declaring that Biden will finish his term. “Things change, right? I would hesitate to say I have no doubt about his fitness, because I don’t know what is going to happen,” Representative Ann Kuster of New Hampshire told me. “In the present tense, I am not at all concerned.”
