“I think attacking President Obama is bad policy and bad politics,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said Thursday. Of Biden’s tenure as vice president, Blumenthal added: “He owns it, for better or worse. But he should be proud of it.”

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois also suggested the Democratic race should be marked by a more hands-off approach toward Obama.

“You can disagree with him, and I have, but the bottom line is ... he did an extraordinary job, and he should be given that recognition by those that are running for the presidency.”

In a Quinnipiac University poll released this week, 51 percent of likely Democratic-primary voters nationwide said Biden presented the party’s best chance against Trump—Sanders (at 10 percent) and Warren and Harris (both at 8 percent) all distantly trailed. Biden held a comfortable lead on that question over his rivals, even among voters younger than 50, but his advantage swelled among older Democrats: He is leading the next closest candidate by a factor of 10 among those 65 and older. Among Democrats who identified as moderate to conservative, more than six times as many picked Biden as the strongest candidate compared with any other contender. Among black voters, he led by a factor of 9, drawing 57 percent on that question, compared with Harris’s 6 percent.

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries on Tuesday stood by the tweet his leadership office sent calling out freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff for his Twitter attacks on a moderate freshman Democrat.

Several Democratic lawmakers have privately told The Hill that Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, should be fired for tweeting that votes from freshman Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.), a gay, Native American mixed-martial arts fighter, “enable a racist system” and that the large bloc of moderate Democrats are modern-day segregationists because they backed a Senate border-aid bill.

But Jeffries, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, declined to say whether he believed that Chakrabarti should be ousted, saying that is Ocasio-Cortez's, or "AOC's," decision.

She has stated on numerous occasions that she supports expanding the use of drone strikes against military opponents, and, in 2014, refused to rule out the idea of using torture on suspected terrorists. Gabbard also spoke out vehemently against the Iran nuclear deal when it was first proposed by President Obama.