'The Campaign Urging Biden Not to Run Is Genuinely Underway'

One House Democrat said he spoke for others in the wake of the president’s stunningly feeble debate performance on Thursday: “The movement to convince Biden to not run is real.”

The House member, an outspoken defender of the president, said that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should consider “a combined effort” to nudge President Joe Biden out of the race.

Crestfallen by the president’s weak voice, pallid appearance and meandering answers, numerous Democratic officials said Biden’s bet on an early debate to rebut unceasing questions about his age had not only backfired but done damage that may prove irreversible. The president had, in the first 30 minutes of the debate, fully affirmed doubts about his fitness.

A second House Democrat said “reflection is needed” from Biden about the way ahead and indicated the private text threads among lawmakers were even more dire, with some saying outright that the president needed to drop out of the race.

A Democratic lobbyist close to many party leaders also invoked Jeffries and Schumer — “Will they do something?” — before noting, hopefully, that Jeffries and former President Barack Obama are holding a fundraiser for House Democrats in New York on Friday.

Many top party officials, however, believe Biden can’t be persuaded let alone pressured. One Democratic governor called the debate “beyond bad,” but said it was “too late” to nominate a new standard bearer.

For those close to Biden, his appearance was the realization of their worst fears. His top strategists sought to make the best of it — citing focus groups and snap polls that showed voters also detested former President Donald Trump — but made no attempt to hide their disappointment. Nobody in Biden’s orbit wants to be the one to approach him about whether to stay in the race, but as one adviser told me: “It’s got to be a conversation, and he will hate it.”

A consistent theme from Democrats who know Biden: First lady Jill Biden would have to be a party to any intervention with the president.

With less than two months until the Democratic convention, Biden would have to agree to withdraw in order for the party to throw open the race to the delegates in Chicago. And there’s no sign, even after former Biden aides went on television to pan his performance Thursday, that he’d consider ending his half-century career in politics with a humiliating, mid-campaign exit.

There was also no indication, at least as of early Friday morning, that elected Democrats would approach Biden or even go on the record with their desire for him to quit.

Which has been the recurring story now since Biden’s first year in office. Out of fear of abetting Trump, loyalty to their incumbent or just lack of any obvious alternative, Democratic leaders have grumbled about the president’s performance and capacity to run for a second term — but swallowed their fears.

A few prominent figures in the party have spoken out, perhaps none more forcefully than longtime strategist James Carville, who on Thursday simply said, “I tried.”

However, most influential Democrats, particularly in Congress, stayed quiet. Few wanted to grapple with the next question they’d invariably get — well if not Biden, are you for the vice president?

And after the party’s better-than-expected 2022 midterm success, well, any movement toward trying to usher Biden to retirement dissipated.

Now it may, indeed, be too late.

But there will at least be a conversation, this one in public. Biden’s lackluster showing ensured it.

“There are going to be discussions about if he should continue,” David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief strategist, said on CNN immediately following the debate.

Biden has finally pushed into the public sphere the backroom chatter I wrote about in February of 2023 when one of the few Democrats to speak openly was the congressman, Dean Phillips, who wound up waging a quixotic primary challenge.

The Please-Joe-Go push may have as much a chance for success as Phillips’s candidacy. Yet Biden will have to quickly dispel it and there’s no obvious, high-profile forum for him to quiet the chatter before the Democratic convention begins on August 19.

The president is in for a difficult summer — with his own party.

Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves. They stayed mum for three and half years and now they’re reaping the whirlwind.