It was late Tuesday afternoon, three days after the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and the Bidenworld insider was blunt. “Momentum against [Joe Biden] [has] stopped, but that’ll pick up again,” he said. “There’s going to be a bunch of polling and analytics leaked and dropped. And it’s all devastating.” Indeed, the next day Politico came out of the box with a memo from BlueLabs, which does polling for Democratic PACs. While short of devastating, the BlueLabs survey purported to show four possible alternative nominees running ahead of Biden “by roughly five points across battleground states.” Another punch came hours later: an AP-NORC poll in which nearly two thirds of the Democratic respondents said they wanted Biden to withdraw.
Yet what made the Biden insider sound truly grim wasn’t simply the data—it was his belief that the information would be spun by an inner circle that includes first lady Jill Biden, son Hunter Biden, and longtime advisers Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon. “Donilon is the gatekeeper of the numbers,” the insider said. “Donilon is a former pollster himself, and he [understands] this stuff. And he doesn’t believe the current polling is reliable.”
Donilon could not be reached for comment, but he has described the issue as one of context and timing: that polling in July can’t accurately forecast what might happen in November. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the narrative about Biden’s insular advisers is sometimes used in service of a larger agenda. “No one is or could even shield information from the most experienced politician in our lifetime,” a Biden aide tells me. “These claims are being made by people who just do not like the decision the president has made, which is: He is staying in the race and he will win.”
Clearly plenty of bad news is getting through to the president at the moment, as the effort to push him out before the Democratic convention gains speed. Biden reads major newspapers and watches the primary TV networks. Since the debate, he’s talked with dozens of Democrats, many of them in meetings the president himself sought out. One key conversation was with former president Barack Obama, whom an associate describes as being clear-eyed about Biden’s prospects. The president’s chances of hanging on to the nomination were, at first, aided by the fact that the dump-Biden movement was fractured and leaderless. That has changed, dramatically, this week, with the effort now appearing to be a coordinated campaign. Two of the Democrats’ most skilled tacticians have taken different but increasingly visible and aggressive roads around Biden’s loyal advisers to press their unhappy message. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a TV interview, floated the idea that Biden could still change his mind; that didn’t work. One week later, California congressman and Senate candidate Adam Schiff explicitly called on Biden to drop out, something Schiff probably wouldn’t have done without Pelosi’s tacit approval. Pelosi also delivered her pessimism in a phone call with Biden, during which she also asked to speak with Donilon, according to The New York Times.
And then there’s Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who for weeks has proclaimed, “I’m with Joe.” But Schumer has been listening carefully to the worries of Democratic Senate candidates in key races; most of them are well ahead of Biden in polls but remain leery of the president dragging them down. Schumer’s top priority is said to be defeating Trump. If he were of the belief that Biden is still the best bet to accomplish that goal, Schumer could have said so emphatically by now. Instead, he, along with House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, has successfully pushed to delay certifying Biden as the nominee ahead of the Democratic convention in August. Word also somehow recently leaked of a one-on-one meeting between Biden and Schumer, in which the majority leader relayed the anxieties of his fellow senators.
Beating Trump in November was always going to be hard enough by itself. But Biden’s disastrous debate performance has forced his team to spend nearly a month fighting an internal war, against elements of the Democratic Party and a political media that worships polls and seems ever more determined to hound Biden from the race. The president ramped up his public appearances, mixing improved coherence (during a solo press conference following a NATO meeting) with disquieting lapses (during a speech to the NAACP’s annual convention), while reportedly sounding increasingly bitter behind the scenes. Then came a positive COVID test, further underscoring his physical vulnerability.
Through it all, members of the Biden campaign have stuck to their line that the fundamentals of the general election race have not changed postdebate, and that an effective campaign can alter what today appears to be a bleak picture. They do have some evidence in their favor, both nationally and in battleground states. In the cascade of polling, Democrats still support the president against Trump, despite thinking Biden is too old and wishing there were another candidate in their camp. Yet pressure keeps building: from donors withholding millions of dollars, from two dozen House Democrats publicly calling on Biden to quit, from George Clooney. The Democrats are steaming toward their most fractious convention since they convened in Chicago in 1968, when the Vietnam War was tearing the party apart. “Democrats have done more damage to Joe Biden over the last two weeks than Donald Trump or Republicans have,” says Cornell Belcher, a strategist who worked on both of Obama’s winning White House runs, and who was prescient in seeing through the predictions of a Republican red wave in the 2022 midterms. “You still have some of the elite cabal that is attempting a coup d’état, still chirping about the polls. Democratic voters know Biden is old, they’re not in love with him, and they vote for him anyway against Trump. Polls are instructional, not predictive. It’s still a toss-up race.”
Indeed, there’s some polling showing Biden actually gaining ground in the swing states, and the national margin closing to within one point. It’s hard to see the contest staying that tight, however, if Biden retains the nomination and continues to take a pounding from his supposed allies, while also being a weak campaigner. It’s also entirely possible that Trump’s current run of good luck turns in the next three months, and the race heads into November as it began: too close to call. There’s plenty of sincere fear that Biden will lose and take the Senate and House down with him. But just in case the president can’t be driven off the ballot, Democrats are getting a jump on assigning blame for his presumed defeat.
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