Healey, a key Biden supporter, encourages him to contemplate bowing out of the race

BOSTON — One of Joe Biden’s high-profile campaign surrogates is publicly urging him to consider exiting the presidential race.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a member of Biden’s national campaign advisory board who earlier this spring headlined a big-dollar fundraiser for him in Boston, said in a statement Friday that he should “carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump.”

Biden “saved our democracy in 2020 and has done an outstanding job over the last four years,” Healey said in a statement released through her political arm Friday, breaking days of silence from the first-term governor of this deep-blue state that handed Biden one of his widest margins of victory in 2020.

“The best way forward right now is a decision for the President to make. Over the coming days, I urge him to listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump,” she continued. “Whatever President Biden decides, I am committed to doing everything in my power to defeat Donald Trump.”

Healey is the first Democratic governor to publicly nudge Biden toward exiting the presidential race as he struggles to recover from a disastrous debate performance last week that has the potential to doom his reelection bid.

Other Democrats have been banging that drum this week. Three sitting House Democrats — including Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton — have publicly called on Biden to end his campaign. Other Democrats, including Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), also criticized Biden’s campaign for previously pushing back against people who question the president’s age and fitness.

Privately, congressional Democrats are panicked, and some are circulating letters including one that would call on Biden to withdraw from the race. Meanwhile, delegates to the Democratic National Convention expressed to POLITICO that they hoped Biden would step aside — and make way for Vice President Kamala Harris — and some donors have been applying pressure on his campaign as well.

Biden on social media Friday afternoon stated that he’s not dropping out of the 2024 contest, similar to what he told a crowd at a rally in Wisconsin.

“I’m the sitting President of the United States. I’m the nominee of the Democratic party. I’m staying in the race,” he posted.

Democratic governors have largely rushed to Biden’s defense after the debate. But Healey — who unlike many of her counterparts is not being seriously floated as a possible replacement on the ticket — has proceeded with caution.

After staying silent on debate night, she acknowledged to reporters at an unrelated event the next day that Biden “had a bad debate performance” and that it was “tough to watch.”

She doubled down on the comments later that day.

“It was a big fail. I mean, that was horrible,” she said during a “Pod Save America” event in Boston (though, she added, Trump’s remarks during the debate were “downright scary”).

In a call with Democratic governors on Monday, Healey called Biden’s political position “irretrievable,” according to a person directly familiar with the call and granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic. The New York Times first reported her remark.

Healey’s remarks on Friday are an early sign that governors’ concerns about Biden were not allayed by his emergency convening of more than 20 Democratic state executives at the White House on Wednesday, in which the president said he underwent a medical checkup after the debate and was fine. Healey notably did not join her counterparts in addressing reporters after the closed-door confab, nor did she follow them in posting supportive statements on social media.

Her statement came hours before Biden was set to do his first post-debate TV interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, a moment widely viewed as do-or-die for the president’s campaign.