“Oh thank God,” said Cathy Gramze, a retired nurse who lives in the suburbs of Detroit. “My diagnosis has for a long time been that he cannot run again and I am not entirely sure that he should finish his term in office.”
Gramze had worried about Biden’s fitness long before the debate. His 27 June performance merely confirmed what she had long feared. “A lot of the time he is the president we need, but some of the time he isn’t.”
Kamala Harris, whom Biden endorsed on Sunday and who has won the backing of most prominent Democratic elected officials, "needs to be the presidential nominee", Gramze said.
For more than a year, voters across the political spectrum said they felt Biden, 81, was too old to run for re-election. Those anxieties increased in the wake of his first debate with Donald Trump, in which Trump lied repeatedly and Biden struggled to push back or even answer questions coherently.
This story is from the July 23, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the July 23, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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