The Don’t Run Joe campaign issued the following statement on Friday:

President Biden’s move to reorder the Democratic Party’s 2024 political calendar is an inappropriate, self-serving intervention dressed up in noble rhetoric. Biden received a mere 8 percent of the vote in the 2020 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, finishing fifth. Now he wants to dislodge New Hampshire from its longstanding first-in-the-nation primary role. On the other hand, Biden was the big winner of the South Carolina primary in 2020. Now he wants that state to go first.

Biden’s decision to intrude into the Democratic National Committee’s painstaking process for setting the 2024 presidential primary schedule appears to be a sign of anxiety in the White House about potential obstacles to his winning renomination. The president has indicated repeatedly that he plans to run again, so how ethical would it be for the DNC to allow a contestant to determine key rules of the game before the race begins?

South Carolina is a state that Biden obviously sees as vital to a renomination bid, but – unlike all other states under consideration for early primaries – it is not a battleground state. Everyone knows that the Democratic ticket will not win the deep-red state of South Carolina in 2024. Georgia, on the other hand, is one of the most important battleground states, and is more racially diverse than South Carolina. If Biden’s proposal to supplant the New Hampshire primary as first-in-the-nation were truly about diversity and not about improving his own prospects for renomination, he would be promoting a state other than South Carolina to be first.

Joe Biden should climb down from attempting to manipulate the Democratic primary schedule for his own narrow political purposes. As we pointed out when announcing the Don’t Run Joe campaign, “A president is not his party’s king, and he has no automatic right to renomination.”

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