Isolated at his Delaware beach house while recovering from Covid, president Joe Biden I received some good news on Saturday when it became public that Hillary and Bill Clinton are with him.
But the fact that it’s news that the former president and secretary of state support his fellow Democrat — and not even in public, but in private — has underscored how isolated Biden has become within his own party, with some saying privately that he is It’s easier to count the number of people who still support the president than those who think he should abandon his re-election bid.
“I’m sure he’s furious and upset at the same time,” said Meghan Hays, who served in the Biden White House until 2022, but added that she understands the realities of politics and is “notorious for not holding grudges.”
O defiant tone reached by campaign chiefs on Friday and the promise that Biden would return to the campaign trail next week did little to stem the hemorrhaging of support for the president. Some Democrats have already begun drawing up possible contingency plans, such as whether Vice President Kamala Harris should seamlessly replace Biden at the top of the ticket or whether Democrats should prepare for an open nominating convention next month in Chicago, which would be the first in decades. .
“Joe Biden is our nominee,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said on MSNBC on Saturday. “But what gives me a lot of hope right now is that if President Biden decides to back down, we will have Vice President Kamala Harris, who is ready to join the party, to take over donald trump and win in November.”
“Remember,” added Warren, a progressive who ran against Biden and Harris for the Democratic nomination in 2020, “80 million people voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 knowing that Kamala Harris would be ready to step up if necessary.
Biden’s shrinking circle of supporters continues to argue that the president made the decision to stay in the race and that the party needs to overcome this crisis “yesterday,” as Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said on MSNBC on Saturday.
“We need to come together as a coalition, like we did in 2020,” Munoz added, arguing that the party needs instead to focus on the “terrifying” possibility of another Donald Trump presidency.
Still, as of Saturday afternoon, 32 Democratic congressmen and four senators had publicly called on Biden not to seek re-election. And 11 of them have emerged in just the last two days, since Trump gave his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, suggesting the tide is not turning.
That remains a small minority among the more than 200 Democratic members of the House and 51 Democrats in the Senate. But Democratic officials and strategists widely believe the real number of people who want Biden to step aside is much higher.
And the defectors increasingly include longtime Biden allies like Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who faces a difficult re-election year.
Some, according to aides and allies, have tried to avoid a public break with the president, hoping that he will come to the conclusion that he needs to step aside, but they have felt compelled to increase the pressure as Biden has advanced.
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who has known Biden for years, reiterated his call for Biden not to run for re-election in a new Boston Globe op-edwho revealed a recent incident at a D-Day celebration where Biden “didn’t seem to recognize me.”
“Of course, this can happen as anyone ages, but watching the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem,” Moulton wrote. “It was a crushing realization, and not because someone I care about had a rough night, but because everything depends on Biden’s ability to defeat Donald Trump in November.”
Moulton called on his fellow Democratic lawmakers “who are deeply concerned but have not said so publicly” to find the courage to speak out.
Lawmakers will return to the Capitol next week, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to speak on Wednesday at the request of Republicans.
Meanwhile, in Rehoboth Beach, Biden “continues to steadily improve” from his Covid infection, according to his doctor, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who said Biden responded well to multiple doses of Paxlovid.
Biden was also boosted by the Clintons, who continue to be a powerful force in Democratic politics. They have actively encouraged donors to stand by the president and have been in contact with the White House, offering to help however they can, according to two people familiar with their thinking.
“As soon as we have the green light, we will be back on the stump, directly communicating the contrast [with Trump],” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said on a Saturday morning conference call.
Still, in the same call organized by the campaign, Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, although she supported Biden herself, refused to urge her Senate colleagues to do the same. “Each of my colleagues has to make their own decision,” she said, before praising Biden’s record in Michigan.
While they wait, some Democrats are already looking beyond Biden and imagining possible replacement scenarios.
Harris would be the obvious and strongly preferred successor, but others want a more open process with other options.
A group of jurists are circulating a memo to Democratic lawmakers, opinion leaders, donors and other officials laying out the case for what they dubbed a “blitz primary,” which would allow multiple candidates to present their case in the days and weeks before Democratic National Convention delegates formally select the nominee at the end of August.
“Anointing Harris would cause the Party to miss a remarkable opportunity to capture the nation’s imagination between now and the Convention,” says the memo, which was written, among others, by Rosa Brooks, a former Obama and Clinton administration official and a informal political advisor to Biden’s 2020 campaign who is now a Georgetown Law professor.
Another pop-up group, Delegates for Democracy, has directly organized convention delegates around the idea of an open convention, where delegates could, for the first time in decades, decide who would represent the party in November.
A previously unreported memo authored by Democratic pollster Jason Boxt in support of the effort drew on his polling to argue that Democratic primary voters “are overwhelmingly in favor of withdrawing Biden from the race” and want an open convention, which they see as a legitimate way to select the candidate.
“Delegates have always been the end of the process, the people who nominate the president,” Elaine Kamarck, a longtime DNC member and rules expert, said in a virtual briefing for delegates hosted by the group on Friday. “Delegates still choose the party’s nominee.”
Many other Democrats, however, want to avoid a messy replacement process if Biden steps aside and see Harris as the party’s best — and perhaps only — option to quickly fill the president’s shoes so close to the November elections.
“Vice President Harris has the message, the resources and the experience to defeat Donald Trump and safeguard our Republic,” Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., said in a statement Saturday. “Joe, I love and respect you. But the risks are too high to fail. It’s time to pass the torch to Kamala.”
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
