Three reports suggest there’s an effort behind the scenes to jettison Biden from his own campaign.
Three stories published in quick succession on Thursday afternoon revealed that, behind the scenes, the effort to jettison Joe Biden from his own campaign has more dynamism than the Democratic Party’s paralysis would suggest.
First, the New York Times revealed that the Biden campaign — not a Democratic political action committee or interest group, but the campaign itself — had commissioned polling designed to test Kamala Harris’s viability as the party’s presidential nominee. “They did not specify why the survey was being conducted or what the campaign planned to do with the results,” the report read. How the campaign will use the results it gets depends on what it finds, but we can safely deduce that the survey is being conducted because its principal is fully cooked.
That’s the impression readers of the second dispatch to be published in the space of a single busy hour on Thursday came away with. According to NBC News, the Biden campaign itself is growing increasingly mutinous. “He needs to drop out,” said one unnamed Biden campaign official. “He will never recover from this.” A second campaign adviser admitted that “no one involved in the effort thinks he has a path” toward reelection. “A third person close to the re-election campaign said the present situation,” the dispatch continued, “is unsustainable. This person also said they didn’t see how the campaign could win.”
The view from outside the campaign among Biden’s allies is rapidly shifting from fear and depression to anger over the president’s stubbornness. “We have this window, and the White House is just running out the clock, which is so selfish,” said one Democratic political strategist. “We’re all waiting around for Joe Biden to f— up again, which is not a great position to be in.”
Lastly, the New York Times revealed that insiders in both the Biden campaign and administration were at last formulating a strategy aimed at coaxing Biden out of the race:
They said they have to make the case to the president, who remains convinced of the strength of his campaign, that he cannot win against former President Donald J. Trump. They have to persuade him to believe that another candidate, like Vice President Kamala Harris, could beat Mr. Trump. And they have to assure Mr. Biden that, should he step aside, the process to choose another candidate would be orderly and not devolve into chaos in the Democratic Party.
“The consensus inside Mr. Biden’s operation is that it will take hard numbers to convince him, particularly polling showing that his support has eroded significantly,” that report added. This might be a clue about what the Biden campaign intends to do with polling that tests Harris’s strength against Trump, should the results support the assumption that Biden’s candidacy is no longer competitive.
But, as both the Times and NBC News observed, because the president’s inner circle has narrowed now to the point that it includes only family and closest advisers, there’s “no indication any of these discussions have reached Mr. Biden himself.”
Amid all this, the Biden campaign itself produced a memo conceding that there had been “real movement” in the post-debate polls and that this movement represented a “setback” for the campaign. It believes a path to reelection exists, but it now depends on the so-called Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — all states in which Donald Trump leads in the polling averages.
It has not been a great afternoon for the Biden campaign. It’s unclear what the president could do at his much-anticipated press conference tonight at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. But it’s a safe bet that, like his post-debate interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, the bar for Biden has been set beyond his reach.