Reporter Straight Up Asks Biden, ‘Does Gavin Need to Stand By’ to Receive the Nomination?
President Joe Biden was asked by a White House reporter on Tuesday as he left on a trip to California if he was off to recruit Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) as a potential 2024 replacement.
“You’re going to California. Is this about coming up with a Plan B for 2024 — does Gavin need to stand by?” the reporter asked the president on the White House lawn.
Biden walked over and jested with the reporter, asking, “Are you ready?”
“Well I’m looking for— I’m looking at you. We’re looking at you,” Biden joked, brushing off the question. The president then pivoted to announcing that new sanctions on Russia are coming soon.
Biden has come under renewed pressure to step aside ahead of the 2024 presidential election as polls show him in a tight race with former President Donald Trump.
A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, said on Monday that the Biden White House is “extremely upset” with the paper’s coverage of Biden’s age.
Sulzberger added, “We are going to continue to report fully and fairly, not just on Donald Trump but also on President Joe Biden. He is a historically unpopular incumbent and the oldest man to ever hold this office. We’ve reported on both of those realities extensively, and the White House has been extremely upset about it.”
MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki discussed Biden’s historically low numbers while dissecting the latest NBC News national poll in early February, which found Trump leading Biden by five points.
“It’s simply this his approval rating in our poll clocks in at 37%,” Kornacki said of Biden’s general election polling struggle.
“That is his low in our poll. That’s the lowest a president has checked in in an NBC poll since the final days of the George W. Bush administration in 2008,” Kornacki noted, before adding some more brutal context.
“Bush won, he started at 54%. Barack Obama started at 49% in 2012, he won,” Kornacki said, noting the approval ratings for incumbent presidents in January of their reelection year.
“Donald Trump was at 46%, started 2020. He lost. Joe Biden, look at that number, it stands out, 37%, markedly different. Only two incumbent presidents seeking reelection have had approval ratings at this level or below in their reelection year. They were George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980,” Kornacki concluded, noting both Carter and H.W. Bush lost reelection.
Watch the clip above.
