Nikki Fried still wants to ‘deliver’ Florida for Joe Biden, even as leading Dems want him off the ticket

If the Chair of the Florida Democratic Party has any concerns about President Joe Biden’s competence, she’s still not saying.

That’s true even if many other leading Democrats are saying it’s time to go.

“President Biden has delivered for Florida, and we need to deliver for him.”

That’s a takeaway from a Nikki Fried press call, in which the former Agriculture Commissioner was yet again faced with the bitter harvest of Biden’s recurrent issues with public speaking, a new case of COVID, and pressure to withdraw his candidacy for a second term from former President Barack Obama, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

By the end of the call, the Chair seemingly hedged her bets in response to a follow-up question to our original query, when informed that Democrats were talking in Central Florida about how Biden must go.

“I have complete trust in Joe Biden and, and so he, I’m sure, is hearing the same conversations and is going to make the right decision for our nation because he truly is a patriot and he loves this country,” she said.

Fried expressed confidence in the President’s cognition both before and after the June debate with Donald Trump, and what’s clear is that she is still standing by the candidate when he’s being abandoned elsewhere. This position is especially notable given that Biden Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said Florida was not in play for the President’s re-election campaign.

“We had a poll that came out earlier part of this week that, that showed Biden within four points here in the State of Florida,” Fried said Thursday, referring to a Redfield and Wilton survey that suggested the  race is tight despite a 963,000 GOP vote advantage. The Chair believes up to 65% of independents  support Biden, though if that’s the case, it’s a marked outlier to other polling throughout the country showing Trump ahead with independents.

Fried also said that “candidates,” “grassroots” and “local leadership” keep hailing “the incredible accomplishments of the last 3.5 years under President Biden.”

“You know, whether it is capping of insulin (prices), whether it is moving forward in progress on our environment to putting jobs back into our economy. Everybody doubted that there and said that there was going to be a recession. We have now had one of the strongest, if not the strongest economic recoveries in the entire world,” Fried said.

“And while not everybody is quite yet feeling all of the economic benefits, we are seeing prices going down, we’re seeing inflation coming down, we’re seeing gas prices and the price of milk all going down.”

And despite Biden’s issues, Fried argues “Biden has beaten Trump before and I do believe that he can do it again.”

“We trusted Joe Biden in 2020. We trust that he is going to always do what is right for the country. The country called on him in 2020 to unite us in a time like this,” Fried said. “When we have seen some of the most divisive politics and rhetoric that I have seen certainly in my lifetime, we need a steady leader who is going to unite us, not divide us. And that is why the Florida Democrats are united in our support for the President.”

While Biden’s COVID diagnosis is “unfortunate,” Fried notes he’s been “campaigning over the last four weeks” and is “out there still working every day for us and that is why we have his back.”