Greeting the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee as it convenes Thursday in Philadelphia, activists from the Don’t Run Joe campaign are gathering there to urge the DNC to reject President Biden’s effort to “manipulate the presidential primary schedule for his personal political benefit.”

Don’t Run Joe, sponsored by the activist organization RootsAction.org, contends that “there are ample indications that having Joe Biden at the top of ballots across the country in autumn 2024 would bring enormous political vulnerabilities for the ticket and for down-ballot races.”

Today and Friday, when President Biden is scheduled to address the DNC meeting in person, activists will be distributing Don’t Run Joe literature and holding signs from late morning into early afternoon at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown hotel where the gathering takes place. That activity is set to occur in tandem with a large mobile billboard bearing the words “DON’T MANIPULATE THE PRIMARIES” that will circle the hotel throughout Thursday and Friday.

“Joe Biden has repeatedly said he plans to seek renomination,” RootsAction political director Sam Rosenthal said. “In case there’s a Democratic challenger, it would be simply unethical for the DNC to allow Biden to dictate key rules of the contest, the order of the primaries, before the race begins.”

In a statement released in early December, the Don’t Run Joe campaign called Biden’s move to reorder the Democratic Party’s 2024 political calendar “an inappropriate, self-serving intervention dressed up in noble rhetoric.”

The campaign added: “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.”

For further information, contact:
– At DNC in Philadelphia — Sam Rosenthal, RootsAction political director, sam [at] rootsaction.org
– Jeff Cohen, RootsAction co-founder, jeff [at] rootsaction.org
– Norman Solomon, RootsAction national director, norman [at] rootsaction.org

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