Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio), the GOP nominee for vice president, took aim at current Vice President Kamala Harris’s essentially locking up the top spot on the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket immediately after President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek re-election on Sunday.
During a rally in Middletown, Ohio — the town where Vance grew up — the Hillbilly Elegy author attacked the Democratic establishment over Biden’s decision to take his name off the ballot after the primary process had already ended, especially considering the frenzy of statements from party elders urging Biden to leave the race.
“The idea of selecting the Democrat Party’s nominee because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard — that is not how it works,” Vance said. “That is the threat to democracy, not the Republican Party.”
Vance pre-empted Biden’s announcement of his decision not to run for a second term on Sunday morning, writing in a post on X that withdrawing from the race would amount to a concession that the president is not up to the job.
“Not running for reelection would be a clear admission that President Trump was right all along about Biden not being mentally fit enough to serve as Commander-in-Chief,” Vance wrote. “There is no middle ground.”
In his first statement after Biden officially left the Democratic ticket, Vance, after describing Biden as the worst president in his lifetime, charged Harris with bearing responsibility for the administration’s failures and efforts to hide Biden’s health issues.
“Over the last four years, she co-signed Biden’s open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries,” Vance wrote. “She owns all of these failures, and she lied for nearly four years about Biden’s mental capacity — saddling the nation with a president who can’t do the job.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) made similar points to Vance in his first message after Biden announced his decision.
“At this unprecedented juncture in American history, we must be clear about what just happened,” Johnson wrote. “The Democrat Party forced the Democrat nominee off the ballot, just over 100 days before the election. Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite.”
Johnson went on to argue, like Vance, that Biden’s inability to run for re-election signals his inability to serve in the Oval Office.
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” he contended. “He must resign the office immediately. November 5 cannot come soon enough.”