In the ongoing soap opera “As Biden’s Candidacy Turns,” we may have seen the biggest plot twist yet: a swing-state senator up for re-election, telling Biden publicly that he needs to quit.
In a short, tersely worded statement Friday night, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown urged President Joe Biden to drop his campaign for a second term, joining 35 Democrats in Congress, Forbes reported.
“Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard from Ohioans on important issues, such as how to continue to grow jobs in our state, give law enforcement the resources to crack down on fentanyl, protect Social Security and Medicare from cuts, and prevent the ongoing efforts to impose a national abortion ban,” he wrote in a statement.
“These are the issues Ohioans care about and it is my job to keep fighting for them.
Then, the statement shifted abruptly: “I agree with the many Ohioans who have reached out to me,” he wrote.
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“At this critical time, our full attention must return to these important issues. I think the President should end his campaign.”
I agree with the many Ohioans who have reached out to me. At this critical time, our full attention must return to these important issues. I think the President should end his campaign. pic.twitter.com/dwKMZJzMfu
— Sherrod Brown (@SherrodBrown) July 19, 2024
Only two other senators have joined the call for Biden to step aside as nominee: Sens. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Jon Tester of Montana.
Should Joe Biden step aside as the Democratic nominee?
Both are up for re-election; according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Tester is currently behind to Republican nominee Tim Sheehy by 1.5 points, but he’s long been seen as a moderate within the party and one of the most likely to go, given how red his state usually is, no matter how popular Biden remains.
Heinrich, meanwhile, normally wouldn’t be in trouble, given New Mexico’s reliable history of going blue. However, at the July 3 closed-door governor’s meeting following the president’s dismal debate performance, Democrat New Mexico Gov. Michelle Luján Grisham told Biden her data showed he was at risk of losing her state, according to The New York Times — a canary in an electoral landslide coal-mine if there ever was one.
Brown is the last major Democratic statewide elected official, meanwhile, and one who had harbored potential 2028 presidential aspirations, albeit long-shot ones. However, while Tester’s loss seems to be a fait accompli for the Democrats and a Heinrich loss would signal such a massive electoral defeat that the fallout would be difficult to fathom, Brown is a slight prohibitive favorite — albeit who will likely be dragged down by Biden.
In the RealClearPolitics polling average, Brown leads his Republican opponent, businessman Bernie Moreno, by 45.4 percent to 40.2 percent as of Friday. However, Moreno’s first statewide victory was his win in the Republican primary, meaning he has far less name recognition than Brown, who’s been a senator since 2007.
More worrying, too, is the the RealClearPolitics average for president in Ohio: Trump 52.0, Biden 41.3. At this point, it’s not even really considered a swing state for the president — and all of the polls in the aggregate came before both the assassination attempt against Trump and his choice of Ohio’s other senator, J.D. Vance, as his running mate. With Biden acting as an anchor on Brown’s campaign, those polls could swing very quickly. Not only that, but Brown’s defection will likely hurt Biden in other Rust Belt states where he’s still polling better.
Brown’s move comes at an awkward time, since the Biden campaign seemed to be digging its heels in — again.
On Thursday, before the last night of the Republican National Convention began, Axios reported that top Democrats believed Biden would announce he would step aside as nominee over the weekend due to the pressure from top Democrats and COVID-19 taking him off the campaign trail at a critical time.
The Axios report said that “privately [Biden is] resigned to mounting pressure, bad polls, and untenable scrutiny making it impossible to continue his campaign, the Democrats tell us.”
After Trump’s acceptance speech, however, the Biden campaign put out a statement saying that “President Biden is more determined than ever to defeat Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda in November.” That could be dismissed as pro forma posturing, however — until his campaign put out a memo Friday insisting in no uncertain terms that Biden still had the votes to become nominee, believed he could win, and had no intention of stepping aside.
“While voters consistently mention President Biden’s age when contacted, our target voters — both reengagement and true swing voters — are still planning to vote for him, making it clear the debate has not hurt support among the voters who will decide this election,” read the memo, written by Biden campaign battleground states director Dan Kanninen and first obtained by NBC News.
“Joe Biden has made it more than clear: he’s in this race and he’s in it to win it. Moreover, he’s the presumptive nominee, there is no plan for an alternative nominee,” it added.
“In a few short weeks, Joe Biden will be the official nominee. It is high past time we stop fighting one another … The only person who wins when we fight is Donald Trump.”
Later in the day, the New York Times also reported that Biden was bucking back against the pressure from top party officials, with the paper describing the convalescing Biden as “fuming at his Delaware beach house, increasingly resentful about what he sees as an orchestrated campaign to drive him out of the race and bitter toward some of those he once considered close, including his onetime running mate Barack Obama.”
However, the paper added that “privately people close to [Biden] have said that he is increasingly accepting that he may not be able to” continue.
“One factor that may stretch out a decision: Advisers believe that Mr. Biden would not want to do it before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visits Washington on Wednesday at the initiative of Republicans to address Congress, unwilling to give the premier the satisfaction given their strained relations lately over the Gaza war,” the report stressed.
Furthermore, the report added that “Mr. Biden bristles at pressure and those pushing him risk getting his back up and prompting him to remain after all.”
That being said, the clock is ticking, and petty grievances against Prime Minister Netanyahu or allies informing him of reality won’t make what would be an already chaotic transition to another nominee any smoother. And, unless the president is truly so far gone as to be diagnosably delusional, the question with Brown’s defection now seems to be when, not if, Biden bows out.
