Behind the scenes as Joe Biden lost control of the Democratic Party
The president of the United States had spoken – with 24 million Americans watching on TV. Every Democratic leader knew Joe Biden would continue his campaign. Statements like that used to mean something.
But two days after that July 11 NATO news conference, the president found himself hunched in front of a stone fireplace in his Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home, losing his temper. A war hero had just questioned the toll that age took on his ability to lead.
“Tell me who enlarged NATO. Tell me who did the Pacific basin,” Biden snapped over Zoom at Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a decorated, retired Army Ranger, according to a recording of the virtual meeting with House Democrats. “Tell me who did something that you never done with your Bronze Star – and your – like my son – and, you know – proud of your leadership. But guess what? Well, what’s happening? We got Korea and Japan working together.”
Crow was not the problem, however. He was the tip of the spear.
Significant parts of the president’s campaign and White House team were saying privately that, after a disastrous debate performance on June 27, they no longer believed. Big donors were withholding money, demanding change. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sat down with Biden after the news conference to warn the president that his candidacy imperiled Democratic hopes of taking back the House. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) shared the same warning days later. Delegates and party members sketched out a Plan B.
Just a month earlier, all of those people had been united behind Biden, focused on the threat they saw in former president Donald Trump – the felon, Capitol riot agitator, election denier, self-proclaimed “day one” dictator and provocateur. The mantra of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) – “Diversity is our strength. Unity is our power” – still governed Democrats in June.
But now even Pelosi was saying Biden needed more time to decide what he said he had already decided. Former president Barack Obama, Biden’s old running mate and governing partner, told allies that the path to victory had diminished. House Democrats, who had planned to cast Republicans as “chaos agents” in the fall, edged toward revolution. Seven more called for Biden to step aside on the day of his NATO news conference.
The sudden collapse of Biden’s control over the party he brought to power, just four months before a presidential election, is without obvious historical precedent. Behind the scenes, people working inside the bowels of Democratic politics and government described the first three weeks of July: too extraordinary to be real, too unexpected to be believed.
This story of Biden’s shrinking political power is based on interviews with more than three dozen people who played behind-the-scenes roles, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe painful private events and respond frankly to even more astounding public ones.
The terrible Biden debate was followed by a far more terrible attempted assassination of Trump on live television July 13, from which the former president rose triumphant – fist in the air, blood streaked across his face. Biden’s polling, which held steady at first, began to erode.
Then the 81-year-old president, traveling to campaign events to try to prove his vigor, contracted COVID-19 again. As Trump welcomed his new running mate this week in Milwaukee, video footage showed a delicate Biden struggling to get up the short stairs to Air Force One on his way to further isolation. Aides passed along the footage in dismay, a person familiar with the messages said. More than half a dozen Democratic House members called on Biden to step aside Friday after the conclusion of the Republican nominating convention, meaning that more than 30 lawmakers have now called on him to leave the race.
Biden and his campaign team still maintain that nothing has changed. Even Jeffries continues to state publicly, as he did Friday, that Biden has “the ability, the capacity, and the track record to make a case to the American people that will result in us being successful in November.”
“I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t know how many more times we can answer that,” principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said Thursday morning.
But Fulks spoke those words on behalf of a president no longer backed by an entire party. Two-thirds of the country, including 56% of Democrats, said in a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll in early July that Biden should drop out. Biden is testing how far a president can lead when his followers go astray.
“This is a brand-new political problem,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the Democratic group Third Way. “It is the wickedest of political problems because one, no one knows if there is a solution. And two, there’s no one to coalesce around. And three, everyone has their own theory of the case, so it’s just incredibly, incredibly complicated.”
Full-court press
The first week after the debate had not gone well. No one, not even Biden, contested that. He needed to get out more, to prove his mettle, to replace the images of the doddering debate night in everyone’s mind. History will record that as things got worse, Biden fought harder.
A long interview with Complex magazine, another with BET, a third with Lester Holt of NBC News. Over a 48-hour period, he had calls with the Congressional Asian American Pacific Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition, the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, whose political arm endorsed Biden on Friday. Lawmakers confronted him repeatedly to ask him to reconsider.
The White House circulated a list of about 20 other elected leaders or union officials the president had spoken with on the plane or while traveling. About 75 members of Congress have reiterated their support for him. He rallied another raucous crowd in Detroit. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) closed ranks.
“Can you hear the helicopter in the background?” Biden shouted through the phone to the Rev. Al Sharpton as he boarded a plane for Nevada, according to Sharpton. “We’ve got to keep going, Al.”
The president wanted Sharpton’s help to let his base know he would not give up. The debate over Biden’s future had become its own wound, Sharpton argued. “It undercuts potential enthusiasm. It confuses people who want him to fight,” he said. “If he steps down, then what? If you have an open convention, couldn’t that be a disaster?”
One lawmaker who recently flew on Air Force One described only lately realizing the change in the president, after meeting with him several times over the last four years. Biden was speaking in hushed tones and could barely be heard across the table. Another lawmaker who spoke with Biden in the last few weeks described him as trailing off at times and calling the lawmaker by the wrong name, even as he seemed sharp at others.
And a third lawmaker who recently interacted with Biden described him as mentally sharp, if frail, and serious about staying in.
“He believes he can still win,” this person said. “I don’t think he is even spinning. He really thinks that everyone has always counted him out, and he has a chip on his shoulder, and he thinks he can win.”
Trump advisers and operatives in key states began discussing how they could help keep Biden in the race, believing he is a weaker candidate than other options for Democrats. “If Democrats want to win Georgia, they’d be better off with a potted plant at the top of their ticket,” said Cody Hall, a top adviser to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), describing the current environment there.
At the White House, officials stoked the fires they could control. The policy shop began to fast-track plans that had long been in the works, including a blueprint to create term limits for the Supreme Court and impose new ethics rules on the justices – catnip for the liberal base. Propeller heads finalized a plan for legislation to take away tax rebates from corporate landlords who increased rent by more than 5% a year, a potentially massive new federal intervention to reverse a major driver of inflation.
Advance teams set up the big moment Tuesday at the NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas, where Biden would show he could paint the contrast with Republicans and debut his 5% rent cap.
But reading from a teleprompter, he lost his way.
“What I am about to announce,” he told the crowd. “They can’t raise it more than -” he trailed off. A pause. “Fifty-five dollars,” he finally said, for reasons that are not clear. The crowd cheered anyway.
Inside the West Wing, informal camps formed and pressure mounted. At times, it seemed the code of loyalty that had long followed Biden’s operations was coming undone. Some engaged in black humor. Some advisers shifted their focus from planning a second term to planning ways to lock in the policy wins they had achieved before Trump would take over, according to a Biden administration official briefed on the work. Other officials said more effort was still being put into planning a future agenda. The preparations for a Trump takeover, they added, had begun months earlier, as a normal course of business.
Some sought to rally the troops. “Keep the faith,” senior deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates posted on social media Thursday.
Someone inside the White House anonymously texted Politico blaming “green badge staffers,” who do not have direct access to the West Wing like their “blue badge” peers, for the critical blind comments to the press. “This is out of line,” shot back Saloni Sharma, a top adviser to White House chief of staff Jeff Zients. “We are all a team and in this together.”
Among those working on the Biden campaign effort, things were not much better: work hard, panic in private, take nothing personally.
“The Republican Convention should light a fire under every American who wants to beat Trump and the Project 2025, and it certainly does for our campaign,” campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said Friday. “It reaffirms just why President Biden is in this fight.”
One campaign aide said that junior and even some senior staff were in the dark about how Biden wanted to forge ahead. Text messages flew between Capitol Hill, administration officials and others, trying to figure out what was going on. Hungry journalists began reporting the impressions of their sources, who offered guesses about what might happen on the assumption that something different had to happen.
“It has been intriguing to learn how many ‘Biden insiders’ seem to exist all of a sudden, who just happen to sound identical to the people who’ve been giving blind quotes doubting us for five straight years, during win after win after win,” Bates responded.
Access to Biden, in calmer times, had been a stove-piped affair. Now people worried to each other that the future of the world order could be at stake. White House senior staff let it be known that their doors were open to underlings if anyone needed to talk through the difficulties.
White House staffers did not contest that Biden was spending more time with two of his longest-serving, most loyal advisers: Mike Donilon, senior campaign adviser, and Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president. They argued that their expertise was more in demand. Both had argued that polling had become less meaningful.
Some advisers traded accusations, without evidence, that top aides had misplaced loyalties, selfish interests, personal ambitions. Those aspersions even made it onto MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the president’s favorite cable talkfest, days later.
“The anger I hear are at the people that are keeping him in a bubble or who may have their own interests, some financial, in keeping him in the race,” co-host Joe Scarborough said, laying out for the world the ugliness growing in Biden’s world. “That is anger from inside his own political camp, and it is widespread. It is widespread. Joe Biden deserves better.”
It was a remarkable breakdown.
Uncertain ultimatum
As his NATO news conference concluded, Biden laid down a gauntlet. He would get out, he said, only if his advisers came to him and said, “There’s no way you can win.”
“I thought he bought us some time with the NATO news conference,” one campaign adviser said. “There was a sigh of relief that night. If that had gone poorly, I think we all thought it was over within 24 hours.”
Like others, this person said there had been lots of mistakes: Jill Biden’s Vogue photo shoot, a family meeting at Camp David, defensive Zoom calls, a sometimes polarizing communications strategy. There were increasingly dismal polls – and a sense the campaign might not last.
“The polling isn’t good, and it feels like things are just getting worse every day,” the campaign adviser said.
Political polling and analytics deal in probabilities, not absolutes like “No way.” They create snapshots in time, out of focus. Biden won in 2020 by 4.5 percentage points nationally, but he now trailed Trump by about 2 points, according to a Washington Post average of polls. Public surveys since the debate showed him down slightly in the must-win Northern swing states and by larger margins in Western and Southern states he hoped to win.
Democratic House polls showed him significantly behind his 2020 margins in key districts. Senate polls showed him trailing statewide Democrats by double digits in battleground states.
The campaign has been comforted by internal data showing that most of the people Biden has lost since the debate are unlikely to vote for Trump, suggesting they may come back. Most of them had not even watched the debate. But polling matters little when your party infrastructure is not behind you.
Democratic strategists outside the campaign argued that if Biden were an incumbent senator or congressman running at around 40% in a five-way ballot test, as Biden has been doing in some surveys, he would get only symbolic financial support from the Democratic Senate or House campaign committees and their affiliated super PACs.
Even before the debate, approval of Trump’s remembered presidency was running well ahead of Biden’s current one. Democrats assumed that Trump would get a bump out of his convention and probably a further boost in favorability once the trauma of the failed assassination was digested by voters.
The fate of the Democratic Party now hinged on the gut sense of a man who has spent the last 52 years working in national politics. “This is just purely emotion. It is not a vigorous data-driven exercise,” said one Democratic strategist, describing the decision Biden had already made and would have to make again.
“The truth of the matter is the decision is all in the hands of President Biden; there is not a practical way to prevent him from being the nominee if he wants to be the nominee,” said Jeff Weaver, the former political strategist for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns. “If he were to demur, then the question becomes: What’s the process after that? Is it a coronation of Kamala Harris, which a lot of people are making the case for, or do we have some sort of truncated process?”
Donors dreamed of a sort of reality TV competition at the convention in August – a bake-off for the history books. Many had withheld tens of millions of dollars from Biden. Big-money people tried an escrow account for a new candidate, new polling about replacements for the nomination, money bombs for elected leaders who called on Biden to go. There was even a slogan: “No more dough until no more Joe.”
The campaign budget had been built on the assumption that tens of thousands of people who are not yet engaged would give millions of dollars.
There is no survey data to say whether they will show up in September with $10 or $25 checks. There is no poll to predict whether the party comes back together. Trump remains unpopular, opposed by large shares of voters. But at the moment he is more popular than Biden.
James Carville, the Bill Clinton strategist who had long called for Biden to get out, worked the phone from a cruise ship off the coast of Alaska, trying to divine what happens next and get his party to a better place. He echoed others when he said he was not sure how Biden finds a way out of the spiral in which he is caught – a constant questioning about the path to victory that only makes the path to victory harder.
“What they are asking is, ‘How are you going to win this?’ ” he said of the people he had spoken to. “No one is over it, and we are moving ahead anyway.”
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Paul Kane and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.