Biden meets governors to shore up support hours after telling campaign staff: ‘no one is pushing me out’ – live | US elections 2024

Martin Pengelly

Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan widely spoken of as a possible Democratic candidate for president should Joe Biden cede to growing pressure and leave the race, wants to meet members of a far-right militia who plotted to kidnap and kill her.

“I asked whether I could meet with one of the handful of plotters who’d pleaded guilty and taken responsibility for their actions, just to talk,” Whitmer writes in a new book, of the plot motivated by resistance to Covid public health measures and revealed with 13 arrests in late 2020.

The attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, said it might be possible to talk to the plotters, Whitmer writes, though it has not happened, due to “all the various trials and appeals.

“But I do look forward to being able to sit and talk, face-to-face. To ask the questions and really hear the answers. And hopefully to take some small step toward understanding.”

As described by Nessel’s office, the affair of the “Wolverine Watchmen” resulted in “20 state felonies against eight individuals alleged to have engaged in the planning and training for an operation to attack the state Capitol and kidnap government officials.” Five men were convicted.

Federal charges were filed against six more men, four of whom were convicted. Two pled guilty to conspiracy charges and co-operated with prosecutors.

Whitmer describes the plot, and how she coped with it and other threats from the armed pro-Trump far right, in True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between. The book will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Given Whitmer’s presence in the ranks of proposed replacements for Biden after the president’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump escalated Democratic panic last week, the governor’s book will be eagerly read.

Whitmer has said she does not want to replace Biden but that has not stopped speculation. On Wednesday, she was due to be among Democratic governors meeting Biden at the White House.

Read the full story here:

Analysis: White House efforts to shield Biden’s missteps are unraveling

Robert Tait

For three and a half years, Joe Biden was wrapped in a metaphorical ball of cotton wool by an anxious White House staff eager to protect him from the worst of himself.

Worried about signs of ageing and an increasing propensity for verbal missteps, they cut press conferences and media interviews to a minimum.

Meetings with members of Congress, frequent enough in his first year – despite it coinciding with part of the Covid-19 pandemic – were whittled down by two-thirds by year three.

Public appearances were tightly rationed and controlled, with the president speaking predominantly from an autocue.

Unscripted exchanges with journalists were deemed too hazardous, resulting in 81-year-old Biden staging fewer presidential news conferences than any US chief executive since Ronald Reagan. Even the traditional pre-Super Bowl television interview – a chance to reach the biggest audience ever likely to tune for a political broadcast – was given a wide berth for the past two years.

Now the approach has unravelled spectacularly, seemingly exposed as a desperate damage limitation exercise by last week’s floundering performance in a televised debate with Donald Trump that has left Biden’s presidential candidacy in dire jeopardy.

Democrats considering replacing him on the ticket accuse his handlers of putting up a wall of denial to counteract a years-long low murmur of talk about his age-related decline, only for the truth to burst into the open in a manner that greatly increases the chances of a second Trump presidency.

“We kind of just feel lied to,” an unnamed Democratic senator told Punchbowl website. “They’ve been shielding him from those types of settings for months and even after it became undeniable, they’re still lying to us.”

The complaint reflected a deep discontent with White House efforts to dismiss the abject debate display as an unrepresentative one-off.

Read the full analysis here:

Here is where the day stands:

• Joe Biden vowed to stay in the presidential race and continue his re-election bid, telling his staffers: “No one is pushing me out,” according to multiple reports. In a call on Wednesday following his lackluster performance during last week’s presidential debate and amid growing panic from Democratic donors and lawmakers, the president said: “Let me say this as clearly as possibly can, as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running.”

• House Democrat Raúl Grijalva of Arizona has joined his fellow House Democrat Lloyd Doggett of Texas in calls for Joe Biden to withdraw his re-election bid. In an interview with the New York Times, Grijalva said: “If he’s the candidate, I’m going to support him but I think that this is an opportunity to look elsewhere … What he really needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat – and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.”

• A new poll released this afternoon by the New York Times/Siena College showed that 49% of voters would vote for Donald Trump, compared to 43% of voters who said they would vote for Joe Biden. According to the New York Times, Trump’s lead over Biden by 6% points marks the largest lead the ex-president has recorded in a Times/Siena poll since 2015.

• Donald Trump’s campaign has released a statement on what it called the “total collapse of the Democrat party”. On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign said: “Every Democrat who is calling on Crooked Joe Biden to quit was once a supporter of Biden and his failed policies that lead to extreme inflation, an open border, and chaos at home and abroad.”

• Michelle Obama is the only Democrat that can beat Donald Trump, a new poll has found. According to a new poll on Tuesday conducted by Reuters and Ipsos, the former first lady is the only Democrat that is able to attain victory over Trump in November in a hypothetical match, leading with 50% support compared to his 39%.

• The White House pushed back against a new New York Times report that Joe Biden allegedly told a key ally that he is weighing whether to stay in the presidential race. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported an anonymous source saying of Biden: “He knows if he has two more events like that, we’re in a different place,” referring to last week’s presidential debate in which Biden did poorly. In response, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates took to Twitter/X, posting publicly: “That claim is absolutely false.”

• House Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington said that Biden “is going to lose to Trump” following the president’s poor debate performance last week. In a new interview with KATU News, Gluesenkamp Perez said: “About 50 million Americans tuned in and watched that debate. I was one of them for about five very painful minutes. We all saw what we saw, you can’t undo that, and the truth, I think, is that Biden is going to lose to Trump.”

• Dozens of House Democrats are considering signing a letter to call for Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, Bloomberg reports, citing a “senior party official”. According to the source, Democrats currently running for re-election in “traditionally safe Democratic districts are circulating the letter”.

House Democrat Raúl Grijalva of Arizona has joined his fellow House Democrat Lloyd Doggett of Texas in calls for Joe Biden to withdraw his re-election bid.

In an interview with the New York Times, Grijalva said:

If he’s the candidate, I’m going to support him but I think that this is an opportunity to look elsewhere … What he really needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat – and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.