A majority of voters who supported President Joe Biden in 2020 believe he should step up again and publicly debate other aspiring Democrat presidential candidates looking ahead to 2024, a poll released Thursday sets out.
A Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll carried out on April 30 for Newsweek found 79 percent of eligible voters who voted for Biden agree the Democratic Party should hold all-in televised primary debates, the outlet reports.
The Democratic Party has been criticized for the fact no debates are planned even after Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy and self-help author and 2020 Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson have thrown their respective hats into the ring.
The former has already called on the president to meet him publicly on the debate stage, as Breitbart News reported.
Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called on President Joe Biden to meet him on the debate stage and at town hall meetings throughout the country during the Democrat primary. https://t.co/LdGicBrm9a
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 26, 2023
The Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll found some 68 percent of eligible voters believe the Democratic Party should hold televised debates, compared to 15 percent who answered “no” and 17 percent who responded “don’t know.”
The overall poll was conducted among 1,500 eligible voters in the U.S..
The figure supporting debates was even higher among those who said they’d previously voted for Biden, with 79 percent agreeing there should be Democratic primary debates.
Analysts look at the call for debates by Democrats as a vote of no-confidence in their choice of the president as their party’s future standard-bearer.
“The fact that such a high percentage of the Democratic electorate wants to see primary debates is confirmatory of polling showing just how dissatisfied rank-and-file voters are with their option of Joe Biden,” Thomas Gift, founding director of University College London’s Centre on U.S. Politics (CUSP), told Newsweek.
“In the end, it doesn’t matter because a messy primary battle would be a nightmare for Democrats, and leadership would never agree to debates that have the potential to weaken Biden heading into the general election.”
Despite the push by party membership for Biden to be open and public in meeting his challengers, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has already decided it would not hold primary debates.
Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term if reelected, three years older than former President Ronald Reagan was when he disclosed his battle with Alzheimer’s in 1994.
