So President Biden will seek to reassure union leaders today
that he is in fact capable of running for re
election.
Another Democrat in Congress, though,
is now on the record calling for him to bow
out.
All right, so we have these two competing narratives here.
Douglas Ader has more from Washington this morning.
Doug, good morning, Good morning.
All right, so President Biden just talked to the governor's
yesterday.
Anita just mentioned he is now reaching up to union
leaders.
Is this having an impact?
Well, you know, they're trying to kind of circle the
wagons.
So he's going back to these reliable constituencies,
unions today. He's spoken to Democratic mayors,
the Congressional Black Caucus, which has been very supportive of
him.
So he's trying to do this at the same time
that there are some more defections here on Capitol Hill.
We now have seven Democratic House members saying that Biden
should not run for re election.
That's still a relatively small number.
So this is a question of kind of management right
now whether the Biden team can make sure that it
kind of ends there with those seven or whether that
number continues to grow. And the other thing is we
haven't had any senators,
Democratic senators come out and publicly say that Biden shouldn't
run.
And this is, you know,
it's with the president was to keep it that way.
So they're trying to manage all of this and kind
of buy themselves some time to make it.
So it's really too late to replace Biden on the
ticket.
Yeah. And when you speak of the issue of time,
we've had several days now where
former President Donald Trump has been relatively silent,
but then finally coming out to another campaign rally.
Yeah. And you listen, I,
I I think if if you were an advisor to
Trump,
you probably probably would have told him to do this,
to just kind of lay low while Democrats go through
all of this drama.
He did return to the campaign trail after a fair
amount of time off yesterday and had this big rally
in Florida and really went after Biden.
There was another challenge to a golf match
that has been going back and forth
between the two of them and another challenge to a
debate.
And you know, that's an open question whether there is
going to be
that second debate between these two.
Is there a limit to how long this chatter and
these competing narratives where there's defection,
another defection one day and a certain
contingent that are supporting the president,
is there a limit to how long this can go
on before the president will not be able to recover
in time to get reelected?
Yeah. And I guess the flip side of this is
how long will it be until his detractors within the
party realize that there just isn't time left to replace
him. So this really is kind of a waiting game
on both sides here.
There is theoretically time to replace Biden at the top
of the ticket right now.
But it it's it's it's
the the quantity is decreasing,
obviously every single day here.
And it does get more and more difficult.
Even if they were to transition to Kamala Harris at
the top of the ticket,
that would really require a voluntary removal from the race,
though, on the part of Joe Biden.
And by every indication, he's staying in this.
Yeah, absolutely. OK. Thank you.
Doug Luzader there in Washington.
We'll check back in with you tomorrow.