- President Joe Biden struggled in the first 2024 debate.
- Biden claimed the fastest major debate in history.
- After the president’s performance, concerns about his age will likely intensify again.
President Joe Biden wanted the earliest primary debate in history. He asked for an empty room, muted microphones and Fox News to listen in. He got everything he wanted.
Biden’s performance has been so dismal that leading Democrats are questioning whether the president can continue.
“I think it was actually shocking how he came out at the beginning of the debate,” David Axelrod, a former senior White House adviser to former President Barack Obama, told CNN. “The sound of his voice suggested he was a little confused at the beginning of the debate. He certainly got stronger as the debate went on, but I think that’s when the panic started to set in.”
While Axelrod and other Democrats sought to praise Biden for his several criticisms, their concerns surfaced after prominent leaders for months ignored arguments that Biden would remain the longest-serving president in history.
“Joe Biden’s debate performance was really disappointing,” former White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said shortly after Axelrod’s remarks. “I don’t think there’s any other way to evaluate it. His biggest challenge was to prove to the American people that he had the energy and the stamina, and he didn’t do that.”
Van Jones was going crazy.
“It was tough. I loved Joe Biden and I worked for Joe Biden,” Jones said. “He didn’t do a good job at all.”
Even Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged the president was struggling.
“We certainly started off slow but finished strong,” Harris told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper after the debate.
At best, Biden missed an opportunity to jolt a campaign that is within shouting distance of several key battleground states but has little room for error. At worst, his raspy voice and incoherent answers could be the president’s final significant words, warning that a loss to former President Donald Trump would mean the end of the American experiment as we know it.
Leading Democrats helped Biden avoid serious challengers in the primary. No recent incumbent president has faced a debate challenger in the primary. But no recent incumbent president is the oldest in U.S. history. And in Biden’s own view, no challenger poses as fundamental a risk to the United States as Trump.
One former White House aide told Politico that Biden’s performance was “terrible.”
Special counsel Robert Hur offered a stopgap strategy earlier this year, saying he decided not to indict Biden because jurors would find the national leader a “well-intentioned old man with a short memory.” Biden calmed some of those doubts with a rousing State of the Union address in which he repeatedly attacked his predecessor on everything but his name.
But as Thursday’s debate progressed, those doubts resurfaced.
“There’s no way he would send his boss on national television like this,” Michael Hardaway, a former aide to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, wrote on X. “There’s no benefit to Joe Biden doing this.”
Quentin James, co-founder of Collective PAC, a group that advocates for black voters, told The New York Times he was surprised by how bad Biden’s voice sounded.
“I think he over-prepared for the debate compared to the State of the Union and the campaign,” James, a Biden supporter, told The New York Times. “He had very little range, and his raspy voice hurt his performance.”
Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang also weighed in on X toward the end of the debate: “Folks, Democrats need to nominate someone else before it’s too late. #swapJoeout,” he wrote.
Multiple media outlets reported that Biden had a cold, but as Politico Playbook author Eugene Daniels noted, there was no mention of the president’s illness before the debate.
Biden enjoys being written off – President Obama even told Herr that he didn’t think he was the best Democrat to run in 2016. Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, reportedly warned Biden that he didn’t want to end his decades-long career in public office by coming up short in the Iowa caucuses, the first in the nation.
Biden had the last laugh, overcoming a disastrous showing in the Iowa caucuses to win not only the Democratic nomination but also the presidency.
Another Obama aide, David Axelrod, reportedly raised concerns about the president’s age this year, drawing Biden’s ire, and some Democrats will say Obama should have listened to him.
But it won’t take a bad caucus to bring him down — it might just be a bad debate in a nearly empty room on the Georgia Tech campus.
Biden’s approval ratings were already abysmal, and we’ll almost certainly see more talk about his biggest weakness: his age.
