Biden blames elites, but voters may be his bigger problem
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Even if President Biden can stem high-level Democratic defections, many Americans will still have grave concerns about his age and abilities.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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WASHINGTON - As US President Joe Biden confronts a simmering threat to his candidacy from within his own party, he is dismissing what he casts as a familiar set of doubters: the editorial boards. The “millionaires”. The Democratic chattering class that, in his view, has long underestimated him.
Left unmentioned are the people who have been the loudest and most consistent in voicing concerns about Mr Biden’s age and abilities: the voters.
Since the beginning of Mr Biden’s last run for president five years ago, Democratic voters have aired concerns about his verbal stumbles, dated references and uneven, halting speaking style. Those anxieties have only deepened throughout his presidency – two years ago, a strong majority of Democratic voters said they wanted a new standard-bearer – even as many leading Democratic officials put aside their own private reservations to support his re-election.
Now, some lawmakers are publicly breaking with the President after his disastrous debate performance in June. But even if Mr Biden, 81, succeeds in stemming high-level defections, interviews across the country made clear that the concerns among the Americans he needs to win re-election are real, grave and growing.
“You want to be on Team Joe, but you also see what other people saw at the debate,” said Ms Judy Dixon, a township supervisor of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, who is also a leader of the local Democratic Party there. She was comfortable with Mr Biden before the debate, she said, and will support him if he is the nominee – but she is currently part of an effort petitioning for a new Democratic candidate.
Asked about Mr Biden’s suggestion on MSNBC this week that it was predominantly the “elites in the party” who want him to step aside, she replied: “That’s not accurate.”
Former representative Charlie Dent, who backed Mr Biden in 2020, was more blunt: “Ha! Yeah, right.”
“The elites are the ones who have been protecting him the whole time,” said Mr Dent, who added that he would not support former president Donald Trump in 2024 but might not vote for Mr Biden, either. Citing the conversations he had while vacationing on the Jersey Shore alongside fellow Pennsylvanians recently, he said: “Regular, normal people don’t think Biden should be running.”
The challenge for Mr Biden is twofold: assuring Americans broadly that he is up to the task of serving until he is 86 years old – and quelling mounting fears among Democrats that if he remains on the ticket, his candidacy will deliver total control of Washington to Trump.
The polls “certainly show a difficult environment for President Biden’s re-election, and correspondingly that would likely lead to losses in the House and the Senate,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, said in an interview on July 11, adding that he hoped Mr Biden could demonstrate “the vitality and the charisma that he needs to turn this election around”.
He added at another point: “I’m sure the President and his close advisers are really thinking deeply about the path forward and how we can best position Democrats to win in November.”
A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after the June 27 debate
And a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released on July 11 found that 56 per cent of Democrats said he should end his candidacy, while 42 per cent said he should continue, even as the survey showed a tied race for the popular vote. Sixty-seven per cent of Americans overall believe Mr Biden should end his re-election campaign, the poll found.
“I don’t know if he’s all the way there,” said Mr Robert Hightower, 30, from Douglasville, Georgia, after watching clips of Mr Biden’s debate performance, adding that after voting for him in 2020, he was leaning towards Trump in 2024.
A bipartisan poll in Wisconsin also taken after the debate had Trump up 5 percentage points against Mr Biden, 50 per cent to 45 per cent.
Other post-debate public polling is just arriving, and it is possible that the national presidential race numbers will not shift dramatically, given the polarised nature of the closely divided country: Most Americans are already in their partisan corners.
But even before the debate, Mr Biden was trailing in critical battleground states amid signs of erosion within important parts of his coalition.
“We had already seen in our polling that there were doubts about Biden, even among Democrats,” Mr Patrick Murray, the director of the polling institute at Monmouth University, said. “It’s almost hubris to think that voters wouldn’t be thinking about this with an 80-year-old man.”
Mr Biden’s allies have said there are opportunities to refocus attention on the choice in the election. He is running against a convicted criminal who tried to overthrow an election, paved the way for eliminating the constitutionally protected right to abortion, has plans for a radical reshaping of American government and is deeply unpopular himself.
They hope that next week’s Republican National Convention will remind voters of the alternative, and Mr Biden has a number of public appearances scheduled in between, including a closely watched news conference set for the evening of July 11.
“Nearly a million Americans donated to our campaign for the first time after the debate, a clear sign that there is strong enthusiasm behind the president as the candidate who can beat Donald Trump,” said Ms Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for the Biden campaign.
The decision about whether to stay in the race is effectively Mr Biden’s alone: If he stepped aside, he would almost certainly have to release his own delegates, freeing them up to support another nominee. He has insisted that he is not leaving the race.
Still, Mr Biden retains vital endorsements, including the backing of leaders from the labour movement and from the Congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses. Vice-President Kamala Harris – whom some see as a natural successor if Mr Biden stepped aside
Black women have long been the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting bloc, and there are signs that so far many of those voters remain firmly in Mr Biden’s corner.
“There’s some questionable things because of Biden and his age and of course because of the most recent debate, but he’s done a lot of great things for us as people of colour,” said Ms Nicole James, 57, a Democrat from South Fulton, Georgia, who is black.
The Biden campaign is quietly testing the strength of Harris against Trump in a head-to-head survey of voters, The New York Times reported on July 11, though it was not clear why the survey was being conducted or what the campaign planned to do with the results.
In Georgia, Mr Hightower described feeling conflicted: He still considers himself a Democrat but has deep concerns about Mr Biden. He would reconsider supporting Trump, he said, if Mr Biden were to step aside for a younger, more dynamic candidate.
“They still have the right ideas in mind,” he said of Democrats. “It’s just more so their mouthpiece.” NYTIMES
