For years, President Biden has responded to opponents who question his ability and fitness to run for president again at age 81 and serve in the office until age 86: “Pay attention to me.”
But since tens of millions of Americans watched Biden’s gaffes in Thursday’s debate in real time, Biden has essentially adopted a new line: “Trust me.”
“Folks,” he said the following night at a fundraiser in New York, “I wouldn’t be running again if I didn’t believe in my heart that I could do this job.”
It’s a cliché political strategy that smart campaigns engage with voters on their behalf — that is, devising strategies that appeal to the public’s existing emotions rather than trying to change how they think.
But the problem for the president is that even on the eve of the deadlocked debate, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that 69% of voters and 55% of Biden supporters saw Biden as too old to be an effective president. This is not a new concern: Nearly two years ago, a majority of Democratic voters said they wanted a new standard-bearer.
Now, those deep-seated fears among ordinary Americans are being expressed publicly by many in the Democratic Party’s commentary class, and privately by lawmakers, donors and strategists who worry about losing the 2024 election to former President Donald J. Trump, whom many see as an existential threat to the nation.
“Biden’s debate performance was a disaster from which there will likely be no recovery,” one Democratic congressman texted Democratic donor Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund manager who shared the message on the condition that the congressman’s name not be used.
There’s a siege mentality around Biden as his team remembers and reiterates how he overcame skeptics to win the nomination four years ago.
“He’s really at his best when the pundits overreact and give up on him,” Ted Kaufman, a former Senate chief of staff and one of Biden’s closest aides, said in an interview. “He has a hell of a track record. I think he should stay. He’s the best president in modern history.”
While the president gathered with his family at Camp David in recent days, advisers scrambled to rein in any powerful Democratic rebels who might abandon the party leader. Biden’s team had been talking about doing some kind of interview or press conference to reassure concerned people, even before Mika Brzezinski, co-host of Biden’s favorite morning show on MSNBC, said in a monologue on Monday that “America needs a clarification from Joe Biden and assurances that what happened the other night was a one-time thing.”
Biden returned to the White House on Monday night to speak about the Supreme Court’s decision on executive immunity, speaking for five minutes via teleprompter and not taking questions.
This spring, Biden officials pushed for the fastest general election debate in history as a way to hasten voters’ acceptance of the reality of a Trump-Biden rematch that polls repeatedly showed voters didn’t want. It was a calculated gamble at a time when Biden was trailing in the polls. The thinking then was that once the contrast became clearer and the contest undeniable, undecided Democrats would return to the party.
Instead, the debate debacle has raised new questions about whether Biden should remain at the top of the list — or, at the very least, prolonged the very debate his campaign was trying to erase.
“The gift that Joe Biden gave us was that he agreed to a pre-convention debate,” said Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and co-host of the popular progressive podcast “Pod Save America,” who has urged the party to consider replacing Biden. “If the debate had been in October, I would have stayed quiet.”
Favreau said the Biden campaign’s attempts to silence doubters are an insult to voters.
“I think millions of Americans watched it,” Favreau said of the debate. “You can’t just call the critics crazy and bedwetters.”
When the Democratic National Committee convened its members last weekend, party chairman Jaime Harrison spoke while everyone else was muted, which felt like a blatant indication that party leadership doesn’t want real feedback from the grassroots.
The Biden campaign sees grassroots donations and volunteer registrations after the debate, which reached $26 million — three times the usual amount — as evidence of voter support.
Biden has recently acknowledged his shortcomings more publicly, and not just on the debate stage, saying he “can’t walk as easily as I used to” and “can’t talk as smoothly as I used to.”
Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory council, said the new approach would help the campaign by “connecting emotionally” rather than simply “staging a bad performance.”
“Voters don’t want gaslighting or Biden trying to make himself out to be more than he is,” Khanna said. “He’s been brutally honest about who he is.”
First Lady Jill Biden’s role has been much talked about, from her helping her husband down the stairs after the debate to her praise at a post-debate rally (“Joe, you did a great job!”). On Monday, Vogue magazine released its latest cover, featuring Dr. Biden in a $5,000 white Ralph Lauren tuxedo dress with the words, “We define our future.”
Former Biden adviser Michael LaRosa said those who expect Biden to urge her husband to step down fundamentally misunderstand the two men’s political relationship, which he said was built in part on Biden’s early withdrawal from the 1988 presidential race amid a plagiarism scandal.
“In 1987, she watched the president get pushed out by the press, the pundits and the polls, and it was a really traumatic experience for both of us,” LaRosa said. He said he discussed the events of 1988 with the first lady many times while he worked for her. “I think they learned from that experience and were not pushed out the way they were in 1987.”
LaRosa explained that the Bidens see Biden’s life and career as a story of overcoming adversity. “This is another chapter of resilience in the Joe Biden story,” LaRosa said, summing up how they see it.
Indeed, the Biden campaign’s first post-debate ad ended with Biden declaring, “When I get knocked down, I get up.”
Serious consideration within the party about Biden’s age has been frozen since the 2022 midterm elections, in which Democrats outperformed expectations. The White House took that as a validation of its political strategy and the limits of studying the president’s declining approval ratings for clues to the election outcome.
“I’m going to run again,” Biden said the next day.
And that was it.
Biden, like other presidents, has visibly aged, but White House physicians noticed changes as early as late 2021, noting that he was “clearing his throat” more frequently than he had a year ago and that his gait was “noticeably stiffer.” The doctor recommended “shoe orthotics.”
Biden’s officials have insisted he’s up to the task of running a reelection campaign, but his handling of the situation suggests otherwise. After his high-profile fall, Biden began using a shorter flight of stairs to board Air Force One. He has given fewer press conferences than his predecessors, even declining a pregame interview at the Super Bowl, and his events have been purposefully kept short.
And after the special counsel’s report criticized Biden’s mental capacity in a way the White House deemed unnecessary, labeling him a “well-meaning old man with a weak memory,” Biden held an evening press conference to rebut the caricature, only to end up calling him the president of Mexico when he should have been referring to the president of Egypt.
In the wake of the debate, Biden campaign officials have privately argued that switching candidates would be impractical, risky and disruptive, and deputy campaign chairman Rob Flaherty made it clear in fundraising messages that any other candidate “has a lower chance of winning than Joe Biden.”
Some future Democratic leaders urged voters to support Biden.
“We’ve got to support this president,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in the MSNBC spin room after the debate. The next morning, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro appeared on MSNBC and said, “Let’s stop worrying and start working.”
Democratic strategists privately worry that rather than asking voters to work for Biden, they are asking the other way around.
In a sign of the campaign’s risk aversion, two of Biden’s most senior advisers who appeared on television over the weekend to defend the campaign, White House adviser Anita Dunn and pollster Molly Murphy, appeared on an MSNBC show hosted by a former Biden campaign adviser.
“There’s always some allure behind Door No. 2,” Murphy said, rejecting survey findings that suggest voters want a different candidate.
But the latest Times/Siena poll found that 80% of Republicans say they want Trump to remain the candidate even after his felony conviction, far surpassing the share of Democrats who want Biden.
For now, the Biden campaign has renewed its battle with its favorite enemy: the media.
“Did you see the amazing footage of supporters doing the Cupid Shuffle on the runway at 2am the night of the debate?” Biden wrote in a fundraising email over the weekend. “No, you probably didn’t, because the media was too busy hyperventilating and creating drama to drive ratings.”
