Democratic strategist David Axelrod said Sunday he doesn’t think President Biden understands he’s “not winning this race” against former President Trump.
“There are certain immutable facts of life, and those were painfully obvious on that debate stage, and the President just doesn’t seem to wake up — he hasn’t been able to deal with it. He’s not winning this race,” Axelrod, a senior adviser to the Obama administration, said on CNN’s “Inside Politics Sunday.”
“If we just look at the data and talk to people across the country, to politicians across the country, he’s more likely to lose by a landslide than narrowly win this race,” Axelrod continued. “And if the risks are as great as he says, and I believe they are, then he really needs to consider what the right thing to do here is.”
Sunday’s interview comes after Axelrod responded to Biden’s primetime interview on Friday, calling the president “dangerously out of touch” with voters’ concerns.
“Listening to the interview, he seemed to deny where he is in the race. He doesn’t seem to understand what the big concern is that people have,” Axelrod said Sunday about Biden’s performance in the interview.
Axelrod noted the “tremendous loss and enormous odds” Biden has faced in his life and has always “struggled to recover from it.”
“He fought to recover from political defeats and against all odds. And so, his psyche is that he can beat anyone and any odds. What he can’t beat is father time. And that’s really the concern here. It’s not about his record,” Axelrod said, later noting that “history will be much kinder to him than voters are being now.”
The president remained defiant as some party members raised concerns about whether he should remain in the race after his difficult debate performance. Five House Democrats explicitly asked him to step aside.
In The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s national polling average, the two candidates remain in a tight race, with Trump leading by 1.1 percentage points, 44.2% to 43.1%.
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