Election 2024 live: Biden insists he’s the best candidate to beat Trump

Florida senator Marco Rubio, a possible contender to be Trump’s vice presidential pick, went to bat for the former president on Sunday by trying to distance the presumptive Republican nominee from Project 2025.

“Think-tanks do think-tank stuff, they come up with ideas, they say things,” he told CNN’s State of the Union when he was asked if he was “comfortable” with the policies outlined in the initiative spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Rubio downplayed the impact of the 920-page project, which proposes consolidating executive power and replacing impartial civil servants with ideologically-approved successors who have sworn a loyalty oath.

Ariana Baio has more from “Liddle Marco”.

New York Democratic representative Ritchie Torres says that the mixed messaging from the party only serves to weaken Joe Biden further.

He released the following statement this morning:

Regardless of where one stands on the question of President Biden’s political future, the intra-party mixed messaging strikes me as deeply self-destructive.

Those publicly calling on President Biden to withdraw should ask themselves a simple question: what if the President becomes the Democratic nominee?

The drip, drip, drip of public statements of no confidence only serve to weaken a President who has been weakened not only by the debate but also by the debate about the debate.

Weakening a weakened nominee seems like a losing strategy for a presidential election. The piling-on is not so much solving a problem as much as it is creating and compounding one.

The process by which we decide how to move forward matters as much as the decision itself.

President Joe Biden has followed up on his letter to congressional Democrats by calling into MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

He says he has been traveling “to make sure my instinct was right about the party still wanted me to be the nominee” and he believes that the party does.

“I’m confident they do,” Biden says.

“I am not going anywhere.”

President Joe Biden is attempting to head off discussions of whether he should stand aside amid questions over his age and capacity with a defiant letter to Congressional Democrats in which he says exiting the race would be an affront to democracy.

Biden’s missive, which he released publicly on his X (formerly Twitter) account on Monday ahead of Congress’ return to Washington, opens with a declaration that he is “firmly committed” to remaining a candidate in this year’s presidential election and to “running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump.”

Andrew Feinberg reports from the White House.