The fallout from last week’s presidential debate continues.
Democrats, in small numbers, are circling the wagons contending that Joe Biden is the only path forward given the messiness of replacing him before the convention. There are no good answers, they say, so just keep pushing on and keep painting Donald Trump as the bad guy.
That message, which has been Biden’s plan from the beginning, isn’t getting much traction.
According to reports, as many as 25 Democratic House members are prepared to call for Biden to step aside:
Biden insiders continue to insist that the president, 81, will carry on against Trump despite his disastrous first debate just five days ago.
Despite their insistence, his support appears to be crumbling among fellow Dems.
Maine’s Jared Golden, Lloyd Doggett of Texas, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State all either told Biden to drop out or said they believed he would lose to Trump on Tuesday.
Those defections were in addition to the collection of 25 House members – commonly referred to as ‘frontliners’ due to their status as moderates in swing districts – who are set to break with Biden and day now.
It’s not just the presidency at stake for Democrats as down-ballot races may also be wiped out if Biden’s support collapses, especially in swing districts. Democrats could see a seismic event in terms of House and Senate seats up for grabs that were once untouchable now come into play. Many of these House members are fighting for their survival in calling for Biden to step aside.
On the polling front, a leaked internal poll from a Democratic-leaning poll firm is showing a steep crash in Biden’s swing state numbers, according to the New York Post:
President Biden has lost ground to Donald Trump in more than a dozen battleground states or districts after his disastrous debate performance last week, according to polling conducted by a Democrat-affiliated nonprofit.
The data from OpenLabs, reported by Puck News, indicates that if the election were held today, the 81-year-old Biden would not only lose all seven of the swing states thought to hold the key to the White House in 2024 — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but also states he won convincingly four years ago.
Those include New Hampshire, which last voted Republican in 2000; Virginia, which Biden won by 10 points in 2020; and New Mexico, which has gone Democrat in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
Pushing Biden out comes with pitfalls but so does leaving him in.
Each day brings a new round of bad news for the Biden campaign and more evidence that leaving Joe Biden on the top of the ticket might be akin to forfeiting the race to Trump. In that sense, please, Democrats, leave Biden as your nominee. Let him go down in glorious defeat so he can cart his massive ego and screwed-up family back to Delaware.
According to the Washington Post, former President Obama is sounding a little more squishy in his support for Biden:
Former president Barack Obama has privately told allies who have reached out to him that President Biden’s already tough path to reelection grew more challenging after his shaky debate performance on Thursday — a harsher assessment of the presidential race than his public comments, according to several people familiar with his remarks.
Obama separately spoke directly with Biden by phone after last Thursday’s debate to offer his support as a sounding board and private counselor for his embattled former vice president, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. It is unclear how directly Obama addressed Biden’s performance and his path to reelection on the call.
If enough Democrats eventually decide that Joe Biden is a sure-loser in November, the calls to drop out will become louder and more difficult for the campaign to ignore.
Then again, it doesn’t matter what the strategists or rank-and-file Democrats say, it seems to only matter what First Lady Jill Biden says as she clings to power off the public humiliation of her husband:
But Jill Biden, a Northern Virginia Community College professor who also sometimes doubles as her husband’s defender in chief, made her support clear at an event held two days after the debate debacle.
“Joe isn’t just the right person for the job. He’s the only person for the job,” she said at a New York campaign fundraiser.
She doubled down the next day in a phone interview with Vogue from Camp David, where the president’s family had reportedly gathered for a photo shoot and discussion.
“We will continue to fight,” Jill Biden said of the commander in chief’s political future in a cover story this week for the fashion magazine’s August issue.
President Biden, she said, “will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president” and “will always do what’s best for the country.”
If Jill Biden is all-in, does Joe have a choice? He’s not making any serious decisions beyond his favorite ice cream flavor, that’s painfully clear
If Jill doesn’t want to drop out, then Joe’s not dropping out. Furthermore, there has been a long-simmering divide between the First Lady and Vice President Kamala Harris. If Jill does decide to let her husband step aside, it won’t be done willingly and it won’t be because she’s trying to help Harris further her political career.
Democrats are at a crossroads of difficult paths ahead. Get the popcorn.
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