After previously giving answers such as the “Lord Almighty” and “Me” when asked who could influence him step aside from the 2024 race, President Joe Biden on Tuesday offered a new response to the question he has received persistently since his performance in last month’s presidential debate.
“[If] a medical condition emerged – if somebody, the doctors came to me, said you got this problem, that problem,” Biden said, when asked what would spur him to reevaluate his reelection bid in an interview with Ed Gordon of BET News.
Biden’s answer marked the first time he has mentioned health as a factor in his reelection calculation, even after conversations about the 81-year-old president’s age and mental acuity accelerated in the wake of the debate.
The president went on to tell BET News that he did not anticipate the country “getting so divided” when he pitched himself as a “bridge” to future leaders in the party during his 2020 election bid. Biden’s previous portrayal of himself as a transitional candidate has been brought up often since the debate, which sparked a wave of panic in his party and led to more than 20 Democrats in Congress to call on him to drop out.
“When I originally ran, you may remember Ed, I said I was gonna be a transitional candidate and I thought that I'd be able to move from this, just pass it on to someone else,” Biden said. “But I didn't anticipate things getting so, so, so divided.”
Biden added that while he believes he has “demonstrated” that he knows how to “get things done,” there is still more he wants to do.
“And I’m reluctant to walk away from that,” he said.
The president also argued – in the face of several recent polls showing Biden trailing his Republican rival former President Donald Trump – that most people are not paying attention to the race yet.
“Whether it's young Blacks or young whites or young Hispanics or young Asian Americans, they've never focused until after Labor Day,” Biden said.
“The point is, we're just getting down to game time now,” the president later added.
The full interview with BET News, recorded Tuesday in battleground Nevada ahead of Biden’s address to the NAACP National Convention, is set to air on Wednesday night.