Calls for Biden to stand aside grow after presidential debate

President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have squared off in the first debate of the 2024 United States presidential race, seeking to pull ahead in a match-up that has, so far, been in a dead heat.

For Democrats who tuned into Thursday night’s debate looking to calm their worries about President Joe Biden’s age and acuity, they came away with zero remedy. Within 10 minutes of the CNN-hosted event’s start, some of even Biden’s most loyal supporters found themselves asking if the nomination was, in fact, settled, a report by the Time said.

According to The Guardian, Adrianne Shropshire, Executive director of Blackpac, an organization that works to mobilize black voters, told Reuters she wrote down two things in her notepad while watching the debate.

“One is that Trump lies,” she said. The other was that Biden “was not as forceful as I thought he needed to be.”

Shropshire criticised the moderators for allowing Trump to make various false claims without any pushback.

Trump was essentially allowed to do what he does at his rallies, which is say whatever he wants, regardless of the relationship it has to the truth. And that was really unfortunate.”

Shropshire said Biden could have pushed back on Trump’s false claims more forcefully.

“I think he tried to take the high road by talking policy. And I think that has its place. But when we think about where our politics are right now, there really is a need to just assert facts and assert them very clearly. And I think that got muddled a bit in his policy responses.”

Shropshire said she was not as worried as others who have said Biden had an unsteady performance that could increase about his age. “He has great performances that people have talked about just in the past few months,” she said.

“I also think that it just doesn’t change the dynamics of the race, because they also saw Trump standing next to Joe Biden, and I don’t think that they saw someone who was stronger necessarily. I think they saw the same unhinged Trump that they see at every rally and in clips when they’re on social media.”

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, has taken aim at Trump’s claiming – falsely –during the debate that she was responsible for the January 6th insurrection.

“How dare he place the blame for January 6th on anyone but himself, the inciter of an insurrection?” she wrote on X/Twitter.

According to the CNN report, this debate was historic for many reasons, but not least because it is taking place before each man is formally nominated at their respective conventions. The Democratic National Convention is set to convene August 19 in Chicago.

Democrats have spent much of the past year handwringing about Biden’s chances of beating Trump in an election many view as an existential one that will decide the very survival of American democracy. But Biden himself was determined to be the one to take on Trump, at one point even saying directly: “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.”

No serious Democratic challengers stepped up to run against Biden, and at this point in the campaign he’d have to decide to step aside if Democrats were to pick another nominee. If Biden did withdraw, the Democratic nomination would be decided on the floor.

Democrats were even talking about who it might be instead: “If I was Gavin (Newsom) or Gretchen (Whitmer), I’d be making calls tonight,” one said.