While the dam might not yet be breaking, there sure are plenty of leaks: Some Biden aides and operatives overseeing his reelection campaign now see his chances of winning against Trump at zero.
“No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” one person working to reelect Biden told NBC News.
Concerns of Biden’s viability have grown following his shockingly bad debate performance in late June. Biden’s campaign at the time brushed aside widespread concerns from Democrats as ephemeral angst from “the bedwetting brigade.” Now it seems even some on his campaign see the writing on the wall, with some aides discussing how best to convince Biden it’s time to sail off into the sunset.
One campaign official who spoke with NBC described a perfect storm of impasses for Biden and concerns about his mental fitness, fundraising, and unfavorable polling, with two-thirds of voters thinking he should step aside.
“We have this window, and the White House is just running out the clock, which is so selfish,” a longtime Democratic presidential campaign strategist told NBC. “We’re all waiting around for Joe Biden to f--- up again, which is not a great position to be in.”
“He needs to drop out,” another Biden campaign official told NBC. “He will never recover from this.”
Since his debate performance two weeks ago, Biden has said multiple times he will not leave the race.
“I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024,” Biden most recently wrote in a letter to Democrats on Monday. But nothing has been able to quell growing calls for Biden to step aside. On Wednesday, Politico reported deep blue New York is on the brink of becoming a swing state thanks to lackluster support for Biden, with local candidates being advised to avoid attaching themselves to him.
“I worry that the symbol of our party is the person who’s running for president and that that does absolutely trickle down to the down ballot races,” one state party chair told NBC News.
Despite those concerns, an internal memo to Biden campaign staff asserting that he still has a shot circulated on Thursday.
“Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: this remains a margin-of-error race in key battleground states,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote. “The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race—while some of this movement was from undecided voters to Trump, much of the movement was driven by historically Democratic constituencies moving to undecided.”
“No one is denying that the debate was a setback,” they wrote. “But Joe Biden and this campaign have made it through setbacks before. We are clear eyed about what we need to do to win. And we will win by moving forward, unified as a party, so that every single day between now and election day we focus on defeating Donald Trump.”
