Poll: Big majorities of Democrats, independents think Biden should drop out

Sixty-five percent of Democratic voters and 77 percent of independents think Joe Biden should drop out of the 2024 presidential race, according to a new poll from the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Donald Trump gets some pushback – the poll has 51 percent of independents and 26 percent of Republicans saying he should drop out.

But, man.

According to the poll, released on Wednesday, younger Democrats (18-44) are more likely (75 percent) to want Biden out, as are White Democrats (67 percent) and Latino Democrats (64 percent).

Black Democrats, supposedly Biden’s intraparty firewall, are split 50 percent in favor of him staying in, 49 percent wanting him to drop out.

The public discussion among Democratic Party leaders about Biden’s future tamped down in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump last week, but multiple published reports have indicated that the talk behind the scenes has continued, and even ramped up.

Puck is reporting that “at least 50 people” on a Zoom call with Biden an hour before the assassination attempt were ready to publicly come out against the president after the call, with the consensus being that Biden’s disjointed responses to questions and issues raised during the call were “even worse than the debate,” according to one person who was on the call.

Against that backdrop, we have a news item from The New York Times today reporting that the Democratic National Committee has pushed back the start of the roll-call vote to formally make Biden the party’s presidential nominee to Aug. 1.

The reason for the virtual roll call is the Ohio state law requiring presidential candidates to be formally nominated by Aug. 7 in order to be able to have their names on ballots in the state.

The Democratic National Convention begins on Aug. 19.

Notably, there isn’t a consensus among top Democrats that the party needs to have its nominee in place by that Aug. 7 deadline, and a letter from the co-chairs of the party convention’s rules committee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Leah Daughtry, a longtime Democratic Party official, emphasized that “(n)o matter what may be reported, our goal is not to fast-track” the nomination.