CNN
—
Less than 48 hours after President Joe Biden’s stunning debate performance, the Democratic donor base is in a state of crisis, anxious about what, if anything, the party’s wealthiest backers can do to cheer or replace Mr. Biden. The Biden campaign is commissioning a new poll to assess the damage.
The vast universe of Biden’s supporters and their political allies is split three ways: One faction argues that a campaign to pressure a president who has been adamant he will not step down is self-defeating and futile, while the other calls for a centrist approach, arguing that party leaders should consider drastic measures only after more closely examining Thursday night’s aftermath.
Dmitri Melhorn, a Democratic fundraiser and strategist who often works closely with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, another prominent donor, told CNN that the first 10 to 15 minutes of the debate “was very unsettling to watch,” but that Biden’s subsequent performance in Atlanta and then at a heated rally in North Carolina on Friday began to calm his fears.
Either way, he reasoned, Biden alone decides his fate as the Democratic nominee.
“The smartest thing to do is to assume that there’s no change and think carefully about how you (influential outsiders) would act,” Mellhorn said. “And if there’s no change, any kind of pressure campaign would just be a waste of time and energy and effort and money if Biden wants to stay in office.”
A third group of donors and advisers with fewer direct ties to the Biden campaign and less influence within it have been actively calling on Democrats to stop wasting time and immediately begin the process of searching for a new candidate with just over four months until a tough general election battle with former President Donald Trump.
Leading candidates to replace Biden if he reverses course and drops out of the race have been careful to voice their support for the president and have been vocal in his defence, as has California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“These other arguments are unhelpful and unnecessary. We will not turn our backs on one performance,” Newsom said in an email to supporters on Friday. “What kind of political party does that?”
While Biden’s team has been conducting extensive polling in battleground states about the president’s standing, other leading Democrats have been less defensive, instead warning that defeat is inevitable unless the party takes decisive action to turn things around.
Former Iowa senator Tom Harkin, who served with Biden in the Senate for decades, sought to set the tone in a scathing letter he sent to friends after the debate.
“All sitting Democratic senators should write to Mr. Biden urging him to remove his delegates, step down, and have his convention select new nominees,” Harkin wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by CNN. “Several governors may also need to do the same.”
Harkin said he believes there is still time to correct course and field a new Democratic candidate who “will revitalize the party at all levels and capture the attention of the public, many of whom want an alternative to Trump.”
“These are dangerous times, and nothing is more important than Joe Biden’s ego or his desire to remain president,” Harkin wrote.
All sides seem to agree on one thing: Biden will ultimately decide. They have no intention of clashing at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer, in part because they lack a clear way to unseat Biden, but mainly because they worry that a battle on the floor would do more harm than good, whatever the outcome.
“For better or worse, the party is in President Biden’s hands,” a Democratic senator told CNN on the condition of anonymity to avoid disrespecting the president or alienating the campaign. “He deserves our respect and the leeway to make any decision.”
The lack of a successor to Biden who could quickly marshal competing donor networks while satisfying the party’s ever-fighting factions is another major hurdle for those calling for immediate action.
“There is no real succession plan,” a senior Democratic adviser to the Biden campaign told CNN on Saturday. “That’s what makes this not only heartbreaking but deeply problematic.”
Democrats will be conducting new polls and surveys over the weekend and early next week to try to get a better sense of the political ramifications, especially in key races that will determine whether the party can retake its House majority and maintain its slim control of the Senate.
Another longtime adviser said the only way Biden would consider stepping down would be if he was presented with serious data showing he was not only likely to lose reelection, but also that he could jeopardize lower-ranking candidates in the House, Senate and competitive local races across the country.
The Biden campaign has been conducting polls showing that Democrats will support these candidates even if they don’t vote for Biden. If his debate defeat significantly discourages some of those voters, giving Trump and the Republicans an advantage in voter turnout, Biden could be faced with a tougher decision.
For now, without that information, the nation’s most prominent Democrats, led by former President Barack Obama, are urging party donors to stay confident.
Relations between Presidents Obama and Biden and their respective advisers have long been strained over Obama’s decision to support Hillary Clinton’s 2015 presidential bid and urge Biden not to run. Things are “even more tense” this time around, one of Obama’s longtime advisers said Saturday, noting that Biden will ultimately have to “make his own decision about what to do next.”
At a House Democrats fundraiser on New York City’s Upper West Side late Friday, Obama spoke with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries but did not answer questions from donors in the audience. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who was also in attendance, told CNN the event was more like a “fireside chat.”
In a social media post earlier in the day, the former president recounted his own disastrous debate experience in 2012 to the audience, reiterating his message of the stark contrast between the two presidential candidates and saying Biden’s values ”reflect the best of America.”
When asked by Jeffries about the debate, Obama took a broader look at the situation.
“The appropriate message tonight is this is a team sport. The president is the captain, and you need the White House because of the enormous power of the executive branch,” Obama said. “But the critical need to take back the House and get Hakeem Jeffries as speaker should be motivation enough. And if we do our job on that front, that’s probably the most important thing we can do for the Biden reelection campaign.”
But literal signs of opposition have been more visible outside fundraisers: As Biden arrived at an event for hedge fund manager Barry Goldstein in East Hampton, New York, on Saturday, his motorcade passed a group of people holding signs calling for the president to step down.
“We love you,” one of them said, “but it’s time.”
Once inside, Biden acknowledged donors’ concerns.
“I understand the concerns about the debate. I understand that,” the president said. “It just wasn’t a very good night.”
But he also disputed some of the concerns expressed in recent reports.
“Voters responded differently,” Biden said, arguing that post-debate polls showed little change except for a few numbers that “actually boosted our approval ratings.”
Goldstein told CNN that more than 200 people were expected to attend the event, with additional donations coming in on Friday morning after the debate. Moderators included actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, and former President Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
Biden was accompanied on his Hamptons stroll by his campaign co-chairman, Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. The Biden campaign has tried to point to positive fundraising signs in the days since the debate, with the campaign saying it raised more than $27 million over the two days. Biden is scheduled to attend another fundraising event in New Jersey on Saturday night, this time hosted by Phil Murphy, the former Democratic National Committee finance chairman and wealthy New Jersey governor.
The rallies came following mixed reviews of a Friday night event in New York City that Biden attended and was headlined by rock and roll legend Elton John.
“The atmosphere was completely bizarre,” said a Democratic strategist who attended the event. “There was fun, there was alcohol, there was Elton John, but it also felt like a gaffe or gaffe waiting to happen, exacerbated by the horror of the night before.”
Another donor who was in the meeting, Charles Myers, told CNN that the panicked reports about an exodus of donors from the Biden campaign were “frustrating” and “not what’s happening right now.”
“Certainly, donors were nervous because the debate performance was so poor,” Myers said, “but donors are still very supportive and some are willing to give more.” He added that Biden was “on top form” at the East Village rally and that there was a “general feeling” that the debate was “really bad… but the campaign is getting back on track and we all want to redouble our efforts to help turn it around.”
“It’s time to do the polls and see if there’s a replacement who has a higher approval rating than Trump,” Mark Cuban, a billionaire businessman who recently endorsed Biden, told CNN. Because Trump is politically weak, any Democrat who can “step in and quickly turn the tide of the race” is “worth considering,” Cuban said.
But for now, Cuban said that while he is not a donor to the Biden campaign, he attended a fundraiser in March to show his support, and made clear that the task of replacing Biden this late in the election cycle will clearly be particularly difficult.
Cuban, a former majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and former endorser of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, used a sports analogy: “At this point, it’s like talking about NBA or NFL games after the fact and hoping to trade players.”
Hoffman proposed a variation on that theme in a Friday night email to friends, some of whom had asked whether he should “launch a public campaign to pressure President Biden to resign in light of his (very) terrible performance in last night’s debate,” he wrote.
“I think this campaign to get Biden out of office is a bad idea,” Hoffman wrote, arguing that such measures could strengthen Biden’s determination to prove skeptics wrong.
He also pointed to the president’s spirited performance at a rally in Virginia and the Republican reaction to Trump’s felony conviction last month.
“They were ruthless and quickly banded together,” Hoffman wrote, “because they understand that at this stage in the campaign they must spend all their time and money either rooting for their seniors or defeating us.”
Another Democratic donor was more forthright about the current situation and the party’s choices.
“I don’t think[Biden]is going anywhere,” the donor told CNN. “This is an old horse that we have and we need to keep riding it until it’s ready to go to the glue factory.”
