Joe Biden’s quest for survival reaches a tipping point
This is the most dangerous moment of Joe Biden’s presidency. For now, the Democratic Party machine is publicly backing him, as are most of the party’s major donors – but for how long?
The spin campaign by Joe Biden and his supporters to brush off his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump as just a “bad day” and a “nothing to see here” moment is failing.
With every day, the political fallout from Biden’s incoherent performance a week ago is growing. Calls among Democrats for Biden to step aside in his bid for a second presidential term are becoming louder and more fervent, both in public and behind closed doors. His quest for political survival is reaching a tipping point in what is easily the most dangerous moment of his presidency.
It looms as a historic moment in American politics.
For now, Biden is determined to stay the course with the backing of his family, his inner circle and key high-profile Democrats like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Also for now, the Democratic Party machine is publicly backing him, as are most of the party’s major donors, but for how long?
Beneath the surface, the Democrats are embroiled in a titanic internal debate about whether their 81-year-old President should still be their candidate.
“It has been a collective nervous breakdown like nothing I’ve ever seen,” says Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.
Biden has told key allies that he knows he may not be able to save his candidacy unless he can persuade Americans in the coming days and weeks that he is fit to serve a second term.
The damage from his debate performance is already being reflected in opinion polls, with a New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump now leading Biden by 49 per cent to 43 per cent, a three-point swing to Trump in just a week.
The NYT poll showed that a majority of every demographic group, including Biden supporters, said he was too old to be an effective president.
A new Wall Street Journal poll found Trump now leading Biden by six points, with a record 80 per cent of voters saying the President is too old to run for a second term.
The dilemma for Biden and the Democrats is that there are no obvious or easy solutions to the corner they have painted themselves into. It is now clear even to rusted-on Democrats that Biden’s central strategic mistake was not to declare himself a one-term president a year ago and therefore facilitate an orderly primary contest to find a younger and more vibrant Democrat successor.
His failure to do so, whether driven by hubris, ego or simply a personal delusion that he was not too old for a second term, has crippled his party’s options. No presumptive nominee has ever withdrawn from the presidential race so close to an election.
Biden’s incoherent performance in the debate has placed his cognitive decline in the spotlight as never before.
If he stays, he is increasingly likely to lose in November, yet the alternative for the Democrats is an agonising one. They would need first to convince the notoriously stubborn Biden to abandon his bid for re-election. Having already become the Democrat’s presumptive nominee, Biden cannot be forcibly removed and would need to willingly walk away ahead of the Democratic convention, which begins in just six weeks on August 19.
This would most likely lead to an unprecedented and potentially divisive rapid-fire contest between potential Democratic candidates such as Vice-President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
If, and it is a big if, the Democrats could somehow quickly and cleanly choose a successor to Biden, the new nominee would then have only a few months to sell his or her candidacy to the American people against the frontrunner and former president Trump.
To make it more difficult, the Democrats would have to carry off this remarkable succession without giving the appearance of being a disorganised and desperate rabble and thereby all but delivering the presidency to Trump by default. This would be an enormous challenge from a party that has deep divisions between its liberal, centrist and conservative ranks.
As the fallout from Biden’s debate performance continues to unfold, the divisions within Democrat ranks over the President’s future are becoming clearer. The establishment rump of the party still believes that ditching Biden at this late stage is a greater risk than keeping him as the candidate. Their argument is essentially that Biden has been a good president in substance and that a Biden who is past his prime will still be seen by voters as a safer bet as president than a maverick like Trump.
“Bad debate nights happen,” Barack Obama wrote after the debate. “Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”
Former president Bill Clinton said: “I’ll leave the debate rating to the pundits, but here’s what I know: facts and history matter. Joe Biden has given us three years of solid leadership … all while pulling us out of the quagmire Donald Trump left us in.”
Not surprisingly, Biden’s White House team and his inner circle dismissed his debate performance as variously a “bad day” at the office, the result of a head cold or the impact of jet lag, the central theme being that his incoherence on the day was a one-off incident rather than a condition.
Former house Speaker Nancy Pelosi backs Biden’s continued candidacy but adds that she believes “it is a legitimate question” to ask whether Biden’s performance was just “an episode or is this a condition”.
Biden himself has come out swinging, saying, “I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. (But) I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done.”
He claimed later that the reason he “fell asleep on stage” was jet lag from his recent European trip.
Biden told his campaign staff on Thursday (AEST): “I am running. I’m the nominee of the Democratic Party. No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving.”
Those who know Biden well say he prides himself on his ability to push through adversity and is too stubborn to step aside for a successor unless he feels he has absolutely no alternative.
They believe the most influential voice in Biden’s head on this issue is his wife, Jill, which is why many Democrats were privately dismayed by her post-debate comment that, “Joe isn’t just the right person for the job, he’s the only person for the job”.
Hilary Rosen, a long-time Democrat strategist, believes the spin from the Biden camp is counter-productive and says they “would have been better off sticking with honesty”.
“You can’t tell people they didn’t see what they saw,” Rosen says. “To try to turn this around and try to make it be everybody else’s fault – it’s not only offensive, it just isn’t going to fly.”
Although most of the hand-wringing about Biden among Democrats is still taking place behind closed doors, a growing number are going public with their call for him to step aside.
The risk for the Democrats goes beyond Biden losing to Trump. A poor performance by Biden might make it impossible for Democrats to win the races that will decide control of the House and the Senate. Republican control of both houses of congress would give a second Trump presidency the teeth it needs to implement its agenda and would represent the worst nightmare for Democrats.
“He (Biden) clearly has to understand that his decision not only impacts who is going to serve in the White House the next four years, but who is going to serve in the Senate, who is going to serve in the House, and it’s going to have implications for decades to come,” says Democrat congressman Mike Quigley.
Already, two Democrat congressmen – Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Raul Grijalva of Arizona – have openly called for Biden to withdraw from the race, while two others – Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp – have said they believe he will lose in November.
Democrat heavy-hitter James Carville, who managed Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign, has called on Biden to step aside, saying, “Change is messy. But you have to listen to the vox populi. We want something new.”
Many major Democrat donors are expressing alarm behind closed doors about the prospect of a Biden candidacy, while one of them, Reed Hastings, the Netflix co-founder who has given more than $US20m to the party in recent years, has gone public, saying Biden “needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous”.
To add to Biden’s woes, the country’s two most powerful left-leaning pro-Biden newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have called in editorials for him to abandon his candidacy or at least reconsider it.
As The Wall Street Journal points out, the sudden abandonment of Biden by the liberal media in the US raises questions about why they didn’t focus earlier upon his obvious mental and physical frailties.
“They happily covered for White House deceptions. The Democratic press barely questioned Biden’s limited workday, his reliance on a teleprompter, and his rare unscripted media interviews,” the Journal writes.
With Biden’s withdrawal from the race suddenly a very real possibility, Democrat strategists are furiously trying to work out a potential game plan for what might unfold in the weeks ahead.
One way of potentially avoiding a bitter contest between potential successors would be for Biden to endorse Harris as a part of his withdrawal announcement. This would effectively anoint Harris as his successor and would make it difficult for the party to then conduct an open contest among all contenders.
But this strategy makes the highly contentious assumption that Harris is the best Democrat candidate to defeat Trump.
The 59-year-old Harris is widely considered to have been a lacklustre Vice-President at best and it is often forgotten that she ran a terrible presidential campaign in 2020 that saw her drop out before the first Democratic primary vote was cast. There is a wide gap between how Harris is viewed in the Democrat-dominated cities, which are only too happy to embrace a progressive woman of colour from California, compared with regional and rural America, which is deeply sceptical about what she stands for.
The new WSJ poll found Harris has similar poll numbers to Biden, with 35 per cent viewing her favourably and 58 per cent unfavourably. But the Harris camp has been buoyed by a new CNN poll this week that found Harris is within striking distance of Trump, trailing him by just 45-47, which is within the statistical margin of error. This stronger result is driven by 50 per cent support from female voters for Harris compared with 44 per cent for Biden.
The CNN poll shows Harris also performing better against Trump than her potential rivals Newsom (43 to Trump’s 48), Whitmer (42 to Trump’s 47) and Buttigieg (43 to Trump’s 47). However, this early advantage may be partly due to Harris’s much greater national name recognition than her Democrat competitors, a situation that would change quickly if they entered the contest.
The other advantage Harris has is that under Federal Election Commission regulations, only Harris – as a member of Biden’s campaign – could legally access the $US90m already amassed by the campaign.
In theory, other candidates would need to start fundraising from scratch, although it is likely that the Democratic Party machine would use Super PACs (political action committees) and other creative means to ensure that a Newsom or a Whitmer was not running for president on the smell of an oily rag.
Apart from Harris, Newsom is the name most commonly raised as a likely alternative to Biden. With straight teeth and a square-jawed face from central casting, the 56-year-old Californian Governor since 2019 easily won re-election in 2022 and has carefully cultivated a national profile while publicly denying harbouring presidential ambitions.
He supports many of Biden’s progressive social and economic policies but has recently become more centrist on issues such as drug policies, a move that has been seen as broadening his appeal.
But a Newsom candidacy also carries its own risks because California’s spiralling homelessness crisis and high taxes would be easily exploited by Trump on the campaign trail.
Another likely contender would be the popular 52-year-old Whitmer, who has been Governor of the key swing state of Michigan since 2019 and is considered a tough and savvy retail politician. She came to national prominence during the pandemic when she was the subject of a far-right militia plot to kidnap her in 2020 because of her tough Covid restrictions.
Another potential contender is the 42-year-old Buttigieg, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination unsuccessfully in 2020 and who is arguably the Democrats’ strongest performer on the campaign trail. The main question mark over Buttigieg’s candidacy is that he is gay, a fact that has seen him struggle to win solid support among conservative African-American voters, a key constituency for any Democrat.
Other potential candidates include the governors of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro; of Illinois, JB Pritzker; and Kentucky, Andy Beshear, but none of these has been prominent on the national stage.
The single greatest handicap facing the Democrats is time. If Biden is to abandon his candidacy then it has to occur within the next few weeks to give the party even a moderate hope of an orderly transition to a new candidate.
That candidate would be formally chosen at the August 19 convention in Chicago, not by Democrat voters, but by the party delegates who were previously pledged to vote for Biden.
The risks for the Democrats in going down this unprecedented path are hard to overstate. But if polls continue to show that Biden has done himself terminal damage as a candidate, you can expect the Democrats to call for a new beginning regardless of the risks.
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