Since the beginning of the president Joe Bidenre-election campaign, the plan to win was to make the former president donald trump so unpleasant that voters uneasy about the incumbent would vote for him anyway.
But now Biden is stuck in a political crisis, with a dismal debate performance highlighting his inability to defend Trump and sparking collective national concern about his ability to do his job, while a growing number of House Democrats say he should leave the race. To get voters to focus on the threats posed by a second Trump administration, Biden’s own allies say he must first escape his current cycle of destruction and convince voters — even and especially fellow Democrats — that he himself is up to the job.
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“The focus has to go back to Trump and what rights we will lose if he is president,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who ran against Biden for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. “The last three elections have shown us that if you are focus, you lose.”
In fact, the Biden campaign has long sought to make Trump its focus.
That’s why Biden kicked off this year with a blistering speech about Trump’s attempt to overturn the last election, why his allies spent millions to block the No Labels effort, and why the president tried to highlight anniversaries of rights news to abortion.
And that’s why Biden’s top aides thought it was a good idea to move the first debate from September to June — to give voters a one-on-one look at Biden and Trump that the president’s team thought would recalibrate the race, end the flab. from Biden. poll numbers and remind voters what would change if Trump took office again in January.
A pre-debate memo from Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chairman, mentioned Trump 18 times and Biden just five. Of Trump’s record, O’Malley Dillon wrote that the president “will hold Donald Trump accountable for all of this on the debate stage — and he’s raring to go.”
This did not happened.
Before that can happen, Biden must now first dispel self-doubt, a task his team waited more than a week after the debate to mount a full-steam attempt to accomplish. When that happened, during Friday’s interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Biden drew a television audience one-sixth the size of the debate and spent nearly the entire 22 minutes dodging questions about his fitness for office.
“Trump is a deeply flawed candidate,” said David Axelrod, a longtime skeptic of Biden’s ability to mount a presidential campaign at age 81. “It will be very difficult now for the Biden campaign to focus on him.”
There is no doubt in Democratic circles that Biden should run the election around Trump, as he did in 2020, when his winning coalition ranged from progressive Democrats to moderate Republicans.
Then, when Biden won support from Republicans and other voters seeking a return to normalcy in Washington, he ran as a transition candidate. He said he saw himself “as a bridge, not anything else” as he stood alongside Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, giving the distinct impression that he was a vessel to help the country get through the Trump period.
Four years later, polls show that 74% of voters think Biden is too old to be president again.
“It’s established in people’s minds that this isn’t going to work for him, and I don’t see how there’s going to be any return from that,” said John Kasich, the former Ohio governor who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and crossed party lines to support Biden. in 2020. “To run a campaign against Trump, people say, ‘We have to move on.’”
Democrats taking on Sunday’s political talk shows faced a barrage of questions about Biden’s fitness for office.
Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, whose appeals about Hillary Clinton’s weakness to blue-collar voters in her state went unnoticed in 2016, appeared exasperated on CNN.
“We have to stop talking about this,” Dingell said. “We need to get back to talking about Donald Trump.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in his own appearance on CNN, suggested Biden was short on time.
“They need to see more of the president,” he said. “I hope we see that this week.”
There is some evidence that the Black voters who propelled Biden to his 2020 primary victory have not yet abandoned him. Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, said her group’s post-debate polling found that support for Biden among Black voters who watched the debate increased. But among black voters who did not watch the debate and consumed its coverage, there was a drop in support.
Biden on Sunday visited one of Philadelphia’s largest Black churches in an effort to reassure voters that he is ready for office.
“Joy comes in the morning,” Biden told the faithful. “You never gave up. In my life, and as your president, I have tried to walk in my faith.”
Even Biden’s staunchest supporters say Democrats will lose the election if it remains a referendum on Biden’s fitness to serve.
“My goal is to defeat Trump,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who was one of Biden’s campaign surrogates after the debate. “Those calling for him to resign and those wanting him to remain are on the same page about the MAGA scare.”
As questions arose about Biden’s acumen and elected Democrats began calling on him to step aside, the president’s campaign highlighted Trump’s own debate observation on “black jobs” and the Supreme Court ruling that granted him some immunity of prosecution for his actions leading to the January government. .October 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
On Friday, Biden’s campaign sought to amplify Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025, the effort by Trump allies and the Heritage Foundation to write policy to be implemented if Trump takes office again.
“Trump wants to destroy more fundamental freedoms, ban abortion, govern like a dictator, arrest and deport Latinos, and use his new Supreme Court power to punish, harm and potentially jail his enemies,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Trump. the Biden campaign. “Not Joe Biden. This election will be about Donald Trump and the threat he poses to the United States of America.”
And yet, for voters to focus on the threats posed by a Trump victory, Biden and his team must overcome what for most candidates is a low bar: proving a basic physical fitness for the job.
“From the beginning, it was clear that Biden and Democrats must make this election a choice, not a referendum on the president,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, the Democratic think tank that has led efforts to block independent and independent candidates. third parties divert votes from Biden. “This means focusing voters’ attention on Trump’s criminality, chaos and cruelty. Once we emerge from this period of uncertainty, the party should return to prosecuting this case full-time.”
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