WASHINGTON — Concerns about President Joe Biden’s erratic debate performance are spilling from newspaper editorial pages and the donor class to members of Congress as fears grow among Democrats that more than the White House could be at stake.

On Tuesday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas became the first Democratic member of the House to publicly call on Biden to abandon his campaign against former President Donald Trump.

“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020. He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024,” Doggett said in a statement. He noted that polls showed Biden trailing Democratic senators and Trump in key states.

“I had hoped that the debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not. Instead of reassuring voters, the president failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies,” he said.

In light of that, Doggett said, Biden should “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre later told reporters that Biden staying in the race did not jeopardize democracy.

“What we believe is that this is a president that … is going to continue to fight for democracy and is going to continue to focus on making sure that we get Roe v. Wade into law … make sure that IVF is not taken away from families, make sure that contraception is not taken away from families, make sure that we fight for our voting rights,” she said at Tuesday’s White House briefing.

“There are so many things that we need to continue to fight for, and at the end of the day, this is a president that has delivered working closely with Congress and doing some of these things in a bipartisan way,” she said.

Doggett’s recommendation came after Biden’s team spent a weekend tamping down concerns about Biden’s electability even as lawmakers called on him to recognize what staying in the race could mean.

“He clearly has to understand … that his decision not only impacts who’s going to serve in the White House the next four years, but who’s going to serve in the Senate, who’s going to serve in the House and it will have implications for decades to come,” Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., said Tuesday morning on CNN.

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