Pundits are weighing in on Biden’s debate performance, and some questioned whether he should be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president at all.

“That was painful,” Democratic analyst Van Jones said of Biden during a CNN roundtable after the debate. “He had a chance [to] restore confidence in the country and of the base, and he failed to do that.

“I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now,” Jones added. “We’re still far from our convention and there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that.”

Kate Bedingfield, former White House communications director for the Biden administration, said during the same roundtable that Biden failed to display an energetic personality onscreen, which, “for a lot of Democrats, that’s very disappointing.”

David Axelrod, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said on CNN that while Biden “scored a bunch of points” during the debate on issues like abortion and the economy, “there was a sense of shock, I think, [with] how he came out at the beginning, how his voice sounded and that he seemed a little disoriented” at times.

Over at MSNBC, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe described Biden’s performance as “kind of a DEFCON 1 moment.”

“I’ve been deeply involved in presidential campaign debates — some went well, some didn’t go well,” Plouffe told Rachel Maddow. “The only thing that matters, and you won’t really know for three or four days, is how the voters that will decide this election will react.

“It really pains me to say this,” he continued. “They are three years apart. They seemed about 30 years apart tonight. And I think that’s going to be the thing that voters really wrestle with coming out of this.”