President Biden woke up Friday to a torrent of liberal columnists, Democratic operatives and his favorite television host questioning whether he should drop out of the presidential race following a debate performance that focused attention on his advanced age.
“If he were CEO and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America keep him on as CEO?” asked Joe Scarborough during a tough opening monologue of his MSNBC show “Morning Joe.”
The question before Biden is momentous. He and other Democrats have called former President Trump an existential threat to democracy and many of those calling for Biden to step aside cited the importance of keeping Trump out of the White House as their overriding concern, even as many defended Biden’s job performance beyond the debate.
Party rules make it virtually impossible to replace Biden without his consent and he showed little indication Friday that he would bow out. Even if Biden has a change of heart, it presents a raft of risks and obstacles, including settling on a replacement at a brokered convention and selling a new candidate to the American public in a 2½-month sprint. Vice President Kamala Harris, the most obvious heir apparent, has struggled in polls along with Biden. Other potential replacements include California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who have not been tested on the national stage.
“It’s not clear by panicking and pushing out Biden that [Democrats] will be in a better position,” said Gil Duran, a former aide to Harris and other Democrats. “Then the narrative becomes, ‘Oh my God, this has never been done before, the Democrats are creating a historic mistake, no one changes course midstream.’ There’s really no way to win.”
Read more: Column: Biden’s debate gamble went spectacularly wrong. Now Democrats are in panic mode
The question Friday was whether people close to Biden would urge him to make that decision and whether he would listen if they did.
But in the immediate aftermath, even his closest allies conceded that he struggled. “His biggest issue was to prove to the American people that he had the energy, the stamina — and he didn’t do that,” his former communications director, Kate Bedingfield, said on CNN.
“It was a slow start. That’s obvious to everyone,” Harris said on CNN while insisting the larger point was about “the choice in November.”
Jon Favreau, the former Obama administration official, called it a disaster and “maybe the worst debate I’ve ever seen in my entire life” on his podcast while Maria Shriver, the former California first lady and Kennedy family member, wrote on X that it was “heartbreaking in many ways” as she lamented “panic in the Democratic party.”
Biden was hoping to erase the bad reviews with a campaign rally in North Carolina, projecting an optimistic signal that his campaign was trying to expand the electoral map. The last time the reliably red state voted for a Democrat was Obama in 2008. But recent elections have been tight — Trump beat Biden there by 1.3 percentage points in 2020.
But even before the debate, the Biden and Trump campaigns’ travel schedules indicated vulnerability for the incumbent. Harris was scheduled to address Latino voters in Nevada on Friday, while Trump was headed to Virginia. Both states last voted for a Republican to win the White House in 2004, indicating that Trump’s campaign is trying to grow his electoral map while Harris is trying to shore up a Democratic state where the presumptive GOP nominee has been leading in the polls for months.
In the aftermath of the face-off, the Biden campaign appeared to be putting out a concerted message acknowledging that the president’s performance was subpar, while also pointing to the many falsehoods Trump uttered during the debate.
“Look, he had a bad night,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat and Biden campaign surrogate, said on Fox News. “It’s incumbent upon us to go out and make the case about how the country is moving in the right direction versus what you saw from the former president, which is a list of grievances.”
Read more: Newsom praises Biden, shoots down post-debate questions about replacing him
Advisors who spoke anonymously tried to downplay the importance of the face-off with Trump, which they said he won on substance, by noting that debates seldom move polls. And some Democrats were publicly urging their fellow party members to stay the course.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York offered a terse “no” when asked by reporters whether Biden should drop out.
“Republicans are like Tammy Wynette, they stand by their man,” said Elizabeth Ashford, a longtime California political consultant whose clients have included Harris. “And if Dems want to win in November, we must do the same.”
Christine Pelosi, daughter of former House Speaker and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and a longtime delegate to the Democratic National Convention, doubted Biden would withdraw but said he must act quickly to change the perception he created in the debate.
“Needs a course correct and a timely long unscripted interview to show that this was a terrible debate — as Obama and Reagan both had with their first re-elect debates — and not an ongoing condition,” she said in a text message.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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