REHOBOTH, Del. — As President Joe Biden faces a wave of new calls from elected officials to end his reelection bid, his political allies are actively exploring ways to publicly demonstrate that he still has broad support among the Party’s core base. Democrat, according to three Democrats familiar with the discussions.
The new effort aims to reverse the pressure campaign against Biden on party members by tapping into anger and frustration among some voters who feel disenfranchised by attempts to remove the candidate they voted for, Democrats said.
In some cases, the expressions of support are organic, coming from organizations and constituencies that are concerned that the party’s infighting is undermining its goal of defeating Donald Trump. They include black clergy, Latino community leaders and progressive activists, showing popular support for the president.
But Biden’s campaign is also looking to build on that and integrate it into its own defense of the president, according to the three Democrats familiar with the discussions.
“If Democratic elites oust Biden and disenfranchise 14 million voters like me, Democratic lawmakers will be no better than Republican ones,” said a top Biden official focused on reaching Black voters. “Democrats miss the so-called save-democracy argument and it will look racist.”
Rallying the Democratic Party’s core base, especially black and Latino voters in swing states, is something of a wake-up call for big-dollar donors, party leaders in Washington, D.C., and candidates on the ballot in November who will need those voters to win the their own elections – and succeed in defeating Trump, regardless of who his opponent is. It comes as Biden faces dwindling options to turn around a campaign that is losing support from lawmakers and donors.
During a call with Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday hosted by the Biden campaign, some top Democratic donors heard that warning explicitly from leaders of organizations mobilizing Black and Latino voters in swing states.
“While we have continually amplified a message about how to save our democracy, within our own party right now, that democracy is currently being run by party elites, by donors [and] the media, instead of being led by voters and the will of the people,” said Melissa Morales, founder of the group Somos Votantes, according to a participant in the call.
If Biden were to drop out of the 2024 race, Harris could be the most likely beneficiary of that change. Like his running mate, she is first in line to potentially inherit the campaign’s massive war chest. If she were at the top of the Democratic ticket, she would be the first black woman to be nominated by a major party.
The effort to broaden popular support is the latest twist in a war within the Democratic Party that has intensified sharply in the three weeks since Biden’s uneven debate performance, as he has so far resisted growing calls to end his campaign and is furious with longtime allies who are pushing him to do so.
A Democratic official involved in the congressional elections said Biden’s strategy of trying to turn his voters against his critics reflects the limits of his options and influence.
“That’s something you say when you’re looking for anything,” the employee said.
Republicans are seizing on the idea that Democrats who have argued that protecting democracy is an important issue in the 2024 election — and that Trump is a threat to America’s democratic process — are trying to subvert the will of voters.
“We can’t allow a bunch of elite Democrats to suddenly decide to make a switch just because they look at the polls and say, ‘Oh, that’s bad.’ This is undermining democracy,” Ric Grenell, a Trump ally, told reporters Monday during a Bloomberg News roundtable on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention.
“He was elected as the Democratic candidate in every state,” Grenell added. “Why do we talk about undermining the democratic process so easily?”
The aim of Biden’s advisers’ strategy, according to people close to the president, is to build on what they saw as a successful test run at a rally in Detroit just over a week ago. During the event, a Black pastor gave a moving introduction to Biden to close out a speaking program that included local supporters and progressive allies in the key battleground state.
It’s an attempt to make tangible the argument Biden began making a week after his poor debate performance, that party elites are out of step with ordinary voters — especially the Democratic base.
“There is some anger out there about the feeling that people are trying to kick the president out of the ballot they voted in,” said a senior Biden aide.
However, for many voters, there wasn’t much choice. Prominent Democrats chose not to run this cycle, and the primary calendar was tailored to the incumbent president. Democratic primary voters, in many cases, had no one to choose from but Biden — other than the unlikely candidate, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn.
And concerns about Biden’s age were exacerbated by his debate performance last month, after many people had voted.
Some Democratic candidates are hearing from voters concerned about Biden’s ability to carry out his campaign and serve four more years in office.
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, told NBC News that during the campaign in his state — a critical battleground for 2024 — many people who mention Biden “express real concerns about his future.”
“And that is a concern that I must respond to or listen to,” said Casey, a longtime Biden ally who is in a competitive fight for re-election.
On Friday’s conference call with Democratic donors, Harris simply projected confidence, according to people present on the call.
“We are going to win this election,” she said, according to people present on the call.
In fact, although some of Biden’s advisers and members of his family are discussing what a potential announcement to exit the race would look like – and the president has privately demonstrated a willingness to do so if he doesn’t have a path to victory – the his campaign is also drawing up plans for him as if he were to continue his candidacy.
Biden said Friday that he hopes to “return to the campaign trail next week” in a written statement responding to Trump’s speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination.
The president remained at his Delaware beach house on Saturday, recovering from Covid-19, as nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers joined the growing list of elected officials calling on Biden to end his campaign. And a key group of the president’s advisers continued to assess his political health.
The view of many of those close to Biden is that Democrats concerned about their own elections this fall are putting their own interests ahead of the party, but without fully considering what a void at the top of the ticket might do. A senior Biden campaign official alluded to this in a memo released Friday morning.
“He is the presumptive candidate, there are no plans for an alternative candidate,” wrote swing states director Dan Kanninen. “It’s past time we stopped fighting each other. The only person who wins when we fight is Donald Trump.”
Kanninen’s memo argued that despite public attention to Democratic infighting, voters the campaign had targeted in recent weeks remained open to supporting him.
Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told campaign staff during a call Friday that they should stay focused on their work and avoid speculation about Biden’s future.
“The people the president listens to are saying, stay in this race, keep going and keep fighting, and we need you. These voices will never be as loud as the people on TV, but remember that people in our country don’t watch cable news,” she said, according to a source familiar with the call.
When Biden faced humiliating defeats in the first two nomination contests of 2020, he rejected calls to drop out, arguing that the party’s true base — especially Black voters — had not yet been heard. It’s an argument that was validated with his dominant victory in the South Carolina primary, a victory bolstered by the support of Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who continues to support Biden.
Now, Biden’s team and other supporters argue that forcing the president off the ticket would be a betrayal of voters who supported him in the 2024 primaries.
Clyburn said Saturday in an interview with MSNBC that he has not spoken to Biden since they were together early last week in Nevada, but has been on the phone with donors and voters.
“And from what I’m hearing, 85% of the people who have contacted me support the president,” he said.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
