The end may be nigh for Joe Biden’s reelection bid amid rising momentum within the Democratic Party against him staying in the race. While Biden and his top aides maintain he won’t step aside, more and more Democratic lawmakers are now publicly calling for him to drop out, and multiple reports suggest that top Democratic leaders have been privately working to convince him of the same. While Biden’s disastrous debate triggered this crisis, what’s lingered is the now widespread belief among party insiders that he has no viable path to defeating Donald Trump. There are also unconfirmed reports that Biden himself may be coming to terms with his own inviability. Below are live updates on this developing story as it plays out.
From my new post, responding to yet another round of “open process” and “blitz primary” reports:
What observers often miss is that under the existing convention rules the convention will already be “open.” Any candidate willing to run who can identify 300 delegates (no more than 50 from any one state) supporting them can have her or his name placed in nomination. This would be true for either a “virtual roll call” (what the DNC is currently planning for the week after August 1) or for a traditional convention roll call.
Read the rest here.
From one Joe to another:
The West Wing creator has written a New York Times op-ed about how he would have scripted the show, if fictional president Jed Bartlet faced the same situation Biden and Democrats now do (and we can go ahead and file this “what if?” under “never gonna happen”):
What if, as a result of Bartlet revealing his illness, polling showed him losing to his likely opponent? And what if that opponent, rather than being simply unexceptional, had been a dump truck of ignorance and bad intentions? What if Bartlet’s opponent had been a dangerous imbecile with an observable psychiatric disorder who related to his supporters on a fourth-grade level and treated the law as something for suckers and poor people? And was a hero to white supremacists?
We’d have had Bartlet drop out of the race and endorse whoever had the best chance of beating the guy.
The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.
But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.
At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.
Congressman Ro Khanna expressed his continued support on Sunday morning:
In the newly released poll of likely voters from the Detroit Free Press, the Trump has 7 point lead over Biden:
The poll showed Trump, who held a rally in Grand Rapids on Saturday evening, leading Biden 49%-42% in a head-to-head matchup, with 9% undecided, saying they would vote for neither or refusing to answer. In a five-way race, Trump led with 43% to 36% for Biden, 8% for independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and 2% each for Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornel West. Again 9% said they either would not vote for president, pick someone else or were undecided.
Trump led in every region of the state, including in metro Detroit — defined as Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties and seen as the most predominantly Democratic region in Michigan — where he held a slim but remarkable 46%-44% edge in the head-to-head matchup with Biden and a 43%-38% margin in the five-way race.
Trump’s lead in metro Detroit is a significant indicator of how the political winds have changed for Biden, who four years ago, beat Trump 56%-40% in the region.
As the twilight battle over Joe Biden’s nomination continues among Democrats in and beyond Washington, the nomination process itself is coming into view slowly and with some uncertainty.
The Democratic National Convention’s Rules Committee met on July 19 and confirmed an earlier decision to hold a “virtual roll call” vote for the nomination before the August 19 beginning of the convention, but no earlier than August 1. The exact dates for the roll call vote (probably a “window” during which the delegates will be canvassed) will be determined at another meeting next week. The Rules Committee, like the Democratic National Committee, is a stronghold of Biden loyalists. But presumably they are giving some thought to a Plan B if Biden himself withdraws his candidacy.
There have been no reports that Bill or Hillary Clinton are involved in the effort to nudge Biden out of the race. Instead, per NBC News’ Monica Alba:
Politico Playbook adds that the Clintons have been encouraging donors to stay the course:
Three sources tell Playbook that not only is former President Clinton pushing donors to keep giving to the campaign, but that former Secretary of State HILLARY CLINTON is doing the same behind closed doors.
Via an X thread, CBS News’ Robert Costa reports that Biden is angry about the slow-motion revolt, and resents the role Pelosi and Obama seem to be playing in it (which is what the New York Times has also reported):
President Biden is deeply frustrated in Delaware this weekend with those he perceives as unhelpful and who he believes are participating in an informal, somewhat slow-moving, misguided revolt against his candidacy. Biden and members of his inner circle believe both former Speaker Pelosi and former President Obama are privately underestimating his political appeal and the strength of his coalition, especially against Trump, and believe they and others are being too muted on Dem. dissent
President Biden, as one friend puts it to me, is “old school” and believes if you “don’t think he should run, you should run against him publicly” or otherwise be quiet and be supportive.
A flurry of rumors about Biden allies thinking hard about a Biden exit has infuriated many of Biden’s most trusted associates, especially talk that historian Jon Meacham was maybe being tapped to write/or mulling an exit speech, which he denied to CBS News.
The key dynamic is that while Biden and many of his confidants are LISTENING to people’s concerns about his viability, they also DETEST this process. They view the listening as good-faith openness to feedback, not as some willingness to leave the race due to private Dem. doubts.
Note: The discussions – in the inner circle, among lawmakers, among donors, among party elites – remain very fluid with the president’s frustration the only constant. Truth of where things stand will be the president’s own actions more than any particular nudge or shove.
The southern California representative also specifically calls for Harris to be the replacement nominee:
A new Washington Post story suggests they are supporting his choice to remain in the race, not influencing it. “[Biden family] members resist the idea that they are the ones driving the decision,” the Post reports. “They resent any notion that they are propping up the president.”
More from the story:
Hunter, who lives in California, flew out to meet Biden when the president was in Las Vegas recently for campaign events. They have remained in close contact, with Hunter following daily, often hourly, developments, on calls with his father and acting as a sounding board and a gut check. Other family members have been exchanging their usual daily phone calls and frequent text messages.
But in a family where any member can call an emergency meeting, no one has summoned the clan to discuss the patriarch’s political future, despite the extensive speculation from outsiders about some grand family council.
The family’s anger is driven in part by a conviction that Biden could have moved beyond a bad performance in a 90-minute debate if so many Democrats had not immediately joined forces against him. They have come to view the past few weeks as a Game of Thrones-style war among various factions of the party, with the loudest calling on him to depart coming from those he has fought against in previous battles. The tone some in the party are taking in their effort to push him out has only stiffened Biden’s resolve to stay in, they say.
“It’s like they don’t know he’s Irish,” said one person close to the family.
They came at a steady clip on Friday. As of 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, none yet today.
Instead, countless Congressional Democrats have been posting memories of and tributes to longtime Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose family announced on Friday that she had died at the age of 74 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
That’s what Politico reports in its look at Friday’s wave of new statements against his reelection bid:
Aides to House Democratic leadership, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have told members as recently as Friday that if they want to call on the president to step aside, the time to do so is now, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
They are not urging members to drop Biden, those people said, only advising them on timing. But by not standing in members’ way — and telling them to not wait to launch their messages — leadership is indicating the time for back-channeling is over. Despite entreaties from high-ranking members of his own party, Biden has remained in the race and given no public indications that he will reconsider.
And when one lawmaker’s office suggested they would make a private call to the Biden campaign to register complaints, one leadership aide advised that private calls were not the most effective now, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
The lede of the New York Times’ Friday night report on how Biden is privately responding to all the pushback:
Sick with Covid and abandoned by allies, President Biden has been fuming at his Delaware beach house, increasingly resentful about what he sees as an orchestrated campaign to drive him out of the race and bitter toward some of those he once considered close, including his onetime running mate Barack Obama.
Mr. Biden has been around politics long enough to assume that the leaks appearing in the media in recent days are being coordinated to raise the pressure on him to step aside, according to people close to him. He considers Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, the main instigator, but is irritated at Mr. Obama as well, seeing him as a puppet master behind the scenes.
The friction between the sitting president and leaders of his own party so close to an election is unlike anything seen in Washington in generations …
The report also suggests that if Biden does decide to drop out, he won’t announce that before Bibi Netanyahu has left town:
While Mr. Biden and his team publicly insist that he is staying in the race, privately people close to him have said that he is increasingly accepting that he may not be able to, and some have begun discussing dates and venues for a possible announcement that he is stepping aside. One factor that may stretch out a decision: Advisers believe that Mr. Biden would not want to do it before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visits Washington on Wednesday at the initiative of Republicans to address Congress, unwilling to give the premier the satisfaction given their strained relations lately over the Gaza war.
The three-term Ohio senator, who is up for reelection this year, made his announcement on Friday evening:
In a meeting with fellow California Democrats last week, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi stressed the need for an open process to choose the party’s next nominee if President Joe Biden steps aside, in an effort to avoid the appearance of a Kamala Harris coronation.
The discussion in that meeting of the California delegation, which includes 40 members, took place in the Capitol on July 10, at least partly focused on the complicated next steps for the Democratic Party if Biden left the ticket. …
The concern wasn’t about Harris’ strengths as a candidate — and in fact, several people made clear Harris needed to be the party’s next pick — but instead centered on worries that party bosses were choosing the president, rather than the party’s base.
By our count, it’s now up to 36 congressional Democrats. We’ll keep updating this list:
House of Representatives
1) Lloyd Doggett (Texas)
2) Raúl M. Grijalva (Arizona)
3) Seth Moulton (Massachusetts)
4) Mike Quigley (Illinois)
5) Angie Craig (Minnesota)
6) Adam Smith (Washington)
7) Mikie Sherrill (New Jersey)
8) Pat Ryan (New York)
9) Earl Blumenauer (Oregon)
10) Hillary Scholten (Michigan)
11) Ed Case (Hawaii)
12) Jim Himes (Connecticut)
13) Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington)
14) Greg Stanton (Arizona)
15) Brad Schneider (Illinois)
16) Eric Sorensen (Illinois)
17) Scott Peters (California)
18) Brittany Pettersen (Colorado)
19) Mike Levin (California)
20) Adam Schiff (California)
21) Jim Costa (California)
22) Sean Casten (Illinois)
23) Jared Huffman (California)
24) Chuy García (Illinois)
25) Marc Veasey (Texas)
26) Mark Pocan (Wisconsin)
27) Zoe Lofgren (California)
28) Greg Landsman (Ohio)
29) Kathy Castor (Florida)
30) Betty McCollum (Minnesota)
31) Morgan McGarvey (Kentucky)
32) Gabe Vasquez (New Mexico)
33) Mark Takano (California)
U.S. Senate
1) Peter Welch (Vermont)
2) Jon Tester (Montana)
3) Martin Heinrich (New Mexico)
4) Sherrod Brown (Ohio)
5) Joe Manchin (West Virginia)
New Mexico representative Gabe Vasquez adds his name:
One of the strongest arguments for Kamala Harris stepping up if Joe Biden “steps aside” from the 2024 presidential nominations is that she’s been part of Biden’s core team all along and could more or less take over his preexisting presidential campaign along with its funds (since this campaign was always styled legally and politically as a Biden-Harris reelection effort). But even as the struggle over Biden’s status rages in Washington and around the country, an NBC News story appeared that suggested a Harris presidential candidacy might not just be a Biden hand-me-down:
A group of Democrats who believe Vice President Kamala Harris should be the party’s nominee if President Joe Biden steps aside have begun quietly mapping out what her presidential campaign apparatus would look like and what her path to victory could be in November, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the planning.
The effort, which Harris has not sanctioned as she continues to publicly and privately support Biden remaining in the race, comes as many are concerned that the vice president does not currently have the personnel or organization needed to quickly make the pivot to the top of the ticket, the source said. …
As part of their work, the informal group that includes Democratic strategists and aides with presidential campaign experience are already mapping out how Harris’ strategy for victory could be different from the one Biden took to win in 2020 and from what he was planning to do this year. The group, which does not include Harris’ team and is not advocating for Biden to step aside, are also discussing who in Biden’s current campaign structure may need to be replaced.
Now obviously Harris would need to put her personal stamp on a general-election campaign, and its strategy might require a fresh look, particularly to determine if (as some polling suggests) Harris can improve on Biden’s performance among non-white and under-30 voters. Maybe she could put Georgia and North Carolina back into play, maybe not. But it would be foolish to squander the massive organizational and ad investments the Biden campaign has made in the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin unless it’s very clear there is an alternative path to 270 electoral votes.
And more to the immediate point, partywide confidence in Harris would be much stronger if she did not attempt to rebuild a campaign organization on the fly and/or purge veteran campaign operatives, particularly given the poor reputation of Harris’s own stillborn 2020 presidential campaign. She would do well to make it clear she won’t dismantle a well-regarded Biden machine. There’s really just no time for that.
The Progressive Caucus member makes ten total for the day:
Many have worked with Biden before. Per the Washington Post:
A group of 56 former Democratic foreign policy officials in an open letter Friday called on President Biden to drop out of the presidential race, saying that “the growing likelihood of an electoral college victory for Donald Trump puts your national security accomplishments — and our country and your legacy — at an unacceptable level of risk.”
The signees — which include former ambassadors, former members of the diplomatic corps and former national security officials — said Trump’s “vision, approach, and expressed intentions concerning our nation’s security are in fundamental conflict with the values and principles for which you have stood.”
Intelligencer contributor David Freedlander reports:
Their plan is to paint Harris as a daffy and out-of-touch “San Francisco liberal,” according to one Trump campaign adviser, one who can more easily be caricatured as a true-believing left-winger than the man she would replace. Plus they say swapping out nominees would not mean they have to alter the attack on what they believe are Biden’s greatest vulnerabilities besides his age: inflation and immigration. And immigration, Republicans say, may be an even bigger problem for Harris than it was for Biden since the president deputized her to explore the root causes of the migration crisis. …
The Trump campaign also plans to turn the charge that they are anti-democracy against the Democrats if Harris replaces Biden, pushing the notion that Harris was chosen by party bosses and not by the voters. On Thursday morning, at an event sponsored by Politico, Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita called any effort to replace Biden with Harris “an attempted coup.”
Read the rest of David’s reporting here.
The Wall Street Journal got a look at it:
A detailed report compiled by Democrats showing the president forecast to lose in an Electoral College landslide has sent alarm bells through the party’s leadership and led to renewed calls publicly and privately for the president to drop out.
The data, which is based on thousands of voter surveys compiled by Democratic firm Blue Rose Research and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows Biden losing not only all the swing states, but also behind or even in New Hampshire, Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia and Maine. It shows the president leading by only 2.9 percentage points in New Jersey.
The report also suggested a few potential problems for Kamala Harris:
A major concern for Democrats up and down the ballot is the fact that half of voters, including 28% of those who backed Biden in 2020 and 52% of swing voters, think Democrats in office have been lying about the president’s mental fitness. The report says voters are likely to view Democrats’ defense of Biden as dishonest by a two-to-one margin.
Though the data, which was shared widely with Democrats in recent days, found Vice President Kamala Harris performing better than Biden against Trump, it also shows that Republican attacks suggesting Harris wasn’t honest about the president’s health could be effective.
As Democrats look for a path forward, the findings showed that voters would want to see a competitive process to decide on an alternative nominee if Biden were to step aside.
A major labor union in Washington State has called on President Biden to quit his re-election bid, saying that if “he continues to demonstrate that he is unable to effectively campaign, and subsequently loses,” a second Trump administration would create an “immediate risk” for workers. The union, Local 3000 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, represents about 50,000 workers in grocery, retail and other fields in the Pacific Northwest.
Up to now, the only other evidence that unions have grown anxious about Biden’s chances have come in the form of a few statements from union leaders:
Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers, hinted at concerns over Mr. Biden’s candidacy in a speech last week. Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, has said that she shared concerns about “the campaign’s overall strategic direction with the president’s campaign staff” but that Mr. Biden had her full support.
He released a statement:
I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America: one where we save our democracy, protect our rights and freedoms, and create opportunity for everyone.
His COVID symptoms are improving, White House physician Kevin O’Connor said Friday:
Biden’s campaign also held a staff call on Friday during which chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said to ignore cable news:
This makes nine on the day so far:
Data for Progress is having some fun with its poll questions, including getting some voters’ views on one of Kamala Harris’s most memeable lines:
By the way, it’s worth noting the full context of Harris’s famous video clip:
Add Representatives Greg Landsman (Ohio) and Zoe Lofgren (a Pelosi ally in California) to the list (which now includes at 27 representatives and three senators).
Today’s example of people paying extra close attention to every word uttered by one of Joe Biden’s closest allies:
And yesterday:
CNN polling analyst Harry Enten reiterates how Biden has been losing from the start:
He’s the third Senate Democrat to publicly make the call, following Jon Tester on Thursday and Peter Welch back on July 10:
The list of congressional Democrats who have publicly said Biden should go is continuing to grow.
On Friday, Illinois representative Sean Casten made his case for Biden “passing the torch” in a Chicago Tribune op-ed, arguing: “As long as this election is instead litigated over which candidate is more likely to be held accountable for public gaffes and ‘senior moments, I believe that Biden is not only going to lose but is also uniquely incapable of shifting that conversation.”
Hours later, Representatives Jared Huffman, Marc Ceasey, Chuy Garcia, and Mark Pocan released a statement also asking Biden to step aside:
Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon appeared on Morning Joe on Friday to reiterate Biden’s commitment to staying in the race:
The campaign also put out a new memo on Friday morning, as NBC News reports:
[In the memo], the campaign’s battleground states director, Dan Kanninen, says that despite intense media coverage on Democratic divisions, organizers talking to voters consistently found that issues such as women’s rights and the potential GOP agenda of Project 2025 are paramount.
“While voters consistently mention President Biden’s age when contacted, our target voters — both re-engagement and true swing voters — are still planning to vote for him, making it clear the debate has not hurt support among the voters who will decide this election,” he writes in the memo.
Kanninen says he won’t “sugar coat the state of the race: we have our work cut out for us to win this November.” But he underscored what Biden has said repeatedly since his poor debate performance — that he is “in it to win it.”
“He’s the presumptive nominee, there is no plan for an alternative nominee. In a few short weeks, Joe Biden will be the official nominee,” he writes. “It is high past time we stop fighting one another. The only person who wins when we fight is Donald Trump.”
