Biden faces growing calls to step aside: Could Michelle Obama run?

After the disastrous debate for Joe Biden with Donald Trump, there are growing opinions that the incumbent president should withdraw from seeking re-election. Who could replace him? According to a poll by Ipsos and Reuters, there are few candidates, and most of them have little chance of competing against Trump. Only one person could beat him if she decided to run. It is Michelle Obama.

Lloyd Doggett, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, stated in a communication issued on Tuesday that Joe Biden should "make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw" from the presidential elections.

"The overriding issue must be who has the best chance of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang. The stakes are too high to risk a Trump victory - too high a risk to assume that what could not be reversed in a year, what could not be changed in a debate, can be reversed now," Doggett said. "President Biden saved our democracy by freeing us from Trump in 2020. He cannot hand us over to Trump in 2024," he appealed.

Will other Democrats follow his lead? It's unknown. However, according to the latest Ipsos and Reuters poll, as many as 32 per cent of Democratic supporters want Biden to step down from seeking the presidency.

Who could replace him? The most likely candidate would be the current Vice President, Kamala Harris. However, the poll indicates that she has 42 percent support compared to 43 percent for Trump.

Other candidates, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, are lagging further behind Trump - by 3 and 5 percentage points, respectively.

According to the Ipsos and Reuters poll, the only person who would comfortably defeat Trump is Michelle Obama, the wife of former President Obama. She could count on a significant lead in a hypothetical match-up with Trump, beating him 50-39 per cent. The problem is that Michelle Obama has repeatedly stated that she will not run for election.

However, according to the Ipsos/Reuters poll, if she decided to run, she would have a much better result than Biden, who received 40 percent support in the poll—the same as his Republican rival. This survey suggests that Thursday's debate did not change the landscape of the rivalry between the current and former president.

The Reuters poll presents the current president in a better light than most other surveys conducted after the debate, although none of them recorded a dramatic change in voter sympathies.

The Puck.news portal reports that among the most pessimistic polls for Democrats are internal surveys conducted at the request of Biden's campaign. They indicate that despite a minimal drop in support for the president at the national level, his ratings have significantly dropped in key states that will decide the election outcome. Moreover, these surveys show that Trump can win even in states where Democrats have consistently won for a long time, such as New Hampshire, Maine, Virginia, or New Mexico.

The survey, published due to a leak from Biden's campaign, also indicates that all other potential party candidates would have a better chance of defeating Trump than Biden. Among those with the best results in the key states are Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who would beat Trump according to the poll. Other candidates would lose but with a slightly smaller margin than Biden.