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Leading figures in Joe Biden's Democratic Party are nudging the U.S. president to abandon his reelection campaign, telling him in recent days that his chances of winning the November election are dwindling and that a prospective loss could imperil the party's hopes of capturing either chamber of Congress.
Former President Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice president for eight years, has reportedly told political allies that Biden's chance of winning is narrowing and that he thinks Biden needs to deeply consider the viability of his candidacy.
But Biden, 81, has insisted he will be the Democratic standard-bearer in the November 5 election and shown no overt signs he is about to drop out, possibly in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris.
U.S. news accounts, however, say that at times in recent days he has been listening to fellow Democrats' concerns that his campaign against former President Donald Trump is faltering.
Biden, now dealing with his third bout of COVID-19, was isolated Thursday at his vacation house at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with no public appearances planned. Trump was set in the evening to accept the Republican presidential nomination to run again against Biden after losing to him in 2020.
House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, in separate private meetings with Biden in the past week, told him that Democrats would have a tough time winning either chamber of Congress if he remained as the party's presidential candidate.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement that Biden told the two Democratic legislative leaders that "he is the nominee of the party, he plans to win, and looks forward to working with both of them to pass his 100 days' agenda to help working families."
A total of 20 Democratic lawmakers have publicly called for Biden to end his reelection bid, although many more have privately expressed concerns about his political fate. Representative Adam Schiff of California, one of Trump's most vocal critics and a close ally of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called for Biden to quit the race earlier this week.
"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 said in a statement.
In recent days, Hollywood actor George Clooney, who hosted a lavish fundraiser for Biden last month, called for him to end his campaign, while key Biden fundraiser Jeffrey Katzenberg warned the president at a Las Vegas meeting this week that major donors were reluctant to keep funding his campaign.
Virtually every Democrat who has called for Biden to end his campaign has cited his faltering performance at his debate with Trump last month, when Biden looked tired, often lost his train of thought and failed to consistently press his case against Trump or defend his own 3½-year tenure in the White House.
Despite the calls to withdraw, Quentin Fulks, Biden's deputy campaign manager, told reporters Thursday, "Our campaign is not working through any scenarios where Biden is not at the top of the ticket." Fulks said Biden looked forward to accepting the party's nomination at its national convention in Chicago next month.
To head off a messy political fight at the convention, the party is planning for delegates to start voting for Biden as their presidential nominee in early August, two weeks ahead of the official nominating convention.
But if Biden were to end his candidacy before then, Harris could effectively be anointed as the Democratic standard-bearer, or the Democrats could hold an open convention and choose a nominee from among several candidates.
Most national polls show Trump with a consistent 1- to 3-percentage-point lead over Biden. More important, polls show leads of that size or more in key battleground states that both candidates need to capture to win the presidency for another four-year term starting next January.
Democrats have been quietly testing head-to-head polling between Harris and Trump, with the vice president at times, but not always, faring better than Biden, even slightly leading Trump.
The highly contested battleground states are particularly important in deciding U.S. presidential elections, which are not determined by the national popular vote. Rather, the election is essentially 50 state contests, with the winner in all but two of the states collecting all of that state's so-called electoral votes. Those electoral votes are allocated to the states in proportion to their populations.
In 2020, Biden nationally received 7 million more votes than Trump but carried four closely contested states by a collective margin of only about 123,000 votes. Had those states gone the other way, Trump would have been reelected.
The 2024 contest is expected to be similarly close in a handful of states while both Biden and Trump are expected to pile up big vote margins and easily win the states that predictably vote for one party or the other.
Despite repeatedly insisting he is staying in the contest, Biden has offered three scenarios in which he would drop out.
He said once that the direst of polling results could get him to quit, and another time he said he would drop out "if I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, 'You got this problem and that problem.' "
On another occasion, Biden, a devout Catholic, told ABC News that if the Lord Almighty asked him to end his campaign, he would.