For a long time, Joe Biden has seen himself as the only Democrat capable of defeating Donald Trump. He did so in the 2020 presidential election and repeated his strong showing in the 2022 midterms. Biden intended to be a transitional president, with the historic mission of overcoming Trump’s mandate and passing the baton to a new generation. His predecessor, however, resisted his defeat and took control of the Republican Party. Trump is once again the candidate to beat, but polls after last week’s Atlanta debate indicate that the president will not be able to beat him. This increases the pressure on Biden to withdraw. At the same time, Kamala Harris stands out as the favorite to replace him.
The media, political and financial offensive against the president’s candidacy does not stop. This Wednesday was the prestigious Boston Globe Biden, who called for him to step aside in an editorial, raised his voice publicly to ask him to step down. There were also donors who called for a change of candidate. Biden has categorically denied that he is considering giving up re-election. However, if the president becomes convinced that he has no chance of being elected, the chances of him throwing in the towel multiply.
On Wednesday afternoon, Democratic governors from across the country rallied behind the president at a meeting at the White House that was also attended by Vice President Kamala Harris, the first alternative in the line of succession. “The president is our candidate. The president is the leader of our party,” said Maryland Governor Wes Moore at the end of the meeting. Although the governors gave their support to the president, they all concluded that the most important thing is to defeat Donald Trump in the November 5 elections, a significant allusion.
Polls are beginning to point to a decisive gap between the two candidates. This Wednesday, The New York Times The U.S. has released a poll conducted by Siena University that claims that the gap in voting intention in favor of Trump has doubled from 3 to 6 points among likely voters, so that now, between the two candidates, 49% would choose Trump and 43%, Biden. The gap is even greater (49% to 41%) among registered voters. Never before has Trump had such a large lead in a poll of 100 voters. The New York Timesone of the newspapers that has openly called for its withdrawal.
Growing difference
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The difference also breaks all records in a survey by Wall Street Journal The conservative financial daily gives Trump a six-point lead over Biden in the country as a whole, putting the two candidates in a race between the two: 48% to 42%. The gap remains the same (but at 42% to 36%) when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the other independent candidates are also considered. 80% believe Biden is too old to run again and almost half of voters (47%) would replace both candidates on the ballot if they could. A CNN poll also puts the difference at six points.
These polls join others published in recent days in which the effect of the debate seemed somewhat less. Perhaps it is not just the face-to-face, but the subsequent discussion about Biden’s suitability that is eroding his support. The averages of the poll aggregators have begun to open the gap. The average of FiveThirtyEight, which gave Biden a slight advantage before the debate, already placed Trump 2.3 points ahead on Wednesday, the widest distance since both secured the nomination on Super Tuesday, at the beginning of March.
Another aggregator, RealClearPolitics, gives Trump a 2.9-point lead, the largest since January. Metaculus, a predictions community for thousands of users, estimates that the Republican candidate has a 64% chance of returning to the White House, compared to just 24% for Joe Biden. Investors on the experimental market PredictIt have at times given Kamala Harris a higher chance of being elected than Biden himself.
In 2020, four months before the election, Biden had a nine-point lead in the polls. In the end, he won the election with 51.25% of the popular vote, compared to Trump’s 46.8%. Despite the difference of seven million votes, the Democrat’s victory was decided by a few tens of thousands of ballots in a handful of decisive states. Since the electoral system favors rural and depopulated states, which are predominantly Republican, the Democratic candidate needs to win by several points in the popular vote to have a majority in the electoral college, which is the one that elects the president. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 (48%-46%), but was not elected president.
So far, the president has shown himself willing to try to show that the lapses, hesitations and unfinished sentences of the first debate were an accident, due to fatigue, a cold, a sore throat and jet lag(This is the latest excuse or, in Biden’s words, explanation, although he had been preparing for the debate at Camp David, Maryland, for a week.) He will have the opportunity to test himself in a television interview, several radio interviews and a press conference next week. “I’m running. I’m the leader of the Democratic Party. Nobody is kicking me out,” he said on Wednesday in a call with his campaign staff in which Harris also participated. The New York Times,who had posted that Biden had told an ally he was considering leaving, later withdrew that idea after a categorical denial from the White House and left it at that he has admitted that crucial days are coming for his candidacy.
In a radio interview with radio host Earl Ingram, from which some excerpts have been released, Biden said: “I had a bad night. And the fact is, you know, it was… I screwed up. I made a mistake.” At the same time, he asked not to focus so much on the debate: “It’s 90 minutes on stage. Look what I’ve done in three and a half years,” he added.
Things are moving so fast that ABC, which had planned to air its interview with Biden on Sunday, has decided to reschedule it for Friday night in prime time. The pressure is extreme. On the one hand, Biden is in a hurry to change the narrative. On the other, the interview could get old if it is held up for longer than necessary.
New pressures
On Wednesday, a second congressman called on Biden to forgo re-election. That’s Raul Grijalva of Arizona, joining Lloyd Doggett of Texas. They are just two of more than 250 Democratic representatives and senators in Congress, but many more have expressed doubts, even without openly calling on the president to throw in the towel. “The unfortunate reality is that the status quo “will likely bring us President Trump,” Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton said in a statement. “When your current strategy isn’t working, it’s rarely the right decision to double down. President Biden is not going to get any younger.” Several others have made similar comments.
Yuri Gripas / POOL (EFE)
The president took part in a medal ceremony on Wednesday ahead of the Fourth of July Independence Day, the American national holiday. He read his remarks on screen, but his movements and gestures are still those of an older person. At 81, his physical deterioration is evident and a hypothetical second term would mean that he would remain in office until he is 86. Even so, the president seems convinced for now that he can reverse voters’ perception by intensifying his agenda.
Not everyone is confident. Pressure is also coming from the money world. Several donors have begun to express their doubts. Among them is Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, who called on the president to drop out of the race: “Biden needs to step aside to allow a strong Democratic leader to defeat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous,” he said in a statement first reported by the Daily Beast. The New York Times,the most active newspaper in the offensive against the president.
If Biden steps aside — and that’s a giant “if” — it remains to be seen who replaces him. Jim Clyburn, a longtime Biden friend and confidant, said he would support a “mini-primary” in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention that begins Aug. 19 in Chicago. The South Carolina Democrat floated an alternative choice by delegates during a virtual roll call planned by Democrats before the convention itself. On CNN, Clyburn said Vice President Kamala Harris, governors and others could join the race: “It would be fair to everyone.”
Harris’s moment
The vice president appears to be the favorite for a hypothetical succession, although she also has detractors within the party. The Harris solution appears to be the most continuist and also the one that makes it easier to access all the money raised by the Biden-Harris campaign. The delegates that Biden has won in the primaries are also his to a certain extent.
Clyburn has expressed his preference for her on CNN and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has also conveyed that he would support her candidacy if Biden withdraws, according to The Washington Post. Tim Ryan, a prominent former Democratic congressman, has openly supported her in an article in NewsweekObviously, the decisive opinion would be that of Biden, who has kept her at his side in recent days in campaign calls or in meetings with governors.
Choosing someone in place of Harris, the first woman to hold the vice presidency and a daughter of an Indian and Jamaican father who is capable of mobilizing the black vote, could be a burden for Democrats. She has not been very popular during her term, in part because she has been given difficult or impossible tasks, such as curbing the causes of immigration. However, she is beginning to perform better than Biden in some polls, has stood out as a defender of abortion rights and does not face the rejection of the young and Arab vote that accompanies the president. Harris, 59, has a greater national projection than other possible candidates. However, she also provokes rejection in some segments of the electorate with which Biden connected better, in particular the white working-class voter.
That Harris is the front-runner seems to be confirmed by the fact that she has become the target of attacks by the Trump campaign, which has launched an ad with the slogan: “This November, vote Republican. Stop Kamala.”
The former president’s team also issued a damning statement on Wednesday: “All Democrats calling for the resignation of corrupt Joe Biden once supported Biden and his failed policies that lead to extreme inflation, an open border, and chaos at home and abroad,” it said.
“Make no mistake: Democrats, the mainstream media, and the swamp colluded to hide the truth from the American public: Joe Biden is weak, a failure, dishonest, and unfit for the White House,” the text, attributed to campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, continues. “Each of them has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive state and supported his disastrous policies for the past four years, especially the crowing co-pilot Kamala Harris.”
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