Calls are growing louder for U.S. President Joe Biden to drop his re-election bid after last week’s shaky debate performance raised concerns among Democrats about his fitness and ability to beat former president Donald Trump.
But political analysts say as long as Biden refuses those calls, replacing him with a different candidate ahead of the November election will be difficult and unlikely.
On Tuesday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas became the first sitting Democratic lawmaker to publicly urge Biden to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee, saying “too much is at stake” for Biden to stay in the race and lose to Trump.
“He has the opportunity to encourage a new generation of leaders from whom a nominee can be chosen to unite our country through an open, democratic process,” Doggett said in a written statement.
The Biden campaign and the White House have acknowledged Biden’s poor performance at Thursday’s debate, where his voice sounded soft and raspy and he struggled to make coherent arguments. However, they have also stressed he had a cold he was still recovering from this week and simply had “a bad night.”
“We really want to turn the page on this,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday of the intensifying calls for Biden to bow out of the race. She added that the 81-year-old president had no intention of stepping aside, and denied he is suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
The White House also denied a new report from the New York Times on Wednesday that claimed Biden told a “key ally” he is weighing whether to continue in the race.
“That claim is absolutely false,” senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote on X.
Biden addressed the concerns directly at a campaign fundraiser Tuesday night, where he pointed to the intense international travel schedule he completed shortly before the debate, including trips to the G7 Leaders Summit in Italy and D-Day commemorative events in France.
“I decided to travel around the world a couple times … I didn’t listen to my staff, and I came back and I fell asleep on the stage,” Biden told the crowd. “It’s not an excuse but an explanation.”
But doubts about whether the debate was a momentary lapse for Biden are spilling more into public view.
Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC on Tuesday that she believes “it is a legitimate question” whether Biden’s halting performance is just “an episode or is this a condition.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found one-third of Democrat voters think Biden should end his re-election bid, but also suggests his support in a matchup against Trump had not dropped since the debate.
Amid pressure for Biden to increase his public appearances to reassure Americans he remains up to the job, Jean-Pierre said the president has planned trips to Wisconsin on Friday and Philadelphia on Monday, will film an interview with ABC News on Friday, and hold a solo press conference at the NATO Leaders Summit in Washington next week.
Analysts say Biden now faces a zero per cent margin for error going forward with those and other future public appearances.
“There have been these concerns about President Biden for quite some time, and the debate kind of supercharged those concerns,” said Eric Schickler, a political science professor and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California Berkeley.
“I think it’s natural that a lot of Democrats are thinking about, is he the best person to lead the party … given the stakes of this election?”
What could happen?
Analysts say if polls show Biden’s support slipping among voters, he could potentially step aside, allowing a new candidate to step forward and take his place. If he steps down before the Democratic convention in August, that would make it easier for delegates to coalesce around a new nominee.
The most likely successor would be Vice-President Kamala Harris, who would benefit from inheriting the funds raised by the Biden-Harris campaign.
Other names being mentioned include popular Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Transportation Secretary and recent presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and even former first lady Michelle Obama.
None of those people have expressed any desire to challenge Biden for the nomination and have repeatedly said they have no intention of running. Newsom forcefully rejected the skepticism in an MSNBC interview immediately after the debate, saying he was committed to supporting Biden’s re-election.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found Harris, for example, trailed Trump 42 to 43 per cent in a hypothetical matchup, a difference well within the poll’s 3.5 percentage point margin of error that made Harris’ showing statistically just as strong as Biden’s in the survey.
Newsom performed marginally worse, trailing Trump 39 to 42 per cent, while Michelle Obama was the best performing hypothetical alternative opponent with 50 per cent to Trump’s 39 per cent.
The last time a candidate dropped out before the convention was Democratic president Lyndon Johnson in 1968, amid intense criticism over U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The eventual nominee, then-vice president Hubert Humphrey, lost the election to Republican Richard Nixon.
If Biden were to drop out after he’s officially nominated at the convention, the Democrats would face additional headwinds, including ballot deadlines in several states where a replacement nominee may not qualify in time to have their name on the ballot next to Trump.
An even uglier scenario would be a contested convention, where delegates already pledged to Biden switch their allegiance to a different candidate.
Biden won 99 per cent of delegates in the Democratic primaries and caucuses earlier this year, and party rules say those delegates are technically obliged to support him “in all good conscience” and reflect the desires of voters.
Candidates are also allowed to review and make changes to their slate of delegates in each state, ensuring the slates are filled with loyal supporters.
However, if concern over Biden continues to grow and enough momentum builds behind another candidate, a close vote on the floor is possible.
“You could have a very exciting scenario where it goes through one round, then another, and the candidates try to get to the magic number of delegates to secure the nomination,” said Stuart Streichler, a constitutional law professor at the University of Washington.
“The whole world would be watching.”
Streichler, who served as a lawyer on Al Gore’s first presidential campaign in 1988, said he and his team created contingency plans for a possible contested convention before Gore dropped out. He said all other campaigns would do the same.
“It could come down to which Democratic candidate has the best legal team,” he said.
Most Democrat officials, while acknowledging the concerns surrounding Biden’s debate performance, are insisting voters focus on Biden’s record as president. That record is in stark contrast to Trump’s presidency and what a second Trump term could bring, they say, as well as the presumptive Republican nominee’s own cognitive issues.
“What we need on the part of the American people is a maturity right now — and that is to understand that what is important are the issues,” independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont told the Associated Press. “And the difference between Trump and Biden: day and night.”
But analysts say the issue of Biden’s fitness isn’t a new one. They point to special counsel Robert Hur’s report that declined to bring charges against Biden for his handling of classified documents due to his age, and multiple media reports that suggest behind closed doors, Biden is showing signs of slipping.
Those can’t be easily waved away by pointing at Trump, Schickler says.
“It doesn’t negate that Biden’s condition is a legitimate question,” he said.
“Trump may be a threat to American democracy, but that then raises the question, are Democrats running the best possible alternative to that?”
— with files from the Associated Press and Reuters