House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) met with President Joe Biden after his NATO press conference Thursday night amid the dissension about Biden within his caucus — but didn’t reveal whether he advised Biden to stay in the presidential race.
In a letter Friday morning, Jeffries said he expressed to Biden the views of House Democrats, but he offered no other details of the meeting or Biden’s response.
“On behalf of the House Democratic Caucus, I requested and was graciously granted a private meeting with President Joe Biden. The meeting occurred yesterday evening,” Jeffries wrote. “In my conversation with President Biden, I directly expressed the full breadth of insight, heartfelt perspectives and conclusions about the path forward that the caucus has shared in our recent time together.”
The letter was anything but a ringing endorsement of Biden as the party’s presidential nominee. Congressional Democrats have struggled to project an enthusiastic united front in support of the 81-year-old president as new polling shows Biden trailing in swing states and reports suggest the president’s campaign is seeing fundraising slow.
Jeffries’ letter follows Biden’s press conference Thursday in which he answered questions about his health and stamina at the conclusion of this week’s NATO summit in Washington, D.C. Biden made it through the solo presser, flexing his foreign policy muscle while also accidentally referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as Donald Trump. Earlier in the day, he mixed up the presidents of Russia and Ukraine, but corrected himself a few seconds later.
Biden’s press conference was supposed to stem the tide of House Democrats calling for Biden to step aside, but immediately following it several more asked Biden not to run. Since last month’s debate, 17 House Democrats and one Senate Democrat have explicitly called on Biden to step aside to make way for a younger candidate that they see as having better odds of beating former President Donald Trump — whose allies seemed delighted by the fact that Biden performed just well enough Thursday to keep a full-on Democratic rebellion at bay.
Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a freshman from a Colorado swing district, on Friday became the latest House Democrat to call on Biden to resign.
“I have deep admiration and love for Joe Biden and all he has done for our country, which is why this decision is so painful, but my son and my constituents can’t suffer the consequences of inaction at this critical moment,” she wrote on social media.