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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

US President Joe Biden has tested positive for Covid-19, forcing him to cancel a planned speech hosted by a Latino group in Las Vegas on Wednesday. 

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Biden had “mild symptoms” and would be returning to Delaware to “self-isolate”. He would continue to carry out his “duties as president during that time”, she said.

Biden’s illness comes amid a growing backlash from within his own Democratic party at his ability to continue campaigning for a second term in the White House, amid concerns about his physical and mental fitness to stay in the race.

Biden has vowed to carry on with his re-election effort but this week told BET, a television network, that if he had “some medical condition that emerged” he might reconsider.

As he boarded Air Force One for the flight from Nevada to Delaware, Biden said “I feel good” and gave reporters a thumbs up. In a note released by the White House, the president’s doctor said he was suffering from “general malaise”, with a runny nose and cough.

Footage of the president boarding the plane showed him moving very slowly up the stairs into the aircraft.

“He felt okay for his first event of the day, but given that he was not feeling better, point-of-care testing for Covid-19 was conducted, and the results were positive for the Covid-19 virus,” the doctor’s note said, adding that he had received the first dose of Paxlovid, an oral antiviral drug to treat Covid-19 that is commonly administered to elderly and high-risk patients.

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Disney chief executive Bob Iger and his wife Willow Bay have agreed to buy a controlling stake in the US National Women’s Soccer League club Angel City FC at a valuation of $250mn, in a record deal for the league that would make it the most valuable women’s sports team in the world.

The agreement, which is subject to approval by the league, underscores the rapid appreciation of sports clubs and women’s sports in particular. It is also the Iger family’s first foray into the realm of sports ownership.

Los Angeles-based Angel City FC was founded in 2020 by actor Natalie Portman, tennis star Serena Williams and her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and a consortium of investors from the worlds of Hollywood, venture capital and sports. Portman and Ohanian would continue to serve on the board of directors of the team, the club said.

The growth of women’s football, and the NWSL especially, has accelerated through the pandemic. Angel City was the league’s ninth franchise when founded in 2020 — since then the NWSL has grown to 14 clubs.

Last year, investment firm Sixth Street became the first institutional investor to become a majority owner of a US sports team when it committed $125mn to buy a new franchise, Bay FC. That figure included a $53mn expansion fee, paid by owners of new clubs to the rest of the league so as not to dilute the value of existing teams, a 10-fold increase in expansion fees from 2020.

Bay, the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, will serve and control Angel City’s board of directors and represent the club at the NWSL board of governors. She and Iger will also invest an additional $50mn “to support the club’s future growth”, according to a team statement.

Bay said that she and Iger “are committed to advancing the club’s mission of driving equity on and off the field”.

Iger rejoined Disney as chief executive in 2022, having previously served in the role from 2005 to 2020. Disney owns the sport-focused cable network ESPN and free-to-air ABC, and was the largest provider of linear sports content in the US last year, according to MoffettNathanson. NWSL has media rights agreements with ESPN, Paramount’s CBS, Amazon Prime Video, and Scripps Sports.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say President Joe Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate a different candidate, according to a new poll, sharply undercutting his post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still with him even if some “big names” are turning on him.

The new survey by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, conducted as Biden works to salvage his candidacy two weeks after his debate flop, also found that only about 3 in 10 Democrats are extremely or very confident that he has the mental capability to serve effectively as president, down slightly from 40% in an AP-NORC poll in February.

The findings underscore the challenges the 81-year-old president faces as he tries to silence calls from within his own party to leave the race and tries to convince Democrats that he’s the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump. The poll was conducted mostly before Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. It’s unclear whether the shooting influenced people’s views of Biden, but the small number of poll interviews completed after the shooting provided no early indication that his prospects improved.

Meanwhile, as Vice President Kamala Harris receives additional scrutiny amid the talk about whether Biden should bow out, the poll found that her favorability rating is similar to his — but the share of Americans who have an unfavorable opinion of her is slightly lower.

The poll provides some evidence that Black Democrats are among Biden’s strongest supporters, with roughly half in the survey saying he should continue running, compared to about 3 in 10 white and Hispanic Democrats. Overall, seven in 10 Americans think Biden should drop out, with Democrats only slightly less likely than Republicans and independents to say that he should make way for a new nominee.

“I do have genuine concerns about his ability to hold the office,” said Democrat Andrew Holcomb, 27, of Denver. “I think he’s frankly just too old for the job.”

Janie Stapleton, a 50-year-old lifelong Democrat from Walls, Mississippi, held the opposite view, saying Biden is the “best candidate” for president.

People aren’t just sour on Biden on as they size up their choices this election season.

About 6 in 10 Americans want Trump to withdraw — but relatively few Republicans are in that camp.

As for Biden, younger Democrats are especially likely to want to see him bow out – and to say they’re dissatisfied with him. Three-quarters of Democrats under the age of 45 want Biden to drop out, compared to about 6 in 10 of those who are older.

“I just feel like these two individuals are a sad choice,” said Alexi Mitchell, 35, a civil servant who lives in Virginia. She identifies as a Democratic-leaning independent, and while she thinks Biden is probably still mentally up to the job, she worries that the past few weeks’ unraveling of support makes him a weak candidate, no matter what happens next. “If he doesn’t have control over his own party, that’s a fatal flaw,” she said. “He’s put us in a bad position where Trump might win.”

Despite bullish talk from the Biden campaign heading into the debate, the faceoff only left the president in a deeper hole. Democrats are slightly more likely to say they’re dissatisfied with Biden as their nominee now than they were before his halting performance. About half are dissatisfied, an uptick from about 4 in 10 in an AP-NORC poll from June.

By contrast, most Republicans – about 6 in 10 – came out of the debate very or somewhat satisfied with Trump as their candidate. Too few interviews were conducted after the assassination attempt to provide a clear indication of whether Republicans or Americans overall have rallied further around Trump since then.

David Parrott, a Democrat from Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, was willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt given the president’s age, but he still voiced concerns about a potential second term.

“I don’t know if he can make it another four years or not,” said Parrott, a 58-year-old retiree. “Shouldn’t he be sitting at his beach house taking it easy?”

All of the recent churn has left Americans much more likely to think Trump is capable of winning the 2024 election than is Biden – 42% to 18%. About a quarter thought the the two men equally capable of winning.

Even Democrats are relatively dour about their party’s prospects come November.

Only about a third of Democrats believe Biden is more capable of winning than is Trump. About 3 in 10 think the two are equally capable of winning and 16% say victory is more likely to go to the Republican. By contrast, Republicans are overwhelmingly convinced that Trump is in the best position to win.

Trump also has the edge on Biden when Americans consider who is most capable of handling a crisis, 38% to 28%. And people are about equally divided on which candidate has the better vision for the country, with 35% saying Biden and 34% Trump.

For all of the disenchantment Biden is up against, the president insists it’s not too late to turn things around, saying past presidents have come back from a deficit at this stage in the campaign. In an interview Tuesday with BET News, he said many voters haven’t focused yet, adding, “The point is, we’re just getting down to gametime right now.”

The poll did also offer a bright spot for Biden: 40% of adults say he’s more honest than Trump, while about 2 in 10 think the opposite.

Most Democrats — around 6 in 10 — say that Vice President Harris would make a good president, while 22% think not and 2 in 10 don’t know enough to say. The poll showed that 43% of U.S. adults have a favorable opinion of her, while 48% have an unfavorable opinion. Somewhat more have a negative view of Biden: approximately 6 in 10 Americans.

The survey was conducted before Trump selected freshman Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate. It showed that for most Americans, Vance is still an unknown. Six in 10 don’t know enough about him to form an opinion, while 17% have a favorable view and 22% view him negatively.

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The poll of 1,253 adults was conducted July 11-15, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.