Joe Biden is fighting on.
With his party in disarray over the question of the president’s age and political viability, Biden insisted at a press conference on Thursday evening that he was not stepping back.
“If I slow down [and] I can’t get the job done — that’s a sign I shouldn’t be doing it,” he said at the end of this week’s Nato summit. “But there’s no indication of that yet. None.”
There was one major gaffe, when he referred to Kamala Harris, the vice-president, as “vice-president Trump” and earlier in the day Biden described Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin”.
Despite that, the 81-year-old president will be hoping his performance will be enough to fend off a full-blown Democratic rebellion against his candidacy that has been brewing since Biden’s disastrous performance in last month’s debate with Donald Trump.
Yet even if he wins a temporary reprieve, the Democratic party has been plunged into a crisis that is dividing its members between Biden supporters and dissenters, threatening party unity less than four months away from the November election.
The Democrats had wanted to turn the election into a referendum on Trump’s character — and even the future of democracy in America. Instead, the chaos within the party over Biden’s future is likely to further benefit Trump ahead of the Republican convention in Milwaukee next week as polls show him already with a lead in the battleground states.
A party that has become used to watching Republican strife over Trump’s leadership is now reckoning with its own mix of division and despair over whether to try and force Biden out.
“Every single Democrat that I’ve talked to, and I’ve talked to about 1,000 in the past week, every single one thinks the same thing, which is we’re totally, totally screwed,” says one person close to the White House.
“There’s no way [Biden] can win this election, there’s no way he can prosecute the case against Trump. If it turned into a referendum on Biden, we were always going to lose. And that’s what’s happening,” the person adds.
To many Democrats, the insularity of the White House and Biden’s inner circle of advisers keeping him in the race and clinging to power is overwhelmingly to blame.
“I feel like I’m screaming into the void. We are willingly walking into a bear den,” says one party strategist. “We have a team in the presidential space here that has looked at all the options and decided that murder-suicide is the way to go. And it’s pretty terrifying.”
One of the biggest problems for Democrats about the crisis engulfing their nominee is that it is drawing attention away from Trump’s weaknesses.
“The opportunity cost of every minute the Democrats are not attacking Trump is huge,” says Paul Begala, the veteran party strategist.
When Biden launched his re-election bid in April 2023, Democrats on Capitol Hill overwhelmingly gave him the benefit of the doubt about his ability to defeat Trump. While they had some reservations about his age, they were drowned out by his record in office, including his transformational economic policy and handling of foreign affairs, especially the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But Biden’s dismal performance in the televised debate — which the Democrats had hoped would focus attention on Trump’s flaws — delivered a devastating blow to the party’s confidence in his ability to win the campaign and serve four more years in the Oval Office.
When Nato allies gathered midweek in Washington, the unhappiness with Biden had reached fever pitch. By Friday morning, the number of dissenters had swelled to at least 18 Democratic lawmakers in the House and one in the Senate asking for a new nominee.
Some of the criticism has been as blistering as it has been sobering. “Joe Biden’s record of public service is unrivalled. His accomplishments are immense. His legacy as a great president is secure. He must not risk that legacy, those accomplishments and American democracy to soldier on in the face of the horrors promised by Donald Trump,” said Jim Himes, the Connecticut lawmaker and chair of the intelligence committee.
But Biden still has staunch defenders, especially among Black and Hispanic lawmakers.
“What you’re seeing is a circular firing squad — the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” Juan Vargas, a Democratic lawmaker from California, tells the Financial Times. “We’ve got one candidate who has done a fantastic job as president — and another guy that became a criminal. And we’re beating up on the guy who’s done a fantastic job. I mean, how dumb can we be? It’s literally like you’re playing the game of football and you’re tackling your own quarterback.”
Brad Sherman, another California Democrat, says lawmakers are split between those “chanting ‘go with Joe’” and those saying “Joe must go” — but he said most would be evaluating Biden’s public comments very closely in the coming days. Biden heads to Michigan for a rally on Friday, then to Texas on Monday where he will be interviewed by NBC.
“There are very few of us who couldn’t be persuaded by an enormously good or enormously bad set of performances in the next week or so,” says Sherman.
Crucially, Democratic party leaders — including Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House — have been less than full throated in supporting Biden in the past week. Barack Obama, the former president, has been quiet in recent days.
Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker and one of the most influential party elders, said on MSNBC this Wednesday that Biden had a “decision” to make, subtly suggesting that he might reconsider. “She didn’t apply pressure. She created permission. Very astute,” says Begala. “You don’t tell an Irishman to get lost, because he’ll just dig in his heels.”
At the root of the Democratic angst over Biden is polling data that shows the president’s path to victory is narrowing. Since the debate, Trump has opened up a 1.9 percentage point lead over Biden nationally, according to Fivethirtyeight.com’s average, and is ahead in all the swing states.
“This is the lowest point that you can imagine for the Biden campaign,” says David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, a non-partisan political analysis group in Washington.
The danger for many Democrats in House and Senate races is that if Democratic voters feel there is no hope for their party to win the presidency, they stay home on election day.
“If there’s a fatalism that sets in about the election results, and Democratic turnout is poor, then it could be a cataclysm for Democrats,” adds Wasserman. “We could see Trump win some states that were comfortable Biden wins in 2020,” such as Maine, New Hampshire and New Mexico.
The Biden campaign is pushing back against such gloomy assessments. “We maintain multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, wrote in a fundraising email on Thursday. “Right now, winning the Blue Wall states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — is the clearest pathway to that aim, but we also believe that the sunbelt states [Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia] are not out of reach.”
During his press conference, Biden said he would only reconsider his bid if he was told that he could not win. “They’re not saying that. No poll says that,” the president said.
But that comment was immediately challenged as fanciful by David Axelrod, Obama’s former political strategist who has often been critical of Biden. “It sounds like Biden’s team has not been very candid with him about what the data is showing: the age issue is a huge and potentially insurmountable concern and his odds of victory are very, very slim,” Axelrod said on social media.
“Either [Biden] is delusional about his political standing, or his team is delusional, or they’re just cherry picking what to show him,” said one Democratic strategist. “The big frustration is how unaware the White House political operation seems to be of the president’s standing right now”.
Even if Biden presses ahead with his bid, the viability of his campaign could suffer if Democratic donors pull their funding. Biden suffered a blow this week when George Clooney, the actor who hosted a fundraiser in California for the president last month, called on him to quit the race.
Ning Mosberger-Tang, the leader of a donor collaborative focused on climate change, says Biden’s age is “a fundamental issue that you cannot talk away”. Summing up the downbeat mood among donors, she adds that if the Democrats lose the White House, they’ll likely lose the House and Senate, which has the power to confirm Supreme Court justices.
“I’m very concerned,” says Mosberger-Tang. “We may disagree with the strategy in terms of who should be running as the presidential candidate right now. But I think we all agree that we are at a very, very critical point of time that could potentially lead to an irreversible outcome — the loss of democracy for a very long time.”
One of the biggest questions hanging over Biden’s decision is whether any replacement would fare better against Trump. Most likely, the president would pass the baton to the vice-president, Kamala Harris, but her polling has been weak too, casting doubt on her own potential for victory.
“We know that she would face racism and misogyny and that he [Biden] would not. [But] we know that she would more effectively prosecute the case against Trump, because she’s just good at that and he’s gotten to be really bad at it,” says the person close to the White House said. “What we don’t know is which is worse or better?”
Sherman, the California lawmaker, says “if you’re trying to change horses in the middle of [a] stream, it is easier to move over to the adjacent horse” — suggesting Harris would be the default solution over other Democrats such as Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan governor, or Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania governor. But regardless of what happens, he warns: “Any process that departs from Biden is messy and bloody.”
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