Protesters demand US President Joe Biden drop out in front of the White House at a rally held on July 20, 2024.DANIEL SLIM/Getty
While President Joe Biden was holed up in Rehoboth, Delaware, recovering from Covid on Saturday afternoon, about 50 people came out in the rain to attend a rally at the White House to pressure him to abandon his reelection campaign. “Hey, hey; ho ho; thank you Joe it’s time to go,” they chanted, waving hand-painted signs emblazoned with “Pass the Torch” and “Country before Ego!”
“Young people have been shutting down streets, lobbying Congress, pressuring the White House, organizing for a chance to save our democracy, beat MAGA fascism, and win November’s presidential election with a new democratic presidential nominee,” said speaker Claudia Nachega, a 19-year-old college student and reproductive justice activist. Other speakers included Quentin Colón Roosevelt, a Princeton student and DC advisory neighborhood commissioner who is a member of the Sunrise Movement, the youth climate change organization that has called on Biden to exit the race.
The rally was co-organized by Aaron Regunberg, a former democratic Rhode Island state legislator who also helped start a new Pass the Torch political action committee. The PAC was created on July 9, just a few days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, which proved to be a turning point in his support among Democrats. The PAC has spent nearly $40,000 in the past two weeks running ads in DC and Delaware urging Biden to step aside.
Organizers at the rally noted that while the name is similar, the group is not affiliated with the Pass the Torch USA PAC, which was started by Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn) as part of his quixotic primary challenge of Biden.
“I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning.”
Word of the rally spread through social media over the past few days, with a boost from former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang on X. Atul Jain works at a software company in Northern Virginia. He attended the rally with his father-in-law because they were concerned that Biden’s weakness is turning Virginia, which has been a reliably blue state in recent elections, into a battleground state.
“We want Democrats to win,” he told me. “We don’t want Trump to come to power.” Like many people I spoke with, Jain wasn’t especially concerned about which Democrat might replace Biden on the ticket. “Probably Kamala Harris is the heir apparent, but I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning. And we don’t want him to stand in the way of giving somebody else a chance.”
Jain had been supportive of Biden until he watched him in the June debate, and he’s angry that the people around Biden have been hiding his condition from the public and “patriotic Democrats.”
“There is absolutely no way he can win,” he said. “He has to go. It is just a question of: Does he realize it? When does he realize it? In my mind, today is better than tomorrow. Tomorrow is better than day after. But I believe he has to go. I don’t see any path to him surviving. He may be the only one who thinks he can. I love the guy. I think he’s done a great job for this country. I think he did save us in 2020. But I can’t believe that he doesn’t realize this is not his time.”
Charlie Bulman worked on the Biden campaign as an organizer in 2019 and 2020, first in Nevada for the caucuses and then in Pennsylvania for the general election. But he didn’t support Biden’s decision to run again. “I just think it’s clear that the president is not going to be up to do the job for another four years, that his candidacy is not putting us in the best position to win,” he told me. “I think he’s unambiguously the best president of my lifetime and has done a fantastic job. But we need someone new.”
Bulman worries about the impact of Biden’s campaign on down-ballot races and the party’s credibility. “I think it puts other folks in a tough position defending his competency,” he said. “And I think that they might lose trust among voters if they’re forced to do that.”
For all the Democratic establishment concerns about the chaos of an open nominating convention or replacing Biden on the ticket, no one I spoke with at the rally believed there was a downside to replacing Biden. They all suggested Democrats would rally behind the anyone but Biden ticket. Ernest Shepard, 34, is originally from Kansas but now lives in DC. I asked him whether he’d seen evidence of Biden losing support among Black men like himself, as the polls have suggested. He said he was shocked recently when he saw some friends from Kansas who told him adamantly they were not going to vote for Biden.
“They aren’t going to vote for Trump,” he said, but “people will sit on the couch.” What’s frustrating for him is that the evidence about Biden’s decline has been clear for a long time. “In every poll that asks the question ‘do you want Biden to keep running?’ they say ‘no,'” he said. “It’s a shame that it took this.”
Shepard says if there had been a real primary, Democrats would be running against a very flawed candidate with someone better. “We could have been excited about who it is.”
The “Pass the Torch” movement is unusual in that it only has one goal—getting Biden to quit the race—and it’s a short-term one. Many attendees expressed hope that they could soon go back to focusing on the campaign to defeat Trump in November.
Alex Lintz, a rally co-organizer, after watching the June debate, gave up and helped organize the “Pass the Torch” rally. “To be honest,” he said, “we are hoping we don’t have to do another one.”
