Following Biden's stumbled and disorganized performance in last week's debate with President Trump, Democrats inside and outside the administration are privately considering what it would take for Biden to drop out of the presidential race just six weeks before the convention and four months before the election.
Biden and his aides have made clear he has no plans to withdraw from the race, telling campaign staff on Wednesday that “nobody is trying to get rid of me” and “I'm not withdrawing.” Democratic allies, strategists and elected officials are growing increasingly in agreement about what conditions would be necessary for Biden to leave office.
His approval ratings would need to fall further, many Democrats would need to abandon him, and donor funding would need to show clear signs of drying up.
Then a group of Democratic leaders Figures like Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California might privately tell Mr. Biden not only that he will lose but that he stands to lose both the Senate and the House if he remains the nominee.
“This goes to his core: Not only am I going to lose, but I'm going to lose the Senate and the House,” one Democratic strategist said in a routine conversation with lawmakers and aides who, like many of the people involved in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide their candid assessment.
Longtime Biden associates say the case for withdrawal would need to appeal to Biden's sense of dignity, honor and public service. Several offered similar language, highlighting Biden's “historic” and “critical” presidency and likening him to former President Lyndon B. Johnson for the amount of significant legislation he helped enact.
But now, they will continue, “The country has changed, Biden has changed, and it's time to move on.”
“It's always important to know when to back away on your own two feet and your own volition,” said one Democratic official who believes Biden will eventually back away.
A former Democratic Senate aide who now has regular contact with Democratic donors and officeholders put it more bluntly: “He's going to be the 'Scarlet B' around candidates' necks. It's not going to be a fun experience and it's going to be humiliating and degrading for someone like him. He doesn't deserve that and he deserves a more dignified exit given his track record.”
Another purpose of Biden's appeal, these people said, is to remind him that he ran to stop Trump and the existential threat he believes he poses to U.S. democracy. If Biden loses, taking the House and the Senate with him, not only will Trump be back in the White House, but he and Democrats will also be without a bulwark against policies they see as dangerous.
For example, a loss in the Senate would mean being unable to stop President Trump from appointing many MAGA-leaning judges to life terms.
“The president has been in politics for a long time and I strongly believe he views this race as an existential battle with Trump. If the president sees the numbers that say he can't win this race, I would assume he will act on that,” said David Axelrod, a former aide to former President Barack Obama.
Still, Biden's allies say the decision must be made by Biden himself, but key Democrats also have a role to play. Biden has long valued the opinions of his fellow politicians, who win elections and must answer to voters, above almost anything else.
Democrats stressed the importance of the party as a whole reaching out to him, in addition to Democratic leaders such as Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York — a group that should include state governors and “former” lawmakers such as former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
But Obama isn't necessarily a perfect communicator, and former administration officials acknowledged that the 44th president will play a complicated role in the final decision, given that he was seen to prefer Hillary Clinton over Biden in 2016.
Biden has complained for years about being pushed aside and believing at the time that he should have beaten Trump, and his staff has also complained about the general lack of respect they sometimes felt from Obama's staff when Biden was vice president.
Obama and Biden have spoken privately since the debate, and a person familiar with the call said Obama offered to be a confidant as the president decides his future.
Biden's first run for president in 1987 ended in a scandal over allegations that he plagiarized a paper by a British politician. Though his family encouraged him to continue, the then-senator decided to drop out, fearing the scandal would undermine his ability to oversee the confirmation hearings for President Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork.
“It seems to me that I have a choice,” said Biden, who dropped out of the presidential race that year, “either I run for president or I do my job to make sure that the Supreme Court doesn't move in a direction that I think is really harmful.”
The reaction within his party to Biden's poor performance in last week's debate was widespread panic that dramatically reframed the presidential race. In his standoff with Trump, Biden struggled to deflect attacks, gave incoherent answers, stared blankly while Trump spoke and at times appeared confused about the issues he was arguing with.
In the days that followed, those around Biden urged wary allies to remain calm as the Fourth of July holiday weekend loomed and they argued that no one could accurately assess the debate's aftermath until the end of July.
But now that timeline appears to be accelerating. While Biden has publicly defended himself as having “one bad night, tired from a recent trip,” privately he has acknowledged the situation is politically tough and is consulting allies about how he can demonstrate he's ready for a second term.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday that Biden “absolutely” will not back down, and Biden's advisers say the president remains his only option to beat Trump. They argue that polls show no other Democrat is in a much better position than Biden, or able to mount a campaign better than him, with just four months left.
Biden is scheduled to hold several public events before returning to Washington to host a NATO summit next week, including a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday and an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos the same day.
“It's clear that it took a while for the gravity of the situation and the size of the hole that's been dug to sink in,” said Tim Ryan, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio who has publicly called for Biden to step down and for Vice President Harris to become the Democratic nominee.
A growing number of Democrats say they don't see a path forward for Biden and that there is no way for the party to keep the White House unless he gives up his top presidential nomination. While they largely agree, others say Biden, who has run for president three times before, is unlikely to give up the Oval Office he fought so hard to win.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released Wednesday showed Biden trailing Trump among likely voters nationwide, 43 percent to 49 percent, a three-point lead over Trump since last week before the debate. A Wall Street Journal poll after the debate also showed Biden trailing Trump by six points, 42 percent to 48 percent, down from the two-point lead Trump held in February.
Eight national polls tracked by The Washington Post have Biden trailing Trump by an average of 3 percentage points, while the same pollsters had him ahead by an average of 1 point in previous pre-debate surveys.
But internal campaign polling isn't as clear-cut, said a person familiar with the data.
One reason senators like Clyburn and Pelosi have begun giving more aggressive TV interviews this week is because Democrats fear that anxiety, discontent and alarm have not quite seeped into Biden's inner circle and want him to get his message across, even in public, one House Democrat said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on MSNBC on Tuesday that it was a “legitimate question” to ask whether Biden's mediocre debate performance was “a blip or a symptom,” and urged the president to show Americans he is prepared not just to run for office but to defeat Trump in November.
A person familiar with Pelosi's thinking said her comments were not a “warning” but a sign of the president's modesty. The strategy wasn't working and needed to be changed, a message she also conveyed privately to people around Biden, the person said.
There was initial hope that Biden's family would encourage him to step down, but that now seems increasingly unlikely: Biden's wife, Jill, and son, Hunter, remain adamant that he continue to run, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Biden's aides have shown no signs of publicly urging him to find a way out. A former senatorial aide said that if the polls turn clearly dismal, Biden might be persuaded “the hard way”: that “other Democrats would come to him privately and publicly, asking him to resign, distancing themselves from him, saying that Trump has a much better chance of winning if you run.”
One reason Democrats and party leaders have hesitated to publicly call on Biden to back down is because of deep fears about how disruptive such a move would be. Some aren't convinced Harris could win against Trump, but they also don't see a clear path forward that ignoring Harris, the nation's first female, Black and Indian American vice president, would cost them much of their base.
But Ryan said he had not heard any specific concerns about Harris in his conversations with lawmakers.
“They think the worst-case scenario, the riskiest scenario, is the president running again,” Ryan said. “A convention might be a risk, Kamala Harris might be a risk, but it's not as risky as maintaining the status quo.”
Lee Ann Caldwell and Paul Kane contributed to this report.
