California Representative Adam Schiff has become the highest-profile Democrat to call for US President Joe Biden to drop his re-election bid.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
The statement comes as the party pushes ahead with plans to hold a virtual vote to formally make Biden its nominee in the first week of August before the Democratic convention opens in person two weeks later.
Schiff is the 20th congressional Democrat to publicly urge Biden to withdraw from the presidential race.
"A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the President can defeat Donald Trump in November," Schiff, a California Democrat who is running for the Senate, was quoted by the Los Angeles Times newspaper as saying.
Democratic concern about the 81-year-old incumbent's ability to beat Republican challenger Trump, or to serve another four years in office, surged after Biden's halting June 27 debate performance.
Trump is currently in Milwaukee where his fellow Republicans are formally nominating him as candidate, days after he narrowly escaped an assassin's bullet at a Pennsylvania campaign stop.
Nearly two-thirds of Democrat voters say Biden should step aside and let his party nominate a different candidate, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released on Wednesday, undercutting his post-debate claim that "average Democrats" are still with him even if some"big names" are turning on him.
"While the choice to withdraw from the campaign is President Biden's alone, I believe it is time for him to pass the torch," Schiff said in a statement.
"And in doing so, secure his legacy of leadership by allowing us to defeat Donald Trump in the upcoming election."
Schiff's announcement comes after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries encouraged the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to delay for a week plans to hold a virtual vote to renominate Biden, which could have taken place as soon as Sunday, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The DNC's rules committee will meet on Friday to discuss the virtual vote plans and will finalise them next week, according to a letter sent to members obtained on Wednesday by The Associated Press.
The letter from co-chairs Bishop Leah D Daughtry and Minnesota governor Tim Walz states that the virtual roll call vote will not take place before August 1 but that the party is still committed to holding a vote before August 7, which had been the filing deadline to get on Ohio's presidential ballot.
"We will not be implementing a rushed virtual voting process," Daughtry and Walz wrote, "though we will begin our important consideration of how a virtual voting process would work".
The Democratic convention opens on August 19 in Chicago but the party announced in May that it would hold an early roll call to ensure Biden would qualify for the ballot in Ohio.
Ohio originally had an August 7 deadline but has since changed its rules.
Biden's campaign insists that the party must operate under Ohio's initial rules to ensure Republican lawmakers cannot mount legal challenges to keep the president off the ballot.
Even if Democrats conduct a virtual roll call vote ahead of their convention, meanwhile, it would not necessarily lock Biden into the nomination.
The DNC rule-making arm could vote to hold an in-person roll call in Chicago, said Elaine Kamarck, a longtime member of that committee and expert on the party's nominating process.
But since the Ohio law does not go into effect until September 1, Biden appearing on the state's ballot remains a real concern, Kamarck said.
"This is a failsafe for the Democrats," Kamarck said, adding that "the convention is the highest authority" in the nominating process.
The AP-NORC poll, conducted as Biden works to salvage his candidacy two weeks after his debate flop, also found that only about three in 10 Democrats are extremely or very confident that he has the mental capability to serve effectively as president, down slightly from 40 per cent in an AP-NORC poll in February.
with AP
Australian Associated Press
