No. of Recommendations: 3
In late 23 any credible journalist on msnbc, cnn, npr, the New York Times, Wash post etc could have sent the message to team Biden. Agree to do a 45 minute interview, Q and A, no questions in advance,no edits,no baby sitter, or we will refuse to endorse your re election. Simple, he agrees to not run again by new years because he couldn’t do it and the abuse ends.
They could have. I'm sure those organizations did ask for interviews all the time. He's the President of the United States, after all - major news outlets are constantly striving to land a long-form interview with the President.
But again - he's the President. None of those groups can dictate terms to the President, and this is an empty threat. News channels don't issue formal endorsements. For newspapers, the News divisions that would have conducted the interviews aren't the ones who decide whether to endorse (which is either Opinion or the publisher) - and none of those papers were really going to change whether they endorsed him or not on that basis. He wouldn't have agreed to the terms, and he wouldn't have dropped out any earlier.
Finally, whatever pressure the media could have put on him is a different question than whether the party had the ability to change the outcome.
Whoever won the competitive Dem nomination process, wins the presidency, period.
Hardly. Again, the most likely outcome of a competitive Dem nomination process that started late would be Harris winning the nomination. People tend to forget what happened the last time the Democrats had a wide-open nominating contest - the former Veep won, because in a massive multiway race with lots of candidates a former Veep tends to be a really strong contender (and often most folks' second choice). Once Biden decided to run for re-election, no one else of any significance did anything in 2023 to run against him. Which means that if he had dropped out after the primaries had started, nobody would have been in much of a position to really move into the race except for the person who did: Harris.
