Joe Biden revealed the one reason he would exit the presidential race as more and more Democrats call for him to step aside.
He said it would take his doctor telling him directly that he had a medical condition that made that necessary.
‘If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, you got this problem and that problem,’ Biden said in an interview with BET news.
The president’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, has said Biden, 81, is mentally and physically fit to serve as commander-in-chief.
But Democrats’ have questioned Biden’s fitness to serve since his debate performance against Donald Trump, where he fumbled for words and stared blankley into the camera.
Biden has repeatedly changed the conditions on what it would take for him to step aside.
He told ABC News he would only drop out only if the ‘Lord almighty’ told him to. At a press conference in Washington D.C., he said he would stay in the race unless aides came to him with proof that he could never win.
In his interview with BET’s Ed Gordon Biden said for the first time that he had expected to ‘move on’ from the presidency and ‘pass it on to somebody else’ after one term but decided to run again because he believed his ‘wisdom’ and experience would help heal the country.’
‘You may remember Ed, I said I was going to be a transitional candidate, and I thought I would be able to move on from this and pass it on to somebody else,’ Biden said. ‘But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided. And quite frankly, I think the only thing age brings is a little bit of wisdom.’
He added that ‘there’s more to do, and I’m reluctant to walk away from that.’
The full interview with BET is scheduled to air at 10 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday night.
Meanwhile, Biden was hit with a brutal new poll on Wednesday that showed a majority of Democrats want him to drop out of the presidential race even as the party prepares to lock up his nomination.
An AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 65% of Democrats want Biden to withdraw from the race and let the party nominate a different candidate. It also found only 3 in 10 Democrats are confident in his mental capacity to serve as president.
The results undercut Biden’s claim that ‘average Democrats’ want him to remain in the race and only ‘the elite’ want him out.
Biden has spent the past two weeks trying to quell the rising tide against him. But the poll, conducted since his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, shows he has not been able to convince Democrats to stay in his corner.
He argues many voters aren’t paying attention to the race yet.
‘The point is, we’re just getting down to gametime right now,’ Biden told BET News in an interview on Tuesday.
The poll provides some evidence that Black Democrats are among Biden’s strongest supporters, with roughly half in the survey saying he should continue running, compared to about 3 in 10 white and Hispanic Democrats.
The poll also shows the differing support that Biden and Trump have among their parties: only 37% of Democrats think Biden can win while 72% of Republicans think Trump can.
The poll comes as Democrats will nominate Biden for re-election in a virtual roll call, but will delay setting a date for the delegate vote after many Democrats raised objections to the planned process.
The new date for the delegate vote will be the first week of August, shortly before the convention begins in Chicago.
The party’s Rules Committee said they intend to have Biden’s nomination completed by Aug. 7 in order to avoid any risk of a legal challenge to placing him on the ballot in Ohio.
A letter from the co-chairs of the party convention’s rules committee, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Leah Daughtry, a longtime Democratic Party official, says that no virtual voting will begin before Aug. 1.
‘No matter what may be reported, our goal is not to fast-track,’ they write in the letter, according to the New York Times. ‘Our goals are to uphold our tradition of transparency, our commitment to an effective nominating process that delivers a nominee on all state ballots, and ultimately to set our nominees on a path to victory in November.’
The two leaders sought to reassure the party after a House Democrats restarted their coup against the president.
The lawmakers’ challenged the original timeline for Biden’s virtual nomination, which would have him locked in as the nominee in the next few weeks.
Under the party rules, the vast majority of the more than 4,600 delegates to the party convention are bound to vote for Biden on the first ballot, regardless of when that vote takes place.
Biden cannot be forced out and must choose to voluntarily stand down.
He is showing no sign he will exit.
‘Look, 14 million people voted for me to be the nominee in the Democratic Party, OK?’ the president told NBC News. ‘I listen to them.