The Congressional Black Caucus Is Helping Biden Bail Out a Sinking Ship — but Will It Be Enough?

Fighting an uphill battle after last month’s debate debacle, President Joe Biden has been largely successful in keeping defections on Capitol Hill to a minimum, thanks in part to the robust defense he’s getting from high-profile allies in the influential Congressional Black Caucus. 

At the midway point of the first in-session week since last week’s Fourth of July recess, Biden has benefited from unwavering support in recent days from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), CBC chairman Steven Horsford (D., Nev.), former CBC chair Joyce Beatty (D., Ohio), former House whip Jim Clyburn (D., S.C), and many other caucus members who continue to stand behind him as others demand he step aside.

“I support President Biden’s decision,” CBC member and Representative Jonathan Jackson (D., N.C.) said in an interview with NR Tuesday afternoon. “Fourteen million people voted in the primaries and he won the nomination, and I trust his opinion on the reasons for his lapse in the debate.”

“It’s not new that he stutters, stumbles, or mumbles sometimes,” Representative Robin Kelly (D., Ill.), a fellow CBC member, told NR outside the U.S. Capitol Monday evening, adding that she’s “ridin’ with Biden until he doesn’t want to ride anymore.”

CBC support has helped quiet public criticism of Biden on Capitol Hill in recent days, as allies remind skeptics that the president has made clear he is not stepping aside, and that criticizing him now will only hurt their chances in the long run. Despite these public pledges of support for Biden, doubts surrounding his candidacy linger behind closed doors, even within the CBC.

“We’re gonna continue to have candid, comprehensive and clear-eyed conversations with members of the House Democratic Caucus,” Jeffries told reporters on his way out of a CBC luncheon Wednesday afternoon. “That’s been the approach that we’ve taken from the very beginning of this Congress. It’s worked, and it will continue.”

Outside the Beltway, Democratic operatives tell NR the party must unite behind the president so that they don’t end up with an even more damaged nominee in November, even as polls continue to suggest that Biden is losing support among black voters, particularly young black men.

“I think that [Democrats] have had their chance now to express their concerns over the president’s debate performance, which was not good, but I also believe it was just a bad debate,” said Doug Wilson, a North Carolina–based Democratic consultant who previously worked on outreach for the Barack Obama campaign and who has ties in the faith-based, nonprofit sector. “I believe that Democrats, unfortunately, because of their reaction to the debate performance and continued reaction over two weeks, are not making things better. It’s just wounding the president.”

DNC delegate Nervahna Crew tells NR that Democrats should behave more like Republicans, who have supported Trump as their nominee through a myriad of (literal) trials and tribulations. “I think for us to move the party forward, we need to be more like the opposition where we stand behind our candidate ten toes down, regardless of just not giving the best possible performance during a debate,” says Crew.

While party elites still seem to believe that Biden is their best bet for November, minority voters have been sliding away from Biden throughout his first term, and the debate has only made things worse.

“Trump’s current numbers among Black and Latino voters are incompatible with any plausible Democratic victory scenario,” Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman said Wednesday after announcing that the election forecaster had shifted six battleground states toward Trump in response to post-debate polling.

While they may have grassroots support, time is not on the side of Biden’s critics. As the week nears its end, Biden has the added benefit of a media landscape that will soon shift its focus to the Republican nominating convention next week in Milwaukee, where Trump is likely to announce his running mate. 

The number of “step-aside-Biden” members remains in the single digits as of Wednesday afternoon, but there exists a growing number of high-profile Democrats — including celebrity donors, prominent pundits, and lawmakers — who say he can’t win, that he will be a drag on down-ballot Democrats, and that the White House’s post-debate congressional outreach and electoral strategy haven’t been reassuring.

Even ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who served as communications director for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, was caught on camera admitting that he doesn’t believe Biden can serve a second term after conducting what was supposed to be a clean-up interview with the president on Friday. 

Demands from congressional Democrats that he kick off a more aggressive campaign schedule come at an awkward time for the president, who is hosting a three-day NATO summit in Washington that began Tuesday. The media-averse president has pledged to host a solo news conference with the White House press corps after the summit ends, amid calls from some high-profile Democrats that he should think critically about staying in the race — even though he’s said unequivocally that he’s not dropping out.

The most cryptic comment came from former House speaker Nancy Pelosi during a Wednesday morning interview on MSNBC: “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”

And in another bombshell interview with CNN Tuesday evening, Senator Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) said, “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House,” if Biden is their nominee. “The White House has done nothing since the debate to demonstrate they have a plan to win this election,” he added.

Staunch Biden allies maintain that these comments will only come back to bite Democrats if Biden remains the nominee — which he insists is his plan.

“Now, if he is an ineffective messenger to certain people, then maybe they should get out and spread the good news,” Representative Jasmine Crockett (D., Tex.), CBC member, told PBS News Hour on Tuesday. “Instead of complaining, what I need my colleagues to do is to put on their big girl and big boy pants and decide that they’re going to do the work, because this is bigger than whatever five minutes of fame that they’re going to have.”

While it’s clear that no one seems thrilled to have Biden as their nominee at this point, fear of the unknown post-Biden world is proving a powerful motivator.

John Verdejo, a DNC committee member from North Carolina, says he was “absolutely” concerned by Biden’s debate performance. But that concern was quickly pushed aside by the reality of the chaos that would ensue if the party were to replace the president as its nominee.

“I started thinking if we were to replace him, what would that look like? And in everything that I’ve read and in talking to folks, there was no easy way of making that happen,” he said, adding that his priority would be to end the conversation around Biden’s electoral viability as quickly as possible so that Democrats can unite around a winning strategy up and down the ballot.

Around NR

• Former vice president Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom (AAF) takes a swipe at the RNC’s new 2024 draft platform document in a new memo first obtained by Audrey Fahlberg:

“The new RNC platform maintains and supports many of the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence Administration,” the AAF memo reads. “However, the document retreats on life and global leadership, while neglecting to flesh out the Republican Party’s positions on a number of issues, as opposed to previous iterations.”

• ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos said he doesn’t believe Biden can serve a second term, just days after his sit-down interview with the president. Asked by an anonymous person on the street in Manhattan whether he believes Biden should step down, Stephanopoulos replied: “I don’t think he can serve four more years.” David Zimmermann has more here.

• Biden is “riding the bomb all the way down” and taking his party with him, writes Jeffrey Blehar:

He is very much alive and kicking, mounted astride the Democratic Party and pounding furiously on its empty hull, kicking against all attempts to pressure him to step down from the campaign or the presidency. He has made it clear to Democrats and donors alike that he would sooner see the entire party incinerated with him than quit this campaign. 

• The Democrats’ cravenness is worse than the GOP’s, Noah Rothman says:

Many have aptly compared the Democratic Party’s conundrum to the one Republicans faced throughout 2016. There are uncanny similarities — from the collective-action problem among party elites to the disparate and, to varying degrees, fanciful plots designed to extirpate the party’s unpopular presidential nominee from the political scene. But one thing that distinguishes the Democrats’ quandary from the one the GOP faced amid Trump’s ascension is the fact that Joe Biden’s party is not tasked with begrudgingly executing the will of their voters. Rather, they are defying their own voters by deferring to Biden’s recalcitrance.

• “If Republicans have a spring in their step, it’s because Biden put it there,” writes Jay Nordlinger. “He put it there with his implosion on the debate stage and with his refusal to ‘stand down’ — to remove himself from the Democratic ticket.”

Many of us can give a thousand reasons to vote against Trump. I have been detailing them for years. But it is very hard — impossible — to ask someone to vote for Biden, given what we have all seen and know.

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