“Read the polls, Jack. You guys are all the same,” Biden told the reporter
President Joe Biden on Tuesday argued with a reporter that Democrats “want me to run” for reelection in 2024, despite polls showing most Democrats do not want him to run again.
“Mr. President, what’s your message to Democrats who don’t want you to run again?” ABC News reporter Ben Gittleson asked Biden near the end of the White House Congressional Picnic.
“They want me to run,” Biden replied.
“Two-thirds say they don’t,” Gittleson responded, referencing a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday showing that 64% of Democratic voters said they would prefer another presidential candidate next election cycle.
“Read the polls, read the polls, Jack. You guys are all the same. That poll showed that 92% of Democrats if I ran would vote for me,” Biden told the reporter.
“A majority of Democrats say they don’t want you to run again in 2024,” Gittleson stated.
“No, but 92% said if I did, they’d vote for me,” Biden said.
The NYT poll showed that 92% of Democrats would vote for Biden if he ran against former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical rematch, which is possibly the statistic he was referencing.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the results of the poll on Tuesday during a press conference.
“You know, there’s going to be many polls. They’re going to go up or they’re going to go down. This is not the thing that we are solely focused on,” she told reporters.
Most Democrats said they would vote for someone other than Biden in the 2024 presidential primary, with the current president only receiving 30% of the vote, a Harvard CAPS Harris poll last week revealed.