Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) sidestepped a question on whether former President Biden should have dropped out of the 2024 presidential race sooner, saying in a Sunday interview that the election is “over.”
“Here is what we absolutely know about last year’s election: It’s over. And I’m going to spend all of my energy focused on the task in front of us,” he told NBC News’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, before railing against the GOP tax and spending bill, which the Senate is poised to take up this week.
“We are headed into a very critical week,” the senator continued. “The Republicans are trying to push forward this big, ugly bill that’s going to literally cut as many as 7 million Americans off of their health care. It is a drag not only on their health care, it is a drag on the American economy.”
“This is an unfunded mandate at a time when Donald Trump’s tariff tax is literally raising the cost of groceries. And so I’ve got my sleeves rolled up and in front of me is the American people, the people of Georgia. I’m doing everything I can to save them from Trump’s big, ugly bill,” he added.
Warnock’s comments came in response to Welker’s question about a quote from David Plouffe, a senior campaign adviser to former Vice President Kamala Harris, reported in the recent book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson.
“If Biden had decided in 2023 to drop out, we would have had a robust primary. Whitmer, Pritzker, Newsom, Buttigieg, Harris, and Klobuchar would have run. Warnock and Shapiro would have kicked the tires. Maybe Mark Cuban or a businessperson of some sort. Twenty percent of governors and 30 percent of senators would have thought about it. We would have been eminently stronger,” Plouffe said in the quote, which Welker read to Warnock in the interview.
After Warnock gave his response, Welker noted that she “didn’t hear a direct answer to the question there,” but tried to move on.
Warnock interrupted the anchor and again focused on the GOP legislative package that passed the House late last month.
“Well, I take very seriously my job. The people of Georgia hired me to stand up for them. And this really is a critical week,” Warnock said, continuing to talk about the bill.
The interview comes as high-profile Democrats have been asked to reckon with new reporting alleging Biden’s mental and physical decline in the final few years of his term was more severe than what had previously been disclosed to the American public.
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