A defiant President Joe Biden refuses to heed calls from left-leaning pundits, some Democratic lawmakers, and the party’s voter base to consider stepping away from the ticket after a disastrous performance at the first debate against former President Donald Trump last week.
Biden’s inability to quell concerns about his mental acuity during the debate led to Democratic panic over whether the president should remain the party’s standard-bearer ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August.
Tim Ryan, a former Ohio congressman and a 2020 presidential rival to Biden, called for Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party’s nominee in 2024 this week. James Carville, a chief strategist on former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, said he doesn’t think Biden should be the nominee while several newsroom editorial boards have called for Biden to drop out.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) became the first Democratic member of Congress to call on Biden to withdraw as the nominee. “I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw. President Biden should do the same,” Doggett said in a statement Tuesday. Adam Frisch, the Colorado Democratic nominee for the 3rd Congressional District, said he was “worried about the state of the presidential race” before calling on Biden to step down.
But the Biden campaign is unequivocal that the president isn’t backing away as the presumptive nominee as he huddled with his family at Camp David over the weekend.
Here are the many ways Biden’s campaign is pushing back against complaints.
Biden campaign tries damage control and media pivot
The president had been kept in relatively safe environments, eschewing most public interactions that were not directly controlled by the White House or his campaign after the debate. But on Tuesday, it was announced that Biden will sit for an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos with the first clip released on Friday and the full interview airing on Sunday.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, he will campaign in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two battleground states that are crucial to winning the election, and will hold an official press conference during his attendance at the NATO summit next week. “I can assure you the president will be out and about talking directly to the American people,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during Tuesday’s press briefing, claiming the administration wants to turn the page from the debate.
“It was a bad night,” Jean-Pierre later conceded about Biden’s debate performance. “We’re going to continue to build on the unprecedented record by continuing to fight for the American people.”
Biden’s cleanup efforts are an abrupt change from the actions of Biden’s allies last week. Moments after the CNN presidential debate concluded on Thursday, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chairwoman, claimed, “Biden presented a positive and winning vision for the future of America” in a statement completely ignoring the president’s hoarse voice, moments where he lost his train of thought, and rambling statements.
The refusal to address the panic over Biden continued during a DNC call on Saturday, when Chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez didn’t address the president’s poor showing, leaving some members feeling “gaslit.”
In a memo sent out on Saturday, O’Malley Dillon pointed to the perception of voters in battleground states as reason for Biden to continue in his campaign.
“Here’s what else the voters saw immediately following the debate: President Biden met with grassroots supporters in Atlanta, dipped into Waffle House for some late night food and some selfies, then touched down in North Carolina where he shook every hand on the tarmac before a rally the next day with fired-up voters that highlighted the stark contrast at the center of this race,” O’Malley Dillon wrote, projecting Biden as more energetic than what debate watchers saw.
Project Biden’s strength in advertising
After the debate, Biden held a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, a state he is hoping to flip in November, that saw him give a far more forceful performance than the day before.
The campaign quickly released a 60-second “I know” ad on Monday attacking Trump’s “lies” during the debate, hoping to change the narrative back on his rival.
“Folks, I know I’m not a young man. But I know how to do this job. I know right from wrong. I know how to tell the truth,” Biden said indirectly, responding to criticism that he is too old to serve another four years in office. “And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back up.”
The ad will air in battleground states, targeting a younger, more diverse audience on several networks including ESPN, TNT, Bravo, FX, Freeform, and Comedy Central.
Biden campaign brags over fundraising
On Tuesday, the campaign announced it raised $264 million from April through June, with $127 million raised just in June, the best month for the campaign so far. The money raised in the second quarter was $75 million more than what the campaign raised in January through March.
The campaign now has $240 million in cash on hand, an increase from the $212 million cash on had last month. Since the debate, Biden’s campaign has raised $38 million, with $30 million coming from grassroots donations. Roughly half of those grassroots donations were first-time donors to the campaign during this election cycle. Thursday, the day of the debate, was the best grassroots fundraising day of the campaign, and Friday was the second best.
A source familiar told the Washington Examiner that the big dollar fundraisers over the weekend exceeded the campaign’s goals for total raised and attended.
“Our Q2 fundraising haul is a testament to the committed and growing base of supporters standing firmly behind the President and Vice President and clear evidence that our voters understand the choice in this election between President Biden fighting for the American people and Donald Trump fighting for himself as a convicted felon,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.
However, Trump’s second-quarter totals dwarfed Biden’s and effectively erased the financial lead Biden has held in the 2024 cycle. The Trump campaign announced it raised $331 million from April through June, with $111.8 million raised just in June. At the end of last month, Trump’s campaign reported having $284.9 million cash on hand, more than $44 million above the $240 million cash on hand reported by Biden.
“Winning this quarter brought us a cash on hand advantage, which is punctuated by a Biden burn rate that grows while yielding no tangible results for them,” Trump senior campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement. “This fundraising momentum is likely to grow even more as we head into a world-class convention and see the Democrats continue their circular firing squad in the aftermath of Biden’s debate collapse.”
The Biden campaign also touted more than 1,500 events in battleground states connected to its “Weekend of Action” mobilization plan. Top campaign officials and surrogates, including Harris, Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD), Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), and Harrison, led the events to rally supporters. Following the debate, the rate of volunteer signups was more than three times as much as an average day.
Dismiss Democrats as bedwetters
In a Saturday fundraising email titled “7 Things To Tell Your Friends After The Debate” the Biden campaign dismissed and downplayed concern from party members about Biden’s capabilities.
“The bedwetting brigade is calling for Joe Biden to ‘drop out.’ That is the best possible way for Donald Trump to win and us to lose,” the email said.
“First of all: Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, period. End of story. Voters voted. He won overwhelmingly,” the email continued. “And if he were to drop out, it would lead to weeks of chaos, internal foodfighting, and a bunch of candidates who limp into a brutal floor fight at the convention, all while Donald Trump has time to speak to American voters uncontested.”
The email also referenced flash polls from CNN, 538, SurveyUSA, Morning Consult, and Data for Progress, claiming the debate “did not change the horse race.”
But a Sunday poll from CBS News-YouGov showed 72% of registered voters don’t think Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, while only 49% said the same for Trump. Another CNN poll on Tuesday showed Biden behind other Democrats, including Harris, in hypothetical matchups against Trump. Trump is currently leading Biden by 6 percentage points, 49% to 43%, while Trump leads Harris, 47% to 45%.
Biden’s mixed outreach to top Democrats
Biden has reportedly not called top Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, nor has he called Democratic governors since the debate.
According to an NBC News report, Biden has not called Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) or House Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and Democratic governors expressed disappointment that Biden has not reached out. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told MSNBC she had not spoken with Biden since the debate.
“The President has spoken personally with multiple elected officials on the Hill and across the battlegrounds since the debate,” Lauren Hitt, a Biden campaign spokeswoman, told the Washington Examiner in a statement.
Mahen Gunaratna, a spokesman for Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ), claimed Murphy “spent two hrs with @POTUS on Saturday night. They caught up privately and had dinner together, where they discussed topics ranging from the economy to Ukraine.”
Jean-Pierre confirmed during the Tuesday press briefing Biden will meet with Democratic governors on Wednesday, with some attending in person and others attending virtually.
Notably, Biden has limited his public remarks to engaging in as few unscripted moments as possible. He did not take questions after the public remarks he gave on Monday evening following the Supreme Court’s decision to grant Trump some immunity from prosecution. He also did not take any questions during Tuesday’s public remarks and instead relied on the teleprompter as he spoke.
Sending out surrogates to defend Biden
Former Presidents Barack Obama and Clinton have posted supportive tweets hoping to quell the brewing panic among Democrats.
“Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself,” Obama wrote.
Other members of Congress took to X and on the Sunday news shows in support of Biden. “As a pastor … I can tell you that there have been more than a few Sundays when I wish I had preached a better sermon,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), a member of Biden’s national advisory board, told NBC News’s Meet the Press. “But after the sermon was over, it was my job to embody the message, to show up for the people that I serve. And that’s what Joe Biden has been doing his entire life, his entire life of public service.”
On CNN’s State of the Union show, Pelosi sought to reframe the narrative against Trump and away from Biden’s problems. “It’s not about performance in terms of a debate. It’s about performance in a presidency,” Pelosi told host Dana Bash. “And I want you to know that the fact is that the reaction to the lies of Donald Trump is something that maybe TV isn’t focusing on, but people are.”
