What to watch as Biden doubles down amid partisan panic

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The fever didn’t go down over the weekend. In fact, it only got worse.

Since President Joe Biden’s calamitous showing Thursday night during a debate against former President Donald Trump in Atlanta, Democrats have been in the midst of a public outbreak. Anxiety is evident at all levels of the party, from the activists who fuel the campaign infrastructure, to the donors who finance it and the vaunted elders who bless it. Negotiations went from pressuring Biden to step aside to preventing him from being nominated.

Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon kicked off the clean-up operation Friday at the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta with a presentation on the state of the race and the path forward, along with a heartfelt acknowledgment that the night before had not it was a high point. She was still cleaning up the mess on Monday, hastily summoning major donors for a call to calm nerves. Everyone below her had their version of the same script: The contours of the campaign would not be shaped solely on the basis of a single 90-minute breakdown, when the nation must compare Biden’s half-century record of accomplishments with the four-year chaos unfolding. unfolded. with Donald Trump at the helm.

Little of it was landing as expected.

Biden spent Sunday and Monday isolated at Camp David in the mountains of Maryland and has a relatively light public schedule this week. A last-minute addition to Biden’s agenda came Monday night: comments from the White House on the Supreme Court ruling on how much immunity Trump enjoyed while he was president. A previously planned cabinet meeting for Wednesday was cancelled; the official line was that many members planned to leave town, but Democrats largely rolled their eyes at that reasoning.

Meanwhile, the group continued their silent stares and screams. Here are the six things to watch as Democrats try to overcome this crisis in the coming days:

Does Jill Biden waver?

At this point, Democratic National Committee rules leave little room for anyone but Biden to be the party’s nominee. But that changes if Biden voluntarily decides to step aside. This is where many behind-the-scenes discussions take place to assess the possibility of such an outcome. Can Biden be deterred from a second term? Is there a better way to spend your 80s? What – or who – could convince him to stay aside?

The answer to that last question fell to one person and one person only: First Lady Jill Biden. If Dr. Biden felt her husband was causing irreparable harm to himself and his primary calling, she would tell him privately. Those close to Dr. Biden say she’s not there yet.

“So let’s talk about last night’s debate, because I know it’s on your minds,” she said Friday at a fundraiser at a Greenwich Village apartment building. “As Joe said earlier today, he is not a young man. And you know, after last night’s debate, he said, ‘You know, Jill, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel so good. And I said, ‘Look, Joe, we’re not going to let 90 minutes define the four years you’re president.'”

Advisers say Biden’s broader brouhaha over the weekend urged the president to keep the faith and fight back against what he sees as bigoted bullies. Everyone knows the legend of the failed 1988 campaign that saw Biden leave in 1987 amid a plagiarism scandal. By withdrawing, Biden effectively confirmed that he was a plagiarist and fabulist for Washington. They don’t want to repeat that episode if they can avoid it. (They also began to fault team, there is never any sign of a health campaign orbit.)

Can major donors be calmed?

From the moment the debate ended, Biden camp leaders have been making a steady diet of phone calls to both donors and insiders to try to calm the panic. The President himself was involved in some of this, holding pre-scheduled meetings over the weekend with the moneyed group in the New York metropolitan area. And on Monday, campaign leaders hastily called a to call with the Democratic National Committee’s finance committee. The underlying message: We get it, bad nights happen, but Biden is moving forward.

The next big moment is set for Wednesday, when many Democrats are set to join Biden at a private fundraiser in suburban D.C. Whoever shows up, and suddenly finds themselves busy with something else, could signal how confident the party’s biggest names are that Biden will remain the nominee.

Will Bill or Barack do more to help Joe?

There are perhaps few voices beyond his family that Biden would pay more attention to than his Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office. That’s why, last year, Barack Obama told Biden that his re-election bid wasn’t where it needed to be. Bill Clinton is equally frustrated, although his frustrations take on a patina of complaint, given Hillary Clinton’s near-defeat in 2016.

Publicly, both men signaled support for Biden’s continued quest for a second term. They both understand how difficult the hard work of re-election can be, especially when combined with the daily task of running the country. Yet privately, former aides and advisers are being told that Biden is headed for a one-term legacy unless things change drastically.

Kamala starts to look more viable?

Vice President Kamala Harris is the most logical replacement for the nomination. But Democrats aren’t exactly in a rush to put her at the top of the list for a number of reasons: Her 2020 candidacy hasn’t even made it to the Iowa caucuses, Republicans absolutely detest her, and she’s frankly untested as a marquee name. in a vote. (That said, her approval ratings may be below average, but she is less toxic than Biden by about 8 percentage points.)

Then there is the hard reality of identity politics. The Democratic Party cannot afford to disqualify black or female voters. Abandoning the first Black and Asian American woman to serve as vice president risks irrevocably alienating both.

Since joining Team Biden in 2020, Harris has been one of the most misused political tools in the President’s arsenal. It’s even more disconcerting after seeing Harris last year blow doors off at public events — especially with college audiences, women and voters of color. Although Harris’s team has been plagued by dysfunction — and, to be fair, the blame starts at the top — there has been little help from the West Wing in solving the difficult job of being a supportive figure without upstaging the boss.

A crucial point that has often been made by Harris’ defenders: if she rose to the top of the list, all of Biden’s money could easily be transferred to her operation. As this is, from the beginning, the Biden-Harris re-election, there are essentially no campaign financing problems. If someone else took the nomination, the heirs’ campaigns would face the same donation limits imposed on any other campaign committee. With some creative structuring, there would still be ways to use much of Biden’s treasury to help a new candidate, but it would likely be a far cry from the US$231 million and counting that Biden raised a lot of money.

Have any other prominent Democrats done anything?

For the first time in a minute, the Democratic caucus actually seems solid. But no one is rushing yet.

Democratic Governors. Illinois’ JB Pritzker, California’s Gavin Newsom and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer are some of the hottest names right now – so much so that the latter called Biden’s hand to tell her that the 2024 talk wasn’t coming from her parents. Others, such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Rep. Ro Khanna, are also being discussed as potential players. And players like Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker, the 2020 runners-up, haven’t lost any of their ambitions.

In public, everyone joins the former presidents in expressing support for Biden and a second term. Neither has a political operation capable of discreetly nudging Biden’s delegates away without a public fight. And if Biden remains the nominee as expected, there is no advantage in bleeding the nominee.

Still, no Democrat is disinterested in trying to keep Biden in office. (At least, no Democrat except Michelle Obama, who supposedly is not interested in campaigning for him because of a disagreement over how the Biden family treated a messy family to divide. Furthermore, she openly despises party politics and is privileged to avoid the entire affair for now.)

What will the next batch of research say?

All of Washington is waiting for a better sense of how the debate resonated with voters, if at all. Over the weekend, the CBS News poll found almost three-quarters of the electorate had doubts about Biden’s cognitive abilities. Nearly half of Democrats in the same poll would prefer he not be the nominee. A separate USA Today survey show 41% of Democrats told pollsters that the party should replace Biden — including 37% of voters who say they will vote for him if he is the nominee.

Biden’s high command continues to insist that the polls reflect a moment and not a movement. But electorates tend to have a short memory for success but a longer memory for mistakes. Bush’s polls never really recovered after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. No one died from Biden’s debate, but you might not know that from the ongoing recriminations that unfolded in text messages across the party’s base.

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