Billionaire Democratic Donor Bill Ackman says the time has come for President Joe Biden to bow out of the 2024 presidential election. In an upcoming episode of “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations,” Ackman said, “Biden’s done a lot of good things. But I think his legacy will not be a good one if he is the nominee. 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 has been donating to Democratic candidates since 1998, and he said he would preferMinnesotan Democratic Representative Dean Phillips to Biden for the 2024 presidential election.
“You need to be at your intellectual best. And I don’t think Biden is there. 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.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman says President Biden should step aside, adding he was “impressed” by Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who launched a longshot primary challenge to Biden last month https://t.co/ni7LGm3fQE pic.twitter.com/d0Q2Py8YmV
— The Hill (@thehill) November 30, 2023
Fox Business host Stuart Varney also shared this sentiment in an Op-Ed, saying, “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.” Varney said Biden should not be on the 2024 ballot and he should “step aside voluntarily.”
Douglas Schoen’s op-ed in The Hill argued that replacing Biden will not solve the Democratic Party’s problems. “[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,” Schoen said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Schoen argues that changing horses in the middle of the election would have little to no impact adding that, “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.”
Evidently, Ackman, Varney, and Schoen all agree that Biden should not be running again in 2024. Ackman says it is not too late for Biden to make the decision not to run, citing Lyndon Johnson as an example of doing the right thing for the party and nation by choosing not to run in 1968. Ultimately, Biden should be following in Johnson’s example and creating a competitive field for the 2024 election.