CNN
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President Joe Biden fought a fierce weekend battle for reelection following a crushing debate defeat, but he could not dispel ontological doubts about his candidacy that are more glaring than ever.
Biden has been quarantining with his family at Camp David after performing several events to try to ease widespread panic among Democratic voters, associates and donors following concerns that he may be too old to beat former President Donald Trump in the debates or even serve a second term. His weak and incoherent performance at a CNN event on Thursday night marked an extraordinary development in a campaign that has left him facing calls to cede the stage to younger candidates with just over four months to go until Election Day.
The Biden campaign lashed out at critics in the media over the weekend, calling on Biden to stand down and arguing that early data shows Biden's bruising loss hasn't fundamentally changed the race's shape. Meanwhile, Democratic heavyweights flocked to talk shows on Sunday, trying to shift attention away from Biden's messy and painful debate performance and put the spotlight back on Trump.
“Let's not judge a president on one debate,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Dana Bash on CNN's “State of the Union.” “Let's talk about what it means for people's lives. The difference between Joe Biden and the former president is clear.” Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, a longtime Biden supporter, acknowledged his friend's debate was “terrible” but blamed Biden for being overloaded with facts by his staff.
The president's family, who will play a key role in decisions about the future of the campaign, currently believes Biden should stay in the race and keep fighting while waiting for polling data and preparing for some weakening of Biden's position, CNN's MJ Lee and Jeff Zeleny reported Sunday. But that view could change if the situation worsens and the president becomes convinced that dropping out of the race is the best decision.
Democrats' damage-control strategy is to argue that an overnight slump doesn't diminish Biden's past successes, but this ignores a key question many voters have been pondering for months: Is Biden too physically and cognitively debilitated to serve another four years?
Republicans have doubled down on the issue. “All of America saw it. You know who else saw it? Our adversaries saw it. Putin saw it. Xi Jinping saw it. The Ayatollahs saw it,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a possible vice presidential candidate for Trump, said on NBC's “Meet the Press,” referring to the leaders of Russia, China and Iran.
So far there are no signs that the 81-year-old president is considering abandoning his campaign or that the party is rushing to find another candidate.
“Joe Biden is not going to withdraw from this race, nor should he withdraw,” Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said on CBS' “Face the Nation.”
Biden won the Democratic primary by a landslide and is the presumptive nominee, so there is no real way for the party to move forward unless the president decides the time is right. Some party officials worry that a new nomination contest at this point would risk sparking a civil war within the party and essentially handing the presidency to Trump. Meanwhile, Biden has repeatedly maintained that he is fit for the job. And if the Democratic rising star did step forward, he would be denounced as a traitor by many in the party, putting his own career prospects at risk.
Speaking at a fundraiser in New Jersey on Saturday night, the president said he understood the concerns and acknowledged it was “not a great night” in Atlanta and that he was walking slower and speaking less fluently than before, but vowed to keep fighting.
For now, Biden's campaign appears to have averted an immediate crisis for his campaign. His fundraising remains strong — his campaign said it raised more than $33 million in the days since the debate — and bigwigs appearing on television to defend him suggest he hasn't lost his party yet, even as a complete meltdown unfolds behind the scenes.
But a string of bad polls suggesting his already bleak reelection chances have been seriously damaged by the debate could spark renewed panic. And no modern president or nominee has faced demands equivalent to those from normally friendly media commentators urging Biden to announce he will not seek the Democratic nomination in Chicago in August.
CNN reported Saturday that Democratic donors are split between supporting Biden or finding another candidate, no matter how complicated that may be. Any signs that the president is dashing Democrats' hopes of keeping the Senate and taking back the House would bolster the case for change, especially after a week in which the Supreme Court showed how radically unchecked conservative rule can change the country.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on Monday on Trump's claim that he enjoyed immunity for his actions as president, a case that suggests he believes he could have nearly unlimited power if elected to a second term. Biden has made allegations that Trump is subverting democracy a central part of his reelection campaign, but the debate gaffe only raises new questions about whether the threat is serious enough for Democrats to play it safer.
Though party leaders have publicly committed themselves to Biden (not doing so would be seen as a betrayal), many Democrats were deeply shaken by Thursday night's debate, and sources say many in the party spent the weekend privately lamenting the situation and are now looking toward the November election with trepidation.
But only one senior member has hinted at a behind-the-scenes move against Biden: Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told MSNBC the party is “having very serious conversations about what to do.” Raskin added, “Regardless of what President Biden decides, our party will be united, and our party needs him at the center of our campaign discussions.”
Raskin continued, “Whether (Biden) is the nominee or someone else is the nominee, he will be the keynote speaker at our convention.”
Biden's campaign sent out a series of memos, fundraising calls and statements over the weekend, emphasizing that he would not step down. “Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee. That's it. This is it,” the campaign wrote in an email to supporters. “The voters voted. He won in a landslide victory. If he were to step down, it would lead to weeks of chaos, intraparty fighting and violent floor brawls at the convention with many of the candidates limping along while Donald Trump has time to speak unopposed to the American electorate.”
But Biden's performance on Thursday night was so poor that it gave Trump ample time to speak irrefutably to voters, with the former president escaping a barrage of lies. Biden often missed opportunities to attack Trump on key Democratic issues, like abortion, and instead returned the focus to his own weaknesses, like immigration.
But the Biden campaign's ferocious counterattack does nothing to address a fundamental question raised in the aftermath of the debate, which shattered the confidence of his Democratic colleagues that Biden could beat Trump.
The president was under extreme pressure heading into the runoff because polls have long shown a majority of voters believe Biden is too old to serve a second term, which would expire at age 86. Biden has become noticeably erratic in recent years and appears a vastly different persona from when he took office in 2021.
But rather than allay those fears, Biden exacerbated them at a crucial moment in the campaign watched by more than 50 million viewers. Biden bounced back with a strong performance at a campaign event in North Carolina on Friday, but his televised showdown with Trump will likely never erase the painful image of a president being swept away by the storm of time. Voters saw for themselves how frail and broken Biden was.
Biden's team has long denied that the president's age is a disqualification, but it is one of the first issues raised by voters outside Washington political circles. Efforts to shield Biden from public scrutiny now risk being seen as an attempt to hide his true condition from the public. The controversy has shattered the credibility of frequent assertions by those around Biden that while he is often shaky in public, behind closed doors he is a dynamic force that intellectually dominates his younger aides.
Biden campaign manager Jennifer O'Malley Dillon even blames the media, not the president, for the upcoming poor poll numbers. “If we see a shift in the polls in the coming weeks, this would not be the first time that exaggerated media coverage has led to a temporary drop in the polls,” she wrote. This is a reference to former President Barack Obama's approval ratings after he lost the first debate to Utah Senator Mitt Romney in 2012. But the comparison is not accurate. Obama's approval ratings were indeed very low, and his campaign was in crisis. But there was no question that he was not physically or mentally fit to serve another four years as president.
A new CBS/YouGov poll conducted after the debate found that 72% of registered voters believe Biden is not in good enough mental or cognitive health to serve as president, a seven-point increase from a few weeks before the debate. Only 28% of registered voters said Biden should run for president. About 46% of registered Democratic voters thought Biden shouldn't run.
On the one hand, these numbers are devastating for a president whose path in battleground states is increasingly narrow as key aspects of his coalition crumble, especially among younger, progressive and minority voters. But the one saving grace for Biden is that voters have long considered him too old to run, and he has performed neck and neck with Trump in national polls. That makes it more likely that the twice-impeached convicted felon will alienate many voters, and that many still see Biden as the better choice.
Biden deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty addressed this point in an email of encouragement to Biden supporters, saying, “People are reminded of what they hate about Donald Trump: he is erratic, vengeful and acting in his own self-interest.”
Flaherty also blasted the “bedwetters” among Democrats who are calling on Biden to withdraw and suggested voters don't care about cable news analysis or “smug podcasters” — an apparent reference to the scathing criticism of former President Barack Obama's former aide on the “Pod Save America” podcast.
