Joe Biden Pours Cold Water on Wave of Calls to Resign

President Joe Biden assured his supporters Wednesday night that he remains in the 2024 presidential race.

In an email sent by the Biden campaign, the president addressed the “difficult” few days that followed his first debate of the election cycle. The president took the stage last week against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee in November.

Biden’s poor performance has reignited concerns about his age and mental health, and several Democrats, including two incumbent members of the House of Representatives, have called on the president to drop out of the 2024 nomination race.

“Folks, I know the last few days have been tough,” reads a Biden campaign email obtained by Newsweek“I’m sure you get a lot of questions. I’m sure a lot of you have questions, too. So let me say this as clearly and simply as I can: I’m running.”

The message follows reports of a Zoom call with Democratic National Committee staffers earlier Wednesday, during which Biden made a surprise appearance and rejected calls for his resignation.

“Let me say this as clearly as I can — as simply and openly as I can: I am running … nobody is pushing me out,” Biden said, according to a report by Politico.. “I’m not leaving. I’m in this race until the end and we will win.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls suggest is the likely top candidate to succeed Biden if he were to step down, was also at the DNC on Wednesday and said, sitting next to the president, “We will not back down. We will follow the leadership of our president. We will fight and we will win.”

The White House and its allies have worked hard to allay any concerns about Biden’s future. After New York Times reported Wednesday that Biden had spoken to a key ally about the possibility of withdrawing from the race, White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates called the claim “absolutely false.”

“If New York Times If we had more than seven minutes to comment, we would have told them,” Bates added.

Biden also received public support from former President Barack Obama, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Before the debate, Trump appeared to have a slight lead over Biden in early polls, although the two candidates have been neck and neck for months. In New York Times/A Siena poll released Wednesday, however, showed that Trump’s lead over his competitors widened significantly after the debate.

Of 1,532 voters surveyed from June 28 to July 2, 49 percent said they would vote for Trump if the election were held today and only the former president and Biden were on the ballot, while 43 percent said they would support the current president.

On the day of the debate, polling analytics service FiveThirtyEight had predicted Trump would beat Biden by an average of just 0.2 percentage points in national polls. By Wednesday, the former president’s lead had grown to 2.3 percent.