Biden’s debate debacle last Thursday laid bare the bet, forcing the 81-year old president to admit the following day at a North Carolina rally that he has a diminished capacity for walking and talking. The concerns that have flared within the party since have focused on a fear that the decline evident at the debate and in other recent public events will only continue, disqualifying him as a candidate.
“I am going through the same thing myself and I just know it doesn’t get any better,” said Democratic strategist James Carville, 79, one of the most outspoken Democrats concerned about Biden’s continued path. He said top donors expressed “deep concern” at a breakfast he attended Friday at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
“It’s like seeing your grandma naked,” he said of the debate. “You can’t get it out of your mind.”
But Biden’s team has argued that the concern over Biden’s most basic abilities and competence will not be reflected at the ballot box, both because of Biden’s record and the proportionate voter aversion to former president Donald Trump winning a second term.
Biden campaign polling since the debate, they say, has confirmed their theory of the case. Though some 2020 Biden voters came away from the debate with a more negative view of the president, a large majority of those who were turned off said they were still voting for Biden. A significant share of the group also reconsidered their opinion when shown clips from Biden’s Friday rally in North Carolina, where he demonstrated much more energy and declared, “I know how to do this job.”
“Our job is to show voters that Joe Biden is not just up to the job, but he is currently doing the job that they sent him to do and has a vision for the second term,” Biden pollster Molly Murphy said.
That renewed effort launched Monday with a new ad, debuted on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, that used footage of Biden’s energetic Friday speech in North Carolina to attack Trump, mixed with footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, darkened images of Trump, and footage of Biden doing the job of president. The ad includes Biden’s admission, “I know I am not a young man.”
“And I know like millions of Americans know,” Biden bellows at the ad’s conclusion over a cheering crowd, “when you get knocked down, you get back up.”
From the start of the campaign, Biden’s team has painted a relatively dim view of how the election would unfold. Their strategy has hinged on forcing Americans to choose between two men for whom they have serious concerns — Trump, whose political approach has been a consistent loser in elections since 2016, and Biden, who enters the race with historically low approval ratings and unprecedented concerns about his abilities.
A June Gallup poll before the debate found that 67 percent of the country believed Biden is “too old to be president” — twice as high a share as the concerns that faced the late Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was 72 on Election Day in 2008, and Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who was 73 when he was the GOP nominee in 1996. A CBS News/YouGov poll after the Thursday debate found that 72 percent said Biden “does not have the mental and cognitive health to be president.”
Those numbers are not contested by the Biden campaign, though advisers point out that significant shares of voters also have concerns about Trump. Gallup found 37 percent of voters think Trump is “too old,” while CBS found 49 percent believed Trump did not have the mental health to be president.
The numbers lay bare a central challenge for the Biden campaign: If he only receives votes from those who find him competent, he would receive support from less than a third of the electorate — far behind the winning margin he needs, even with a significant third-party candidate lowering the share of the vote total he needs to win.
That reality has driven the behind-the-scenes party-wide panic in recent days, as donors, strategists and some elected officials grapple with the idea that a candidate can win the most powerful office in the world despite the perception that he is unqualified to perform its obligations. Major donors have expressed alarm, saying they recognized in Biden’s performance some of the deterioration they have observed in smaller meetings and donor events.
Elected Democratic leaders, for their part, have mostly withheld public judgment or expressed support for Biden’s candidacy as they await polling to settle. Even Trump advisers have discussed the likelihood that it will take until after the July Fourth holiday to know just how much damage was done to Biden.
Another point of contention is the assumption that recent Democratic performance by Senate and gubernatorial candidates in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona can be replicated by a president whose approval is below 40 percent and who is widely seen as unfit for the job, say people involved in the discussions. Biden’s advisers have long pointed to those results to argue that presidential approval is less determinative in contests where Trump’s politics are at issue, but they have not tested that with Biden on the ballot.
The rosier scenario holds that much of the concern over Biden’s age was already baked into the electorate before Thursday’s debate. While Biden’s performance may make winning over new concerned voters more difficult, it is unlikely to reduce his vote share by much. Geoff Garin, another Biden campaign pollster, said in a campaign memo Saturday that there had been no change in the vote choice in two battleground polls conducted after the debate.
“The critical marginal voters — the swing voters and the marginal turnout targets on both sides — already thought that Joe Biden was the person who showed up at that debate,” said Dmitri Mehlhorn, a high-dollar donor adviser and Democratic strategist who has been working with independent groups to support Biden. “So it’s damaging to be clear — that debate made our job materially harder, there is no way to deny that — but I don’t think it changed our job.”
Biden’s campaign and outside allies still plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the coming months to highlight parts of Trump’s record and agenda that turn off these same voters. Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has publicly indicated that they plan to use the debate footage to underscore their own campaign’s central argument.
“The ‘Debate’ was a visual representation of the Biden presidency: Weak, Failed and Dishonest,” Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita posted Sunday on social media.
What is not disputed is that Biden was behind where he needed to be when the debate began, and the aftermath has not helped his situation. Rather than the referendum on Trump that Biden hopes to create, the Democratic Party is now consumed with debate over Biden’s merits and limitations. It is unclear how that will shift over the coming months.
“This election is entirely about Oct. 15 to Election Day. Which set of concerns is dominating the conversation?” said another Democratic strategist involved in the race, who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “People are going to walk into Oct. 15 concerned about both candidates and concerned about their choice. The question is: Which concern rises to the top? And which concern is secondary going into the close?”
