U.S. Senator Peter Welch, a representative from Vermont, has become the first lawmaker in the Upper House to in publicly calling on President Joe Biden to step downof the Democratic presidential nomination.

In a column in the newspaper The Washington Postthe Democrat assured that Biden He is not the best person to beat former President Donald Trump this November and has asked the president to leave to give the opportunity to other “young and energetic” politicians.

The lawmaker said that the “risks could not be higher” ahead of the presidential elections and stressed that Americans “cannot ignore” the “disastrous performance”” from Biden in the first presidential debate with Trump, on June 27.

He thinks he is not a good candidate

“I understand why Biden wants to run. He saved us from Donald Trump once and he wants to do it again,” Welch wrote. “But he needs to re-evaluate whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my opinion, he is not.Biden’s poor performance in the debate against former President Trump has sparked a political crisis in Washington, with multiple calls from lawmakers and influential figures within the Democratic Party asking the president to step aside.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a heavyweight within the “Elites“The party’s leader declined to give his explicit support to the president in an interview on the Morning Joe program on Wednesday. “It’s up to him to decide whether he’s going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is of the essence,” he said.

According to the latest polls, Trump is ahead of Biden. The average of polls conducted by the website FiveThirtyEight shows that he has 42.1% of voting intentions, 2.1 percentage points more than his rival.