Biden’s dilemma | TIME

J.oe Biden walked into St. Edmond Catholic Church, near the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk in Delaware, just as Saturday night services were scheduled to begin. News soon emerged of the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania. Biden was rushed out of the building, a black baseball cap over his white hair, to receive the news that his predecessor had been the target of an apparent assassination attempt.

Biden took action and began his return to Washington. He called his national security team and peppered his aides with questions. He soon spoke to Trump and addressed the nation three times the next night. His campaign paused political activities in deference to the sensitivity of the moment, even as aides recognized that his opponent facing a bullet would only intensify the fervor of the MAGA movement and perhaps reinforce Trump’s lead in the race.

It was yet another political setback for the President in a month in which nothing went as planned. Since his disastrous June 27th debate, Biden’s re-election bid has been mired in crisis. He is trailing in the polls in swing states. More than 20 Democrats in Congress publicly called for him to step aside, while the top Democrat in the House and Senate privately called for the same. Prominent donors are abandoning it or recalibrating their investments. Discussion of his apparent cognitive decline dominated the news for weeks. An Associated Press poll released Wednesday found that 7 in 10 voters think Biden should withdraw from the race — including 65% of Democrats. The same day, the White House announced that Biden would do his job while isolating and recovering from a case of COVID-19.

The biggest problem for Democrats now may not be Biden’s mental sharpness, but his pride. Only he can choose to end his candidacy and so far he has resisted. Like Trump, he has a grudge against the press, a disdain for Washington, a taste for power, and a sense of his own unique abilities to get the job done. Unable to oust him, many frustrated Democrats remained silent, either too timid to declare that the President could no longer lead the ticket, or unsure whether the most convenient replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, would do any better. “No one wants to be the person asking him to step aside because no one thinks he’s going to step aside,” a Senate Democratic aide told TIME last week, when White House and campaign officials still thought the panic could be temporary and could give way to other narratives. (Did not happen.)

As bad as Biden’s position seems now, there is still plenty of time for the President to write a comeback story. He has a robust and well-funded campaign operation, with 1,200 aides spread across 300 offices; the number of employees is expected to reach 2,000 by the end of the summer. To prevent Democratic rebellion, he rallied prominent black, Latino, progressive, and labor leaders to his support. The polls remain tight and his opponent is unpopular. It’s too early to say whether the attack in Butler, Pennsylvania, altered any of these dynamics. “These candidates are deeply defined for the American electorate,” says Quentin Fulks, Biden’s chief deputy campaign manager. “I think we will win on the popularity of the issues.”

The window for Biden to withdraw is closing soon. Meanwhile, the Republican convention in Milwaukee presented Trump at his most statesmanlike, leading a Republican Party that hasn’t been this united in years. “The tragedy is who is on the other side,” a senior Biden administration official says of the Democrats’ dilemma, “and how it is benefiting them.”

To understand Joe Biden in this moment of obstinacy helps to chart the path that brought him here. As soon as he was elected to the Senate in 1972, he suffered the deaths of his wife and daughter in a car accident. Fifteen years later, Biden’s first run for the White House ended abruptly after he made a stolen debate argument to a British politician. As the plagiarism scandal snowballed, Biden’s inner circle — many of whom still hold positions in his orbit today — urged him to leave. Even now, Biden regrets listening to his family advisors, who encouraged him not to give up.

The experience influenced Biden’s contempt for both the press and his critics. He sees Washington elitists working against him. Giving in to the pleas for him to step aside would be the same as admitting he’s not up to the task, and he believes he is. It would be 1987 again.

But Biden’s dismissal of Democrats’ doubts as a Beltway phenomenon is self-serving and inaccurate. Americans have had questions about Biden’s age for, well, years. An Associated Press-NORC poll last summer found that 77% of adults believe Biden is too old to govern effectively during a second term.

The debate cemented that perception, and the weeks since have been harrowing for the President, party officials and millions of anxious voters. After circulating in an attempt to reinforce support, Biden tried to announce that the discussion was over. “The Democratic Party has spoken. The Democratic nominee is me,” he said in a tense July 8 conference call with the party’s top fundraisers and donors. “I’m not going anywhere, guys.”

However, two days later, Nancy Pelosi gave Biden’s effort new momentum. “It is up to the president to decide whether he will run. We all encourage him to make this decision because time is running out,” the 84-year-old former House speaker said of her 81-year-old president, speaking as if Biden’s decision hadn’t been clear for weeks.

While the party fretted, a series of appearances designed to showcase Biden’s capabilities did little to dispel doubts. Trump’s shooting put the debate on pause, but did not end it: Strategies about how to deny Biden the nomination continue to circulate behind the scenes, group texts and Zoom calls. Even during the Republican convention, Biden lost even more ground.

“Our nation is at a crossroads,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the party’s California Senate candidate, said Wednesday. Schiff, an ally of Pelosi, called on Biden to step aside for the good of the party: “A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundations of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the President can defeat Donald Trump.” It was a message not unlike the one delivered by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the White House on July 11 and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in Rehoboth hours before the assassination attempt on Trump. Pelosi has also spoken directly to Biden about her concerns in recent weeks.

Even when Democrats panic about Biden’s chances, they have no clear alternative. The easiest trade would be Harris. Leaving aside the first woman and first person of color to hold the vice presidency would be politically complicated for a party that relies on these constituencies at the polls, and unlike other replacements, Harris would have no trouble leveraging the ticket’s war chest. .

However, Biden investigators remain convinced that polls still show a path to victory for the President. In a rematch between two known quantities, they argue, Trump will have the more difficult task of courting undecided voters. “Ultimately, this race will be decided by the small portion of true independent and swing voters in the middle,” says Senator Alex Padilla of California. “I think Joe Biden is more than game here.”

Meanwhile, Biden has narrowed his inner circle. Her main advisors are family members, not her chief of staff or senior messaging specialist. At a crucial moment, he leans on true believers who are less inclined to deliver difficult news. Asked in an interview with NBC News whose advice he seeks, Biden’s answer was short and revealing: “Me.”

Meanwhile, the party’s skepticism about its chances grows by the day. Stan Greenberg, who was Bill Clinton’s pollster and who had previously touted Biden’s re-election chances, has repeatedly called on the White House to take his current peril more seriously. Other party strategists are equally concerned that the campaign is ignoring a crisis situation for both the President and the least-voted candidates across the country, whose fortunes are tied to his. Reliably Democratic states are suddenly trending purple. If Biden is forced to spend time defending territory this fall in Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico or New Hampshire, the “Blue Wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania will likely already be gone.

The party’s broader fortunes may not figure into Biden’s calculations as he is alone at the end of the day in his private office in the White House residence. The President remains confident that only he can beat Trump. Like his predecessor, Biden appears willing to overstay his welcome, dragging down his allies rather than accept the possibility that voters might prefer someone else. Says a former Biden aide: “He always wanted this job and he can still do it better than the other guy.” But the bar should be much higher than that.

—With reporting by Brian Bennett and Eric Cortellessa