How Biden lost the last two weeks

Here’s why Democrats keep jumping ship.

I’m not much of a betting man, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the political betting markets over the last two weeks.

These markets can be highly sensitive to fairly minor political developments, which means they don’t always hold much predictive power over the long term. But that also means they can be a helpful proxy for following the ups and downs of a specific story, since there seems to be little that doesn’t move the markets one way or the other.

Here, for example, is the last month of Polymarket betting on whether Joe Biden will drop out of the 2024 presidential race:

As you can see, the odds were fairly stable (and low) for a long time, before Biden’s June 26th debate with Donald Trump — appropriately — injected a high amount of fluidity into the question.

Since then, there have been some developments that have pushed bettors closer to gambling on a Biden dropout, and some that have pushed them farther.

You can see the odds of an exit spike after the debate, for obvious reasons, and then stabilize in the immediate aftermath, when Biden declared he was staying in and calmed some Democratic nerves with his performance at a rally in North Carolina. Then, in the first days of July, the odds shot up even higher than before, as new polls showed Biden trailing Trump considerably, the first House Democrats called on him to withdraw, and reports emerged that Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) was gathering a group of colleagues to reason with the president.

By the early part of this week, though, the Warner meeting had fallen apart, and the withdrawal odds began to dip again (going from 75% on July 3 to 36% on July 8), as the expected stampede of anti-Biden congressional Democrats failed to materialize. Then, on Wednesday, they began to rise anew. (More on that in a moment.)

That trajectory pretty well represents Biden’s standing in the Democratic Party over the last two weeks. Up and down, up and down — with times when it felt like Democrats were about to abandon him, and times when it felt like they would stick with him — but with the arrow unmistakably moving in the direction of abandonment. Biden has received encouraging and alarming news, but the good news never seems to last as long as the bad, or to lift him up as high as the bad moments bring him down.

In short, every time Biden tries to quiet his party’s concerns, they roar back even louder. Two weeks have now passed since the debate, and he’s managed to make zero progress in reassuring the Democrats he needs in his corner, lawmakers and voters alike, during that period. With less than four months to go before a critical election, that leaves the party stuck with a problem they have little time to solve: either Biden or his growing army of Democratic skeptics have to give in. At the moment, neither side seems ready to lay down their swords.

The look-it-up-yourself campaign

Actually, it would be inaccurate to say Biden has made zero progress since just after the debate. If you go off of the Polymarket odds, he’s really made negative progress, since the odds of him dropping out stood at 43% right after the debate and have risen to 56% today.

For Richard Nixon, it wasn’t the crime, it was the cover-up; for Biden, his worsening position isn’t just because of his debate performance. It’s because of his response to it. It’s possible to imagine a world where Biden performs badly in Atlanta, says it was only a “bad night,” and then immediately goes about proving that to Democrats, by sitting for interviews with every major TV network, holding a 90-minute press conference in primetime, and generally blanketing the airwaves with reassurance.

Yes, Biden’s polling would have taken a hit because more people would have watched the debate than those other press availabilities, but his standing among Democratic lawmakers might have stabilized, because he’d acted fast to dispel their concerns about his age and mental acuity. The party would have fallen in line behind Biden and focused their energies on bolstering him for the fall.

That is not what happened.

Instead, Biden largely refrained from holding the type of unscripted events that would have quelled concerns — in itself, a telling disclosure about his abilities. (If he could pull of a full-court press, he’d be doing it.) He hardly moved with the urgency one might expect with his presidency on the line, taking days to call key lawmakers; one week to hold a TV interview; two weeks to hold a press conference. Then, when he did speak without a script, he often faltered.

During a meeting with a group of governors, Biden told them he needed to stop doing events after 8 p.m. and joked (?) that “it’s just my brain” when asked if he had health problems. During a set of radio interviews (for which his aides had supplied the questions in advance), he called himself “the first Black woman to serve with a Black president.” In his interview with George Stephanopoulos, he couldn’t seem to remember if he had watched his own debate performance (“I don’t think I did, no”); his answer about how he’d feel if he lost to Trump (“As long as I gave it my all…that’s what this is about”) further enraged his allies.

With almost every attempt at clean-up, Biden only made Democrats grow queasier.

But, if you want to understand why new Democratic lawmakers have been peeling off from Biden every day, all of those verbal miscues pale in comparison to this core reality: Biden is losing to Trump and he has yet to explain to Democrats how he plans to win.

To establish the first prong of that assertion first, pick your polling average. RealClearPolitics:

FiveThirtyEight:

Cook Political Report:

They all tell an identical story. The race was a statistical dead heat before the debate; now, Trump has a clear edge. It’s not a huge edge — somewhere between two and three percentage points — but it represents the largest polling advantage Trump has boasted in any of his three presidential campaigns, or that a Republican has had in this point in a presidential cycle since 2000.

“Trump’s current numbers among Black and Latino voters are incompatible with any plausible Democratic victory scenario,” the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman wrote yesterday.

So, naturally, Democrats are looking for the Biden campaign to present a strategy to change things. Instead, all Biden has given them is denial: “I don’t buy that,” he told Stephanopoulos when informed of the latest numbers. Yesterday, a tweet from a top Biden campaign aide seemed to suggest that the president’s team puts more faith in a lone Northeastern study (which found that the debate had not hurt Biden) than nearly every high-quality public poll (which have found that it did).

To the extent Biden has outlined a campaign message since the debate, he has largely relied on two main arguments, one negative and one positive.

In both the Stephanopoulos and “Morning Joe” interviews, his most frequent attack against Trump was to call him a “liar,” a point he returned to three times in each interview. “He’s a pathological liar,” Biden said at one point; a “congenital liar,” he added at another.

Meanwhile, Biden’s go-to positive message in both interviews centered around foreign policy, which was also the issue he seemed steadiest on during the debate (and in a speech earlier this week, pegged to the NATO summit). Here he is with Stephanopoulos:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You talked a lot about your successes in-- at the beginning of this interview. And-- and I don’t want to dispute that, I don’t want to debate that. But-- as you know, elections are about the future, not the past. They’re about tomorrow, not yesterday. And the question on so many people’s minds right now is, “Can you serve effectively for the next four years?”

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: George. I’m the guy that put NATO together, the future. No one thought I could expand it. I’m the guy that shut Putin down. No one thought could happen. I’m the guy that put together a South Pacific initiative with AUKUS. I’m the guy that got 50 nations out-- not only in Europe, outside of Europe as well to help Ukraine.

I’m the guy that got Japanese to expand their budget. I’m the-- so I mean, these-- and, for example, when I decided we used to have 40% of computer chips. We invented the chip, the little chip, the computer chip. It’s in everything from cell phone to weapons. And so, we used to have 40%, and we're down to virtually nothing. So I get in the plane, against the advice of everybody, and I fly to South Korea. I convince them to invest in the United States billions of dollars. Now we have tens of billions of dollars being invested in the United States making us back in a position we're gonna own that industry again. We have, I mean, I-- I just-- anyway. I’m-- I don’t wanna take too much credit. I have a great staff.

Suffice it to say, foreign policy and “he’s a liar!” will not be sufficient strategies to take down Donald Trump. Anyone who could have been persuaded by pointing out Trump’s mendacity has been persuaded long ago. And anyone who is basing their vote on AUKUS, Finland and Sweden joining NATO, or South Korean semiconductor investments likely has a Biden sign nailed down in their yard already.

According to Gallup, a majority of Americans regard either the economy or immigration as the country’s biggest problem; this is why Donald Trump talks about them almost constantly. Meanwhile, only 1% say the same about national security. As a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his global successes may be points of pride for Biden, but they are unlikely to reverse his polling deficit.

Biden’s struggle to mount an effective case against Trump is perhaps best represented by a tweet his campaign account recently sent out: “Google Project 2025.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s right-wing blueprint for a future Republican administration, is exactly the type of talking point that might re-focus the political conversation on Trump, not Biden, which Biden sorely needs.

And yet, there the Biden campaign is, telling people to look it up themselves — instead of having their candidate talk about it, which he failed to do during both the debate and the Stephanopoulos interview. On “Morning Joe,” his lone attempt at a drive-by mention of the project sputtered, when he referred to “the 2025 agenda,” getting the name wrong and failing to offer any further details.

After two weeks, there is still no indication that Biden either understands the hole he’s in or has a plan to dig himself out of it. That means these have been two lost weeks for the Biden campaign, wasted trying (and failing) to stem Democratic defections instead of looking towards November.

Meanwhile, unlike Biden, Trump has been altering his campaign plans in response to the debate. Since Atlanta, “every Trump move — from personally editing the Republican platform to lying low while President Biden’s debate debacle sucked up attention — has been designed to nudge double-haters and truly undecided voters,” per Axios. It remains unclear what Biden’s plan is to win over those same voters.

The soft touch

This failure to reassure top Democrats has kept Biden’s age front-and-center, and it’s why — a full two weeks after the debate, after giving Biden plenty of time to find his footing — more and more anxious Democrats started coming out of the woodwork Wednesday, sparking fresh movement in the betting markets.

For starters, there were Reps. Pat Ryan (D-NY) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who became the eighth and ninth Democratic House members to call on Biden to quit, and Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), who became the first Democratic senator to do so.

And don’t forget actor/director/producer/Democratic megadonor George Clooney, who had this to say in The New York Times:

It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.

. . . We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate. This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor who I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.

Even more notably, though, were the Democrats who effectively called on him to quit by other means.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), for example, was asked on “Morning Joe” on Wednesday if she wants Biden to remain as the Democratic standard-bearer. “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she responded. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short.”

Of course, Biden has made his decision — he literally wrote a letter to House Democrats on Monday saying that he is “firmly committed to staying in this race” — but many Democrats joined Pelosi in pretending he hasn’t, clearly a subtle way of politely nudging him to decide again (and differently).

Take Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA): “I have complete confidence that Joe Biden will do the patriotic thing for the country. And he’s going to make that decision. He’s never disappointed me.” Or Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH): “The president has to make that decision. I believe ultimately he is going to do what's in the best interest of the country. I’m going to give him some time to make that decision.”

Democrats — conscious that Biden has to be coaxed out gently, not pushed out with brute force — are giving him space, appealing to his sense of patriotism. Do the right thing, Joe, these top Democrats seem to be saying. We won’t tell you what that is, but, c’mon, we know you know.

Meanwhile, Biden’s fundraising is drying up (“The money has absolutely shut off,” one source told NBC); polls suggest he could be hurting the party downballot, including in deep-blue New York; and even his closest allies are growing edgy (Chuck Schumer has privately opened the door to a new ticket, Axios reported).

Biden’s team has responded with still more denial, attempting to argue that Biden is more agile than Clooney and telling NBC, “if major donors don’t come along, we’ll do it without them.”

“We’re done talking about the debate,” Biden reportedly told donors earlier this week, attempting to put his disastrous performance in the rearview mirror. But Democrats are not done talking about it, as evidenced by the fact that more lawmakers emerge with calls for him to quit each day.

In fact, Pelosi said on “Morning Joe” that she hopes Democrats “hold off” discussing Biden’s future until the NATO summit is over — ensuring that the party remains in this state of frozen indecision until next week, at least. How can Biden survive, when so close to the election, key Democrats keep jumping ship, day after day? (Not to mention the fact that, per a Washington Post poll this morning, a majority of his own party’s voters want him out.) Even if the defections slow, Biden will not stop being 81 years old; leaks about his age will continue, as will attention to his every verbal stumble for the next four months. As

Josh Barro

wrote yesterday, “Like Biden’s Dogs, the Age Story Will Never Stop Biting.”

Today, at 5:30 p.m. ET, Biden will hold his first “big boy” press conference since the debate, which will be a crucial moment. You might think that Democrats would be hoping that it will be when their presumptive nominee finally stabilizes himself. Many, however, appear to be wishing for the opposite.

“Some are all but rooting for a big mess up at the press conference to make it easier to ditch him,” CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported.

“This is a terrible thing to say,” one White House official told The Atlantic, expressing the same hope. “But that might be the only thing that could force him out at this point, while there’s still time to rewrite the ending.”

The calls to quit are coming from inside the house. And, with each day, they’re only growing louder.

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The day ahead

• Biden: The president will participate in meetings as part of the NATO Summit, including a sit-down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and an event on the Ukraine Compact, a new roadmap aimed at strengthening Kyiv. He will hold his highly anticipated press conference at 5:30 p.m. ET. You can watch here.

• Harris: The vice president will hold a campaign event in Greesnboro, North Carolina.

• Senate: The upper chamber will hold a procedural vote on a resolution by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would trigger the termination of the pier built by the U.S. military to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. (The project, which has faced numerous difficulties, is already expected to wind down in the coming days.)

• House: The lower chamber is set to vote on a resolution overturning the Biden administration’s Title IX rule. A final vote on the resolution to fine Attorney General Merrick Garland — explained in yesterday’s newsletter — is also expected.

• Trump: The presumptive Republican presidential nominee will meet with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Florida, according to Bloomberg.