'Not the campaigner he was': Ex- HUD Secretary Julián Castro urges Biden to step aside

Former San Antonio mayor and Obama administration Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro added himself Tuesday to a small but insistent list of Democrats calling on President Joe Biden to step aside from the race.

In a series of posts to X, Castro acknowledged his gratitude for Biden's policy accomplishments — but expressed his fear, in the wake of campaign missteps in the previous week, that he isn't up for waging the fight he did in 2020 that swept former President Donald Trump out of office.

"Joe Biden is a good man and has been a good president," he wrote. "President Biden passed transformative legislation. He helped bring us out of the pandemic — and led one of the greatest economic recoveries in the world. But unfortunately, a strong record is not enough when the stakes are this high."

Castro said Biden is "not the campaigner he was in 2020" — and instead, "looks very likely to lose to Trump, one of the weakest candidates in presidential history."

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Other Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have a better shot at winning, he said.

"Defeating Donald Trump is too important for Democrats to do nothing," he concluded. "With the understanding that the stakes are so high, President Biden should make the difficult decision to withdraw from the race."

Castro himself mounted a bid for president against Biden in the 2020 primary, where on the debate stage even at the time he suggested Biden was too elderly to assume the job.