US President Joe Biden was at church in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he has a vacation home, on Saturday afternoon. At 6.10pm, shots fired at his predecessor Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, some 500 kilometres away, changed the news cycle. As he left the church, Biden was asked if he had been informed of the attempted assassination of Trump. “No,” he said briefly. Soon, that would be his priority and not calls to congressmen to reaffirm his candidacy. As an indirect consequence, the attack has relieved the pressure on Biden’s re-election bid, at least temporarily.
The assassination attempt against Trump is one of those news stories that sweeps everything away. From the beginning, when it was still unclear what had happened, all the media attention was focused on those sounds that sounded like a gunshot attack, as was later confirmed, and on how the secret service evacuated the former president with some blood on his face. Then, when the assassination attempt was confirmed, the death of a rally attendee and the shooter, the news continued to grow without stopping. And, by the way, no one continued talking about whether or not Biden is the right person to be the Democratic candidate in the November 5 elections.
The president had three appearances in 24 hours with different formats, the first on Saturday at his beach house, and the other two on Sunday at the White House. The last was a prime-time speech, the format chosen by presidents for moments of special gravity. The Gulf War, the fall of Saddam Hussein, the attacks of September 11, Hurricane Katrina, the coronavirus pandemic and the financial crisis are among them. From the Oval Office, he reiterated the calls for unity of previous appearances and said that Americans must resolve their differences “at the ballot box, not with bullets” (taking advantage of the phonetic similarity in English between the ballots, ballots, and the bullets, bullets).
Biden also called for “lowering the temperature” of American politics, referring to the partisan confrontation, but in some ways, this need to calm things down also works in his favor. The atmosphere is not conducive to the challenge and confrontation that he has been experiencing since his disastrous June 27 debate in Atlanta against Trump, in which his lapses, hesitations, unfinished sentences, coughing and hoarseness called into question his ability to be the Democratic candidate.
In recent days, no congressman has joined the list of those asking the president to give up running for re-election. Biden postponed a trip to Austin (Texas) that he had planned for this Monday, one of those in which US presidents somehow mix the official agenda with the electoral campaign. He is back in action with two events in Las Vegas (in Nevada, one of the decisive states in the elections) this Monday and Tuesday, one aimed at capturing the black vote and another for the Latino vote.
The president is in a double race against time. The long-distance race is the one that marks him as the first octogenarian president in history, who would be 86 years old if he completes a hypothetical second term. The short-distance race is the one that separates him from the presidential elections on November 5 or, even shorter, from the Democratic National Convention that will proclaim the party’s candidate and that is held from August 19 to 22 in Chicago (Illinois). In this short race, time is on his side. The closer the convention gets, the more difficult it will be to force a non-traumatic alternative to the president’s reelection.
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Biden’s every action, meanwhile, will continue to be carefully scrutinized for signs of cognitive decline or frailty. The president is aware that if episodes like the one in the Atlanta debate were to be repeated, his situation would be unsustainable. However, so far, he has come out relatively well from his recent appearances. He survived the NATO summit, including the nearly hour-long press conference in which he answered 19 questions and despite the name-dropping (Putin-Zelensky and Trump-Harris). He then gave an improvised speech to voters in a roadside bar and a rally in Detroit before hundreds of supporters. On Monday he was put to the test again with an interview with Lester Holt, NBC’s star presenter.
The agenda, however, has changed. And just as Biden has responded to Trump’s assassination attempt with calls for unity across the country, his call to overcome divisions within the party itself is gaining strength.
In prediction markets, the probability of Biden dropping out of the race is increasingly low. On Polymarket, quotes were as high as 75% that he would drop out on July 3, the day Biden was slated to drop out. The New York Times He said he was considering doing so. With the White House’s denial and the president’s interventions at various events, those probabilities were lowered. Before the attack on Trump, they were around 50%, like a toss-up decision. After the shooting, they dropped to 33%, but the situation is changing.
While the odds of Biden’s candidacy remaining in the race and going to the polls on November 5 have strengthened, the odds of him winning the election on that day have fallen. The same market gives Trump a 71% chance of being elected, compared to just 17% for Biden. There are still 113 days until the election. Everything can change.
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