‘There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue,’ former Obama strategist David Axelrod said.
If presidential debates are about moments, Republicans have an hour and a half of material to work with.
Even Joe Biden’s own vice president couldn’t beat around the bush. “Yes there was a slow start” that was “obvious to everyone,” Kamala Harris said in a post-debate analysis on CNN, before trying to convince viewers that the debate shouldn’t really matter. “I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last three and a half years of performance.”
There’s no way to sugarcoat this for Democrats. President Joe Biden’s debate performance will go down as one of the worst onstage appearances by a sitting incumbent in modern political memory — to the point where Democrats are already floating the idea that the president should step aside before his party’s mid-August nominating convention in Chicago.
“There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue,” former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod said in a post-debate analysis.
“He had one thing he had to accomplish and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that tonight,” former senator Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) said on MSNBC. “More than handwringing tonight, I do think people feel like that we are confronting a crisis.”
“Guys, the Dems should nominate someone else — before it’s too late,” 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang wrote on X during the debate.
The country’s major opinion columnists are displaying an unprecedented level of unanimity this morning in their evaluation of Biden’s debate performance and what must now be done to prevent a Trump victory.
“Joe Biden Is a Good Man and a Good President. He Must Bow Out of the Race,” reads the headline of Thomas Friedman’s column, which Biden reportedly reads religiously.
Even Joe Scarborough, a staunch Biden defender whose program the president regularly watches from the White House, joined the chorus in a Friday morning Morning Joe segment.
“I think we have to ask the same questions of him that we have asked of Donald Trump since 2016,” Scarborough said. “And that is, 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?”
Democrats are in a full-blown panic. But there’s no mechanism to force Biden off the ticket and getting him to bow out voluntarily will take some convincing. “Of course Joe Biden is not dropping out,” a Biden adviser told the Wall Street Journal.
The campaign’s mid-debate spin that Biden has a cold — which they didn’t tell reporters before the debate kicked off — will do little to allay Americans’ concerns about what they saw onscreen last night: the constant coughing, the labored breathing, the open-mouthed gaze, the staring down at the podium when he wasn’t speaking. Last night’s performance is all the more alarming considering Biden spent an entire week undergoing intense debate prep at Camp David.
“It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden,” former Biden White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said after the debate. “I don’t think there’s any other way to slice it. His biggest issue was to prove to the American people that he had the energy, the stamina — and he didn’t do that.”
Throughout the debate, Biden lost his train of thought and struggled to land any major punches. Even on abortion, an issue that has recently been seen as electorally favorable to Democrats, Biden’s answers were incoherent. “I support Roe v. Wade. You have three trimesters. First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time between the doctor – I mean between the woman and the state,” he said at one point.
Biden sounded much, much more energetic and coherent in his post-debate remarks. But that offstage appearance won’t matter for the many of Americans who turned off their televisions midway through the debate or right after it ended. To shift the trajectory of the race, Biden had one objective — to reassure Americans he is fit to serve. He failed spectacularly.
The presumptive GOP nominee had his fair share of weird riffs and clippable moments — “we had H2O,” “you’re a bad Palestinian,” and “I didn’t have sex with a porn star” come to mind — though out of pocket comments are always expected from Trump on the debate stage. What’s more, Trump clearly took pains to restrain his instincts. He appeared calm and collected, and he didn’t constantly interrupt Biden as he did in the now infamous September 2020 debate. And when he did land a punch-line at Biden’s performance, it didn’t come off as overly rude. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either,” Trump said after one of Biden’s bungled debate answers about immigration.
It’s important to remember that many vulnerable battleground-state Democratic senators and swing-district members are currently running for reelection with Biden at the top of the ticket. Lucky for them Congress is out of session this week and next. When they come back, many will be forced to reckon with the years-long backlog of comments they’ve given to NR and other outlets dismissing voters’ concerns about the president’s age and fitness for the job.
“Everything I read is they’re trying to get him to cut back his hours because he’s got too much energy,” senator Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) told NR in January when asked about intra-party concerns about the president’s age. “A Republican saying that Joe Biden is old is not exactly newsworthy,” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii told NR in February when pressed on special counsel Robert Hur’s devastating characterization of the 81-year-old incumbent’s memory and mental acuity.
Hat tip to Axelrod, the former Obama strategist and one of the few high-profile Democratic strategists who has publicly urged the Biden campaign to acknowledge voters’ long-running concerns about the president’s age. “Occasionally he’ll make a joke about it. But I’m not sure people think it’s a joking matter,” Axelrod told NR back in January. “And in order to get a hearing from people you need to dignify their concerns.”
We’ll see over the next few weeks whether Biden and his allies heed that advice.