Nikki Haley urges Republicans to prepare for Biden’s replacement

The Democrats will not survive if they keep the president on their ticket, Donald Trump’s former rival has said

The US Democratic Party is going to replace Joe Biden with a younger presidential candidate after his failure in the debate, and the Republicans must be ready for this, Nikki Haley, who lost to Donald Trump in the race for the GOP nomination, has said.

The 81-year-old president’s display during his televised face-off with Trump in Atlanta on Thursday was “shocking,” Haley said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Saturday.

"What we saw was that Trump was strong, but I don’t even think that mattered because Biden was so amazingly unfit. The way he lost his train of thought, the way he couldn’t grasp topics of what he needed to talk about,” she said.

The US president’s performance projected weakness and “our enemies just saw that they have between now and [the inauguration day on] January 20 to do whatever it is they want to do,” the former US envoy to the UN and ex-governor of South Carolina added.

Since the debate, reports have emerged that some Democratic donors are insisting that Biden be dropped as the party’s nominee for the November 5 election, and Haley expressed her belief that their demands will be met.

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The Democrats “are going to be smart about it: they’re going to bring somebody younger, they’re going to bring somebody vibrant, they’re going to bring somebody tested,” the Republican politician predicted.

“This is a time for Republicans to prepare and get ready for what’s to come because there is no way that there will be a surviving Democratic Party if they allow Joe Biden to continue to be the candidate,” she said.

Haley reiterated her call for cognitive testing of all federal candidates, which she made as she competed with 78-year-old Trump in the primaries earlier this year. Washington is “full of older people” and voters should be able to see “who is up to the challenge and who is not,” Haley argued.

If the Democrats “continue down this path and they have Biden as their nominee, they are committing to hurting America,” the Republican politician stressed. The president should be replaced on the rival party’s ticket “for the good of the country,” she added.

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On Friday, Axios published the results of a poll by Morning Consult, which suggested that 60% of voters believe that Biden should “definitely” or “probably” be replaced as the Democratic presidential nominee. When asked by journalists after the debate if the president was planning to step aside, the Biden campaign said “of course not.”