Billionaire Democratic Donor Has Seen Enough, Says Biden Must Step Down: 'His Legacy Will Not Be a Good One'
A major Democratic donor says it is time for President Joe Biden to pull out of the 2024 presidential election.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman said Tuesday that Biden’s best days have come and gone, according to Bloomberg.
“Biden’s done a lot of good things. But I think his legacy will not be a good one if he is the nominee,” Ackman said in an upcoming episode of “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations.”
“The right thing for Biden to do is to step aside, and to say he’s not going to run, and create the opportunity for some competition,” Ackman said.
Ackman, who founded Pershing Square Capital Management founder, said was “impressed” with Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who has declared himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“You need to be at your intellectual best. And I don’t think Biden is there,” Ackman said.
“I don’t say that, you know, with any derision of the president, but I think he’s clearly past his physical and cognitive peak,” Ackman added.
Since 1998, Ackman has mainly donated to Democratic candidates, according to the website InfluenceWatch.
However, he said he would prefer a Republican such as former South Carolina Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley of Haley and ex-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to Biden, Bloomberg reported.
In an Op-Ed on Fox Business, host Stuart Varney said Biden should not be on the 2024 ballot.
“This presidency is going from bad to worse. I can’t imagine what’s going on in the White House. The election is less than a year away, and the president’s advisers know Joe Biden is likely to lose,” he said.
“The dilemma is how to get the president out of the race. There is no easy answer if Joe Biden himself doesn’t step aside voluntarily,” he said, noting former President Lyndon Johnson’s decision in 1968 not to seek re-election in the face of dwindling support.
“To sum it up, Biden’s insistence on running is killing his party,” Varney said.
Douglas Schoen, in an Op-Ed on The Hill, said replacing Biden would not necessarily solve all of the party’s problems. Schoen said changing now may be too late.
“[B]y staying in the race as long as he has, Biden has made it near impossible for a candidate other than Harris to meet filing deadlines to get on primary ballots, or to build out the massive organizational infrastructure necessary to run a presidential campaign,” he wrote, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, who he noted is also plagued by abysmal poll numbers.
Schoen wrote that “whether or not Biden is the nominee, Democrats are in a weakened position ahead of 2024. And while it may be fair to ask whether Biden should have said at the beginning of the year that he would not seek reelection in order to give challengers time to position themselves, the simple fact is that he did not.”
“As such, despite Biden’s declining poll numbers, changing horses in the middle of the 2024 race would, at best, have very little impact,” he wrote.
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