Shortly after President Biden walked off the stage in the early hours of Friday morning following his disastrous debate performance, his campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon acknowledged in a series of private calls with prominent allies that the night’s debate hadn’t gone well but urged them not to overreact.
Senior White House aides were on the phone late Friday, with Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, calling Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to check in, a person familiar with the call said. And by the afternoon, the Biden campaign had turned its weekly all-staff call into a virtual pep rally to try to allay any doubts creeping up in campaign offices in Wilmington, Delaware and elsewhere.
“Nothing fundamentally changed with last night’s election,” Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, said in a recording of an all-staff meeting. “We’re going to get hit. We’re going to hit back. We’re going to get hit and we’re going to stand up.”
The 48 hours after the debate became a frenzy as the campaign tried to save Biden’s suddenly shaky candidacy and a days-long damage-control effort to pressure anxious Democratic lawmakers, surrogates, activists and donors, pleading with them to back the president as the party’s presumptive nominee.
Biden has had a whirlwind of seven campaign stops in four states since the debate, but he’s taking a break for a planned family gathering at Camp David, where he is due to arrive late Saturday and be joined by his wife, Jill Biden, and the Bidens’ children and grandchildren, according to two people familiar with the schedule.
The gathering had been planned in the spring for a family photo shoot, according to people familiar with the matter. But the timing and circumstances — surrounded by the very family members who played a key role in Biden’s decision to run for president or not — have raised the stakes and scrutiny around the Camp David estate.
For now, the gulf remains as wide as ever between voters and the party’s most vocal supporters, who have been expressing concerns for more than a year about whether the 81-year-old president is fit to serve another term. Some Democrats are bracing for a drop in the polls after Mr. Biden’s shaky performance in the debates, which they say could reignite calls to replace him.
The mobilization effort from Wilmington to Washington showed the extent of the damage that Biden had inflicted on his reelection campaign in just 90 minutes. Given that his campaign has been criticized as narrow-minded and dogged, the surge in activity suggests that the debate’s aftermath has turned into a real crisis, putting those around Biden into desperate fight mode.
Former President Barack Obama emerged from the sidelines to offer words of encouragement. Mr. Biden offered a kind of apology while speaking at a Proof of Life rally in North Carolina. And many of his Democratic successors defended him on television, with Sunday-morning political shows peppered with interviews defending the president. The most fervent defense took place behind closed doors, in a flurry of private fundraisers and late-night and early-morning conversations.
Their efforts appeared to be successful in staving off a wave of leading Democrats calling for Biden to step down. Meanwhile, the president took to the microphone at campaign events, telling supporters and big donors he knew he messed up in the debates and making repeated attempts to redirect the focus back to Donald J. Trump’s performance.
“It wasn’t a great night for me,” Biden told a group of donors in East Hampton on Saturday, “but it wasn’t a great night for him either.”
Selling “Come Back Kids”
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who hosted a private fundraising dinner for the president at his home Saturday night, was among those who received calls from senior White House officials.
“I acknowledge they had a tough night and I also acknowledge they can’t forget the incredible streak they’ve had over the last four years and they have to continue that,” he said in an interview, adding that “they have to put their foot on the gas.”
At the event, which raised $3.7 million for the campaign, Murphy introduced the president as “America’s Comeback Kid.”
While some Democrats have come up with ways to field an alternative candidate in private text messages and hushed conversations, Biden administration officials have told nearly everyone that there is no viable alternative and that Democrats need to focus on the threat posed by Trump.
Among those making the case, according to people familiar with the matter, were Biden White House advisers Messrs. Zients, Bruce Reed, Anita Dunn and Steve Ricchetti, who called a list of congressional leaders and big donors. Campaign officials said Mr. Biden needed to prove he was resilient enough to withstand the rigors of a campaign, but assured allies they believed he could.
At a fundraiser for President Obama and House Democrats in New York on Friday evening, Biden’s missteps in the debate and the party’s response were the main topics of discussion. President Obama, along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, told donors that the debate had been a tough night, but stressed the urgency of defeating Trump, two attendees said.
Some attendees blamed Biden’s aides for the fiasco, arguing they should never have agreed to the format or such a late start time. Rep. Gregory W. Meeks of New York said many donors had urged the officeholders in attendance to pressure Biden to give up reelection. Meeks said he had advised the donors to stay calm.
“I agree it was a really bad night,” he said, suggesting part of the problem was that Biden packed too much information into his answers.
“Donors are very concerned,” Meeks said. “I’ve had some donors come up to me and say, quite frankly, they’re panicking, they need to do something, they need to do something now. And I’ve had some donors come up to me and say if we do anything now, we’re in big trouble.”
As Obama sought to reassure donors, they were buzzing around the time of the event about an editorial the editorial board of The New York Times had posted online calling for Biden to resign, two attendees said. Other media figures Biden follows, including MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Times columnist Thomas Friedman, had made similar calls.
Democrats have worried, mostly quietly, for months about whether Biden could continue campaigning at his current age and, if elected to a second term, govern until he was 86. A few days before the debate, 45% of Democrats did not want Biden to be the nominee, according to a new Times/Siena College poll, but his performance likely deepened those concerns.
Democratic leaders were waiting to see what the first wave of post-debate polls showed. For now, there seems to be recognition among Democratic leaders that there is little they can do.
One top Biden adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve the relationship, said the idea that a younger candidate could replace Biden and beat Trump in November amounted to a “Washington social fantasy.” The adviser likened the hope to speculation that Nikki Haley and other Republican candidates might have removed Trump from the GOP shortlist.
Advisers said the second debate, scheduled for September, should go ahead, and that the president should focus on positioning himself against Trump rather than trying to explain Biden’s entire agenda.
First 24 hours
The effort to stop Democrats from fleeing the campaign began even before Biden finished his performance on stage at Thursday night’s debate. Campaign headquarters in Wilmington and Atlanta began sending messages to reporters and surrogates, including one that said Biden had no intention of quitting the campaign.
The next morning, campaign chairman O’Malley Dillon, accompanied by Fulks and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, walked through the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta to brief some of the campaign’s most loyal donors.
Later, in North Carolina, Biden ended a rally by acknowledging his age and limitations, turning a planned rally in Raleigh into a performance that was clipped and spread across social media.
“I don’t walk as lightly as I used to. I don’t talk as smoothly as I used to,” Biden told the rally, but he added that he “wouldn’t be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart that I could do this job.”
At 2:36 p.m. on Friday, the Biden campaign got one of its most significant boosts: a message of support from Obama. “Debate nights can be the worst. Trust me, I know,” Obama wrote on social media.
“That was a huge statement,” said Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a member of Biden’s national advisory council.
At an all-staff meeting Friday afternoon, campaign executives O’Malley Dillon, Chavez Rodriguez, Fulks and another deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, told staff they understood the influx of concerns and criticism from friends, family and fellow supporters.
“We’re not trying to whitewash what you saw,” Fulks said, according to the recording.
Human Rights Campaign executive director Kelly Robinson said Biden aides called her after the debate to stress the importance of the election, and she attended the president’s annual LGBTQ+ gala in New York City on Friday night.
“people “It’s starting to get a little confusing, but at the end of the day, there are going to be two options to consider,” she said. “People are coming back to being very pragmatic and understanding what has to happen in this election cycle.”
“It wasn’t a very good night.”
The following afternoon, during a webinar held Saturday to reassure Democratic National Committee members, the party’s chair, Jaime Harrison, spoke about the party’s on the ground efforts and the $27 million the Biden campaign has raised since the debate. Harrison declined to answer questions, saying the committee remains divided on Biden’s future, according to multiple participants.
Throughout the weekend, the Biden campaign was eager to present an image of party unity, but perhaps too eager.
On Saturday afternoon, the Biden campaign sent out a fundraising solicitation addressed to James Carville, a Democratic strategist who has repeatedly argued that Biden should not be the party’s nominee.
“The time that really upset me was the day after he said the reason it wasn’t working was because he was old. Well, that’s the whole point,” Carville said in an expletive-laced interview. “I think it’s fair to say there will be a backlash here and a moment of rallying around the flag, but we’ll see what happens.”
Biden addressed his shortcomings onstage as he drove through the Hamptons to gulp down cash at the mansion of billionaire hedge fund manager Barry Rosenstein. “I understand the concerns about the debate. I get it,” he said. “It just wasn’t a very good night.” On the way there, his motorcade passed groups of people holding signs that read “Fall for America” and “We love you, but it’s time.”
O’Malley Dillon wrote a memo by Saturday evening accusing “politicians in Washington” of prematurely discounting Biden. “If we see a shift in the polls over the next few weeks, it would not be the first time that exaggerated media reports have led to a temporary dip in the polls,” he wrote.
She made no mention of the more than 50 million Americans who watched Biden’s halting performance in real time.
Kate Kelly, Katie Glueck and Kenneth P. Vogel Contributed report.
