The Biden campaign is in denial
They are misjudging both the extent of their problem and the source of it.
If you’ve been under a rock for the past 96 hours — as some Democrats doubtless wish they had been — allow me to catch you up.
On Thursday, Donald Trump and Joe Biden — the former and current presidents of the United States, respectively — debated each other in Atlanta. It did not go well for Biden. He mumbled and meandered; his voice was hoarse, his face was pale. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said at one point. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Within minutes of the candidates leaving the stage — with Biden’s wife Jill helping him down the stairs — the outpouring of calls began for Biden, 81, to also exit the race for the White House. The star-studded list of editorialists nudging Biden to step aside, many of whom have close ties to the president, is by now well known, but bears repeating: MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, the president’s favorite cable news host. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, his favorite columnist. The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, a Biden biographer. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. The Times, Chicago Tribune, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial boards. Even a longtime Scranton neighbor, the son of Biden’s old babysitter, got in on the action.
I. Time for some Bidenology
I don’t know what will happen next, and anyone who tells you that they do is lying. The sample size of an 81-year-old president flubbing a debate and then facing calls to quit is precisely n=1. However, the sample size of Joe Biden deciding whether or not to seek the presidency is much larger than that: it has happened almost every four years for decades. In addition, Biden has been easily observable and living fully on the public stage for more than a half-century. In that time, he has aged — clearly — but his core traits and personally have remained largely the same. We can’t know what he will do next, but we can look to what we know about him for clues.
So, let’s review what we know about Joe Biden (citations included):
He has wanted to be president at least since the 1980s, if not since his time in college.1
He is famously proud and stubborn.2
It is core to his personal story that he is frequently underestimated, but always proves resilient, dating back to when a nun mocked his stutter as a seventh grader.3 He has often quoted his father as telling him, “When you get knocked down, you get back up,” a mantra he has applied in his personal life (including during his many family tragedies), his political life, and when they intersect.4
He has a chip on his shoulder about the opinions of the media elite, of whom he is openly contemptuous and enjoys proving incorrect.5 This is especially true of The New York Times and its editorial board.6 His favorite moniker is “Scranton Joe,” and he believes he understands the attitudes of the electorate much better than the snobbish punditocracy.
He is particularly sensitive about coverage of his age.7
He has a chip on his shoulder about Democratic leaders, including Barack Obama, who stung him when they urged him against running for president in 2016, a race he believes he would have won.8 He often compares himself to Obama, who served two full terms,9 and believes he was looked down on by Obama’s advisers, including David Axelrod10 and the hosts of “Pod Save America.”11
Besides being a dad and a “Pop,” work is his life. He is not known to have any other strong interests or hobbies outside of politics and family.12
Speaking of his children and grandchildren, for Biden, “family is the atomic unit of politics.”13 There is no one whose advice he trusts more than his own relatives — and, in that group, the most powerful force is that of Jill Biden, who has always had the last word in Biden’s decisionmaking about whether to run for president.14
He also counts on the advice of a close circle of confidants, many of whom have been in his employ for decades and whose careers and identities are wrapped up in Joe Biden’s pursuit of the White House.15
He is the candidate who expelled Trump from the White House, and he genuinely believes that he is the only one who can do it again. That lack of confidence in other alternative candidates extends to his vice president, Kamala Harris, who would be the likely Democratic frontrunner if he stepped aside.16
None of this means that Biden withdrawing from the presidential race is impossible, but it does make it deeply unlikely, in my estimation. When you consider what we know about Biden, it is hard to imagine that an orchestrated push from Obama alums and The New York Times editorial board will cause him to leave the job he has wanted for his entire adult life and that he believes he is best suited for. In fact, it would be difficult to think of a group less engineered to push him to do the opposite. Biden views himself as a bare-knuckled fighter; he would probably like nothing more than to defeat Donald Trump and prove the media class wrong in one fell swoop.
Certainly, if he is persuaded to pull out, it will not be because of appeals from Beltway columnists. (If anything, such writings are probably just encouraging him to dig his heels in even further.) It will be because of his family, Jill especially, who have always been central to his campaign efforts.
II. What It Takes to push Biden out
As luck would have it, this past weekend, the extended Biden family was already planning on gathering for a reunion at Camp David. The trip was originally organized around a photo-shoot with the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, but — per NBC News — transformed into an opportunity for Biden to discuss the fate of his re-election bid with his wife, children, and grandchildren, who double as his most trusted advisers. (A campaign official called the NBC report “100% media-fabricated bullshit,” although subsequent reporting seemed to confirm the notion that Biden’s family discussed his future at Camp David.)
It’s a familiar scene for the Biden clan, who have been holding similar summits for decades, though usually at the family home in Delaware. But no analog comes closer to the current moment than September 1987, when Biden was also in the throes of a presidential campaign but facing media pressure to withdraw (in that case because of a different scandal, allegations that he plagiarized from a British politician). Then, as now, he cloistered himself with his children and advisers like Ted Kaufman and Mike Donilon.
In 1987, the room was split on whether Biden should stay in. His sons Beau and Hunter “couldn’t believe their father would even think of getting out,” according to “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s magisterial account of the 1988 campaign. “This wasn’t about politics, or the public—this was about their dad’s honor.”
“If you quit now, people will think that all that stuff about you is true,” Beau told him. “If you stay, keep the spotlight, you can make your case directly to the people—right over the heads of the press.”
“I’ve never been a quitter,” Biden said, according to Cramer. “Never quit anything in my life.”
But his brothers, Frank and James, thought he should withdraw; so did Kaufman, and — most importantly — Jill. So he did, albeit unhappily. “Although it’s awfully clear to me what choice I have to make, I have to tell you honestly, I do it with incredible reluctance—and it makes me angry,” Biden told reporters the next day. “I’m angry with myself for having been put in the position, for having put myself in the position, of having to make this choice. And I am no less frustrated at the environment of presidential politics that makes it so difficult to let the American people measure the whole Joe Biden, and not just misstatements that I have made.”
And yet, he continued (using language that legions of Democrats wish he would repeat today): “Folks, be that as it may, I have concluded that I will stop being a candidate for President of the United States.” In Cramer’s account, as Biden spoke, Jill “stared straight ahead” at the reporters in the back of the room and felt hatred for the “first time in her life,” knowing that they “were destroying what Joe [had] worked for.”
Almost 40 years later, those same frustrations of Joe and Jill Biden, now the First Couple — about the media, about being underestimated, about being judged for his “misstatements” — plainly hang over the decisionmaking process today, as does latent bitterness from the 2016 cycle, another contest that he pulled out of against his better instincts.
This time, though, the family has reportedly come to a different, more unanimous, conclusion: Run, “Pop,” Run. According to The New York Times, Hunter (who was convicted of three felonies earlier this month) reprised the role that his deceased brother Beau played in ’87, bucking up their dad and urging him to show Americans “the version of his father that he knows — scrappy and in command of the facts — rather than the stumbling, aging president Americans saw on Thursday night.” Jill reportedly feels similarly; per Politico, she and Hunter were the “loudest voices” at Camp David urging Biden to keep running.
In short order, most of the Democrats who are (rightly or wrongly) seen as having enough heft to dissuade Biden have followed suit and doubled down in support of the president. Barack Obama:
“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.”
“I’ll leave the debate rating to the pundits, but here’s what I know: facts and history matter. Joe Biden has given us 3 years of solid leadership…”
“I’m not [calling on Biden to step down], and I don’t know anyone who’s doing it.”
“Stay the course.”
In all likelihood, that’s curtains for the effort to oust Biden, barring any major new developments. “Joe Biden is and will be the Democratic nominee,” his campaign tweeted defiantly this weekend.
III. The road ahead
Defiance may be a healthy mode for a campaign to operate in; the same is less often true of denial or defensiveness, both of which the Biden team is also showing signs of. If the president has decided to stay in the race, the statements from his advisers do not reflect a campaign aware of the mounting problems towering in front of them.
“If you’re like me,” read a recent Biden campaign fundraising email, “you’re getting lots of texts or calls from folks about the state of the race after Thursday. Maybe it was your panicked aunt, your MAGA uncle, or some self-important Podcasters.” (The email also compared Biden’s polling against Trump to that of other potential Democratic candidates, a revealing inclusion in of itself.)
Such messages are suggestive of a campaign that believes its problems extend no wider than the hosts of “Pod Save America.” However, by casually dismissing the “bedwetting brigade” (as the email called those who want Biden to drop out), the Team Biden is waving away the worries of nearly half of Democratic voters, according to a new poll from CBS News and YouGov.
The poll, conducted after the debate, found that a jaw-dropping 72% of registered voters believe Biden does not have the mental and cognitive abilities to serve as president. (49% say the same about Trump.) The same number, 72%, believe Biden should not be running for president; among Democratic registered voters, 45% said he should step aside, while 55% said he should continue running.
The Biden campaign has already settled on a culprit to blame for such numbers, however, and it isn’t their candidate’s halting debate performance. “If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a publicly released memo.
According to Politico, the Biden family is casting blame in additional directions: the Camp David conversations reportedly targeted Biden’s debate prep coordinators (Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, her husband Bob Bauer); the CNN moderators; and even the network’s makeup artists, whom the family believes made Biden appear too pallid.
His family reportedly assigns no such share of the blame to Biden himself, who forgot many of his lines on Thursday night, garbled several answers, and offered nonsensical responses such as his boast that he “beat Medicare.”
Luckily for the Biden campaign, if the president’s problem was merely poor prep and unfair media coverage, the fix is fairly simple. Biden can schedule a slew of interviews, or call the White House press corps in for a primetime news conference, or hold town hall events with voters. If his issue is perception, not performance, all they have to do is give him ample opportunities to prove his mental capabilities, and the perceptions will melt away. (Crucially, these events must be held without a script, like a debate is, not with a TelePrompter, like he used at a North Carolina rally on Friday.)
Biden, of course, has avoided such forums for his entire presidency, holding fewer interviews and press conferences than any of his recent predecessors. So far, the White House has not indicated that this week will be any different. Today, Biden is still at Camp David; he will have no public appearances. Later in the week, he is scheduled to headline a closed-door campaign fundraiser and deliver remarks at a Medal of Honor ceremony; then, he will take in fireworks on the Fourth of July before flying to Delaware on Friday, returning home as he does most weekends.
Schedules can change, of course, but — once again — those plans do not suggest a campaign that has come to terms with the extent of their problem (72% of Americans believing their candidate is mentally infirm) or the source of it (their candidate’s own performance).
As the weeks roll on, the Biden team will only have less and less time to chip away at the image cemented on stage Thursday. Biden will not get any younger; reports examining his health status will only increase. Already, since Thursday, Axios has reported that Biden is typically only “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. (he is “more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued” outside of those hours), while The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Biden “struggled to follow the discussions” at a European Union-U.S. summit in October (Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to intervene and show Biden the talking points he should read from).
The Trump campaign will continue releasing ads like this one, which is composed entirely of clips from the Thursday debate; every future miscue Biden makes will be magnified tenfold.
Biden and his advisers, who have long believed that the media overreacts to small events (especially when the events are interpreted as being bad for Biden), are gambling that this too shall pass, and that the debate won’t much move the polls in a contest where many voters have already priced in their thoughts on Biden’s age.
We have yet to see enough poll results to decide whether or not that they are correct. Fundraising data will also be important to watch in the coming weeks: the campaign is crowing about grassroots fundraising records notched since Thursday, but reportedly many big donors (without whom the campaign cannot survive) are considering pulling their funding.
Perhaps Biden’s polling and fundraising numbers will remain steady. But if they do begin to slip — or even if they merely don’t begin to improve — at some point, instead of plowing ahead as though everything if normal, Biden and his staff will have to unveil a strategy that answers the widely held concerns of voters, proving not just that their candidate can win — but that he can do the job for five more years, until he’s 86 years old.
That’s all for today. I’m off to the Supreme Court, where the decision in Trump v. United States, the presidential immunity case, is expected at 10 a.m. today. I’ll be inside the courtroom and will have more to report tomorrow morning.
Thanks so much for waking up to politics — have a great day!
“Lifelong ambition led Joe Biden to Senate, White House aspirations,” The Dallas Morning News, 8/23/2008
“A Fumbling Performance, and a Panicking Party,” The New York Times, 6/27/24
“What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say,” The Atlantic, 1/2020
“Post by Joe Biden,” X, 2/28/2020
“Biden camp thinks the media just doesn’t get it,” Politico, 9/11/2019
“The Petty Feud Between the NYT and the White House,” Politico, 4/25/2024
“Joe Biden’s Secret Oval Office TV,” Politico, 4/27/2023
“‘The President Was Not Encouraging’: What Obama Really Thought About Biden,” Politico, 8/14/2020
“An Axe to grind,” Politico, 3/17/2022
“Pod share your fears,” Politico, 2/23/2024
“Joe Biden: The Old-School Politician in a New-School Era,” The New York Times, 6/26/2024
“Biden Brings in a Consultant,” The Atlantic, 1/23/2023
“The decider: Jill Biden's unparalleled influence and impact on the president,” NBC News, 10/21/2022
“The Insiders: The 3 Men at the Core of Biden’s Brain Trust,” The New York Times, 6/22/2024
“There Has to Be a Backup Plan. There’s a Backup Plan, Right?”, New York Magazine, 5/24/2022
Hoping to see a similar article regarding Mr. Trump’s age and what he stated in the debate. THE MSM seems to be giving him a pass. YOu have always been fair in your assessments. (I don’t read your page everyday so I may have missed that you addressed this.)
Gabe, great column! You are doing a great job! This was the most factual and insightful column I have read post the debate. Keep up the good work!