Party leaders are also aware that there are worries that keeping Biden at the top of the ticket will hurt their chances of winning congressional seats in November.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) acknowledged on MSNBC’s “This Weekend” that House Democrats are involved in conversations over the future of Biden’s candidacy. He noted that, because the House will be in recess next week for the Fourth of July, those conversations will continue over the phone and virtually.
He added that “one thing should be clear: There is a big difference between our view of the world, the country and the future, and the extreme MAGA Republican view.”
Biden’s performance Thursday “certainly was a setback,” Jeffries said. “But of course, I believe a setback is nothing more than a setup for a comeback.”
Still, a new poll shows some sign of a drop-off in voter confidence on Biden. About 55 percent of Democratic voters surveyed said they believe Biden should continue running, while 45 percent say he should step aside, according to a new CBS News-YouGov poll released Sunday. In February, the same poll found that 64 percent of Democratic voters said he should continue running while 36 percent said he should not.
The latest poll shows that a majority of all registered voters — 72 percent — do not believe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. Just 27 percent believe he does have sufficient health to serve, down from 35 percent a month ago. The poll found that 49 percent of voters believe that Trump does not have the mental and cognitive health to serve as president.
The Biden campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the poll.
The Biden campaign has spent the past three days tamping down concerns about the implications of Biden’s debate performance.
Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, argued in a memo released Saturday that the debate “did nothing to change the American people’s perception, our supporters are more fired up than ever, and Donald Trump only reminded voters of why they fired him four years ago and failed to expand his appeal beyond his MAGA base.”
In an email to supporters titled “7 Things to Tell Your Friends After the Debate,” the Biden campaign sent a list of talking points Democrats can use when talking to their “panicked aunt,” “MAGA uncle” or — in an apparent dig to the hosts of the liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” who harshly criticized Biden’s debate performance — “some-self important Podcasters” about the debate.
On the list of suggestions, the Biden campaign argues that “actual voters perceived this debate very differently than those who pay attention to politics a lot” and that “the long-term impact of debates is overstated anyway.”
When asked by NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether Biden should drop, Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) responded with a resounding “absolutely not.”
“If they weren’t engaged in a little bit of hand wringing, they wouldn’t be Democrats,” Warnock said, but he dismissed calls from within the party to have Biden replaced at the top of the ticket.
MSNBC host Jen Psaki, a former Biden White House press secretary, dismissed an idea posed by a political commentator that Democrats should have an open nominating convention and tap in a member of their deep bench to run for president instead of Biden.
Psaki said an idea like that would work in a fictional show like “The West Wing,” where “everybody would just convene and the president would endorse someone and everybody would just line up behind them and the public would be happy.”
“That is not how it would work” in real life, Psaki said, arguing that an open convention would not only ignore the wishes of primary voters but would also put several of the Democrats’ leaders at odds with each other and have the final decision land on a “group of inside Democrats, not the American public.”
“A lot of people [would be] angry,” she said. “And then you have a person who is untested, even if they’re great and they have enormous potential … with low name ID, and a party that’s divided and upset. That’s the potential outcome of an open convention.”
Similarly, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former House speaker and a former chairwoman of the California Democratic Party, told CNN that trying to nominate a new candidate at this stage “could be chaotic.” Pelosi said it was clear now that Biden will be the nominee following months of primary elections.
“You would have to undo the nomination to do something else,” Pelosi said. “That would not be a reason to do it or not do it. The question is: Joe Biden’s decision to go forward is a decision that we will all embrace because of the record he has.”
And Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) — who was widely panned after a weak debate performance during his own election race in 2022 — dismissed concerns from other Democrats by suggesting that those “willing to walk away from Joe Biden” are “helping Trump.”
“The whole ‘Abandon Biden’ thing, that’s the dumbest s--- I’ve ever heard,” Fetterman told “Fox News Sunday.”
Republicans, meanwhile, continued taking a victory lap over what they saw as a successful performance by Trump on Thursday.
“Obviously, Joe Biden had a disastrous performance, which is why they’re talking about replacing him. But you also have to look at what Donald Trump was able to do,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who’s believed to be on Trump’s list of finalists for the vice-presidential spot, told “Fox News Sunday.”
“He was funny, he was engaging. He was pushing back a little bit, but he was doing it with a good-natured demeanor,” Vance continued. “That’s what you need to be able to serve as president of the United States.”
Biden’s allies also pointed out that Trump had gone virtually unchallenged on the lies and falsehoods he shared on stage. Ahead of the debate, the Biden campaign had agreed with CNN that the moderators would not do live fact-checking.
“The guy told 30 some odd lies and nobody checked him on it and said that was up to Joe Biden to do,” Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who is largely credited with reviving Biden’s 2020 campaign, told CNN on Sunday. “If I ask you a question and you lie to me with the answer, I ought to follow up and give you what the facts are and see what your reaction to that would be. So that, to me, was not the way to plan the debate.”
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