Biden’s debate gaffe last Thursday made that gamble clear, forcing the 81-year-old president to acknowledge at a rally in North Carolina the next day that he was having difficulty walking and talking. Since then, concerns have grown within the party that the decline evident at the debate and other recent public appearances could continue and disqualify him as a candidate.
“I’m going through the same thing myself, and I know it’s not going to get better,” said Democratic strategist James Carville, 79, who has been one of the Democrats most vocal about his concerns about Biden’s future course. At an Aspen Ideas Festival breakfast he attended on Friday, he said major donors had expressed “deep concerns.”
“It’s like seeing your grandma naked,” he said of the debate. “I can’t get it out of my head.”
But Biden’s campaign argues that concerns about his most basic competence and ability will not translate at the ballot box because of his record so far and voters’ opposition to former President Donald Trump winning a second term.
Polling by the Biden campaign since the debate supports their theory, they say. While some 2020 Biden supporters left the debate with a more negative view of the president, a majority of those who were turned off said they would still vote for Biden. And a sizable chunk of this group changed their opinion after being shown footage of Biden’s rally in North Carolina on Friday, where he appeared much more energetic than before and proclaimed, “I know how to do this job.”
“Our job is to show voters that Joe Biden is not just up to the task, but that he’s currently doing the job the voters entrusted him with and that he has a vision for a second term,” said Molly Murphy, a Biden-backed pollster.
The new effort launched Monday with a new ad that debuted on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The ad mixes footage of Biden’s impassioned speech attacking Trump in North Carolina on Friday with footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol, dark images of Trump and footage of Biden conducting the duties of his presidency. The ad also includes Biden’s admission that “I know I’m not a young man.”
“And I know, as millions of Americans know,” Biden yells at the end of the ad, over the cheering crowd, “that when you get knocked down, you can get up.”
From the start of the campaign, the Biden team has presented a relatively pessimistic outlook for how the election will play out. Their strategy relies on forcing the public to choose between two people about whom they have serious concerns: Trump, whose political approach has led to consistent election losses since 2016, and Biden, who is running with historically low approval ratings and unprecedented concerns about his competence.
A Gallup poll in June before the debate found that 67 percent of the public thought Biden was “too old to be president,” double the concerns expressed by the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was 72 on Election Day in 2008, and Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kansas), who was 73 when he was the Republican nominee in 1996. A CBS News/YouGov poll after Thursday’s debate found 72 percent said Biden was “not in good mental or cognitive health to be president.”
Those numbers are not disputed by the Biden campaign, but advisers say a significant portion of voters also have concerns about Trump: Gallup found that 37% of voters think Trump is “too old,” while CBS found that 49% think he is not mentally ready to be president.
The numbers highlight a central challenge for Biden’s campaign: If he only gets votes from those he considers competent, he will have the support of less than a third of the electorate — far short of the margin of victory he needs, even if a potential third-party candidate were to lower the vote share needed to win.
That reality has caused behind-the-scenes panic across the party in recent days, as donors, strategists and some elected officials grapple with the idea that a candidate could win the world’s most powerful office despite a perceived lack of qualifications to serve.Big donors have expressed alarm at Biden’s performance, citing some of the deterioration they’ve observed at smaller gatherings and donor events.
Meanwhile, Democratic elected leaders have mostly tended to withhold public judgment or endorse Biden while they wait for the polls to settle. Even Trump’s advisers have discussed the possibility that it may take until after the Fourth of July holiday to know how much damage has been done to Biden.
Another point of contention, according to people involved in the discussions, is the assumption that the recent performance of Democratic candidates for senate and governor in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, whose approval ratings fall below 40%, can be replicated by a president who is widely seen as unfit for office.Biden’s advisers have long pointed to these results and argued that the president’s approval rating is less decisive in elections where Trump’s politics are at stake, but they haven’t tested that in one in which Biden is running.
A brighter scenario is that many of the concerns about Biden’s age were already priced in by voters before Thursday’s debate. Biden’s performance may make it harder to attract new concerned voters, but it’s unlikely to significantly hurt his vote share. Jeff Garin, another pollster for the Biden campaign, said in a campaign memo Saturday that two battleground state polls conducted after the debate showed no change in voting choices.
“The key marginal voters — the swing voters and marginal voter target on both sides — were already thinking about Joe Biden as the person who showed up to the debate,” said Dmitri Melhorn, a high-dollar donor adviser and Democratic strategist who has worked with independent groups to support Biden. “So, frankly, the damage is great. The debate made our job a lot harder. There’s no way to deny that. But I don’t think it changed our job.”
The Biden campaign and outside allies plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming months to highlight parts of Trump’s record and policies that are alienating fellow voters, while the Trump campaign has publicly signaled it plans to use debate footage to highlight its own central arguments.
“The debate was a visual display of President Biden’s weakness, failure and dishonesty,” Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita wrote in a social media post on Sunday.
What’s indisputable is that Biden was behind where he needed to be when the debate began, and its aftermath hasn’t helped his situation. Rather than the referendum on Trump that Biden hopes to achieve, Democrats are now engrossed in a debate about Biden’s strengths and limitations. How that will change in the coming months is unclear.
“This election is all about Oct. 15th through Election Day. What concerns are dominating the conversation?” said another Democratic strategist working in the race, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “People will be going into the race on Oct. 15 worried about both candidates and their choices. The question is, which concerns will rise to the top? And which concerns will become secondary in the final days of the campaign?”
