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Depending on your stance, Democrats who watched Donald Trump’s record-breaking 92-minute acceptance speech on Thursday — and which ran through Friday — came away with very different opinions. verdicts.
For those who have been urging President Joe Biden to rethink his own renomination for three full weeks, Trump’s ominous rhetoric has proven the risks the former president poses and why the starter should step aside for a stronger captain. For those still working to salvage Biden’s bid for a second term, Trump’s wildly inconsistent delivery and tone made the task of blocking him seem perhaps achievable for the first time in a long time.
But a third audience – the population, one – was the only one that mattered, and that was Biden himself. isolating at his beach house on the Delaware coast as he recovers from what doctors described as a mild case of Covid-19. And after watching the meandering mix of a Trump greatest hits speech in Milwaukee, Biden still sees himself as the strongest player to oust his predecessor from the field of American politics. The White House declared “a lid” just after 9:30 a.m., meaning there would be no public sightings of Biden on Friday, and he would remain at home with no public events. The bunkering has continued with no public timetable for his return to Washington, although he says he wants to return to the campaign trail next week.
Biden, aides say, is still working on the phones and in Zoom rooms with advisers and staff, handling the president’s day-to-day to-do list, like facing a global computer collapse this left US airspace hell on Friday. But Biden also finds himself increasingly, albeit grudgingly, open to conversations about his next steps. His family is starting to plot your exit. In this, self-conscious Democrats are suddenly less glum about working hard until Election Day in November.
After three full weeks of beatings, Biden is finally beginning to understand that no one in his party’s institutional ranks wants him to lead the ticket. Even his former boss, Barack Obama, is sheltering fears, insiders say. Public and private polls show Biden is a liability to fellow Democrats, although his supporters argue he is not as clumsy as critics say. For the first time since the debate, Biden is at least testing his own assumptions, although he is unwilling to cede ground to his critics. His weekend in Rehoboth will hopefully give him a window to reflect on the information coming his way.
As private conversations that began with a bang turned into a bang, Biden’s decision on how to proceed still remains. As Republicans unveil their convention, the disparity between Republicans drenched in comity and Democrats plundered by chaos is stark. Behind the scenes, Democrats have been left in a strange pattern of containment. Biden’s top operative, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a television interview Friday that Biden was 100% committed to remaining at the top of the ticket. “Absolutely, the president is in this race,” she told MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Joe Biden is more committed than ever to beating Donald Trump and we believe in this campaign [that] We are prepared for the close elections we are in and we see the path forward.”
Still, another Biden insider, former chief of staff Ron Klain, acknowledged that his boss understands. “I think he’s feeling the pressure,” Klain told the network.
To be clear: the pressure is real. The Democratic National Committee on Friday and again on Sunday was expected to review the rules and guidelines for the nomination process. Party insiders silently awake that would delay Biden’s official renomination timeline to begin after August 1, a slight shift to the right of the calendar. Still, Democrats are moving forward with a plan for Biden to arrive at his nominating convention in Chicago on Aug. 19 as the clear nominee. A repeat of the messy 1968 convention in Chicago should be avoided at all costs, even if it meant deciding the nomination by GoogleDoc and silencing protests on social media timelines. Democratic members agreed to postpone the formality, but not for long.
This does not mean that Democrats of any stripe are exactly happy after the last month. Biden’s campaign insisted on an early debate and then the candidate failed. Biden’s cleanup efforts have been abysmal. His fundraising has all but dried up, with advisors lamenting that they would be lucky if they managed to reach 25% of their main goal in dollar terms this month. And lower-voting Democrats — including prominent party members like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries — are telling the White House, in theatrical whispers, that the party’s fortunes were worsening. sinking with Biden’s poll numbers.
“He just doesn’t get it,” says a top House Democrat. “Joe Biden has done a lot for this country, but he will be the undoing of this party.”
Democrats across the spectrum are trying to discern whether Biden understands that being an anchor for his party is not always an advantage. Sure, he’s keeping the Democratic ship in place, but he’s not a good place. Inaction is the best-case scenario, but experts say the trend is actually benefiting Republicans, who have a narrow majority in the House and are very close to winning back the Senate. Other Democrats who want Biden to keep fighting looked to Trump’s Milwaukee soliloquy as proof that he is still beatable if the media focused on his precedent-breaking stance rather than Biden’s verbal stumbles. The Biden campaign has a simple answer: Stop fighting Biden’s renomination and the focus returns to Trump.
However, a common emotion permeated both Democratic camps: everyone is waiting for Biden to present himself as the presumptive candidate or withdraw. Biden has tried to demonstrate the first option, but not convincingly enough. Privately, Biden’s top deputies say he is less obstinate than he was over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, finally beginning to understand that his choices matter to more than just those who share his surname.
This in no way means that Biden is ready to leave. No, he’s still planning an aggressive travel schedule for this month and preparing tens of millions in advertising. Money is increasingly hard to come by, but he has a pile of cash that allows him to outperform Trump on air by a 25-to-1 margin in some markets. Things will be difficult for Biden as he tries to calm the turmoil within his own party’s ranks, but he has found himself bucking conventional wisdom before. And if things go really wrong, he still controls the levers of his party’s appointments machine; the nod is his until he doesn’t want it, and the signs that he might soon be ready to give up remain mixed. Put plainly: Democrats have only one opinion that matters, and that belongs to an embattled Joe Biden who has never been at his best when cornered.
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