OAN’s Brooke Mallory
Wednesday, July 3, 2024 5:06 PM
Senior aides to President Joe Biden said Wednesday they accepted a stern warning they received from leading Democrats this week: If Biden does not quickly certify he is fit to serve, he will face enormous pressure to remove him from office.
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According to two people familiar with the conversations, The Washington Post Biden on Wednesday began quietly reaching out to allies in recent days, acknowledging that he is going through a difficult time amid growing concerns from Congress, prominent donors and party leaders, including his own advisers, and that he needs to show voters he is worthy of the office.
His relatively muted response to quell the anxiety generated by his dismal performance in the debates over the past six days has upset his critics. He began calling influential congressional leaders on Tuesday afternoon, ABC Newsand “announced a series of weekend campaign trips that will draw intense scrutiny.” The Washington Post report.
Senior Democratic strategists, who requested anonymity, The Washington Post Writing to reveal internal conversations, he warned that even a perfect performance over the next week may not be enough to save him.
Biden, 81, has made just three public appearances since Friday’s rally in North Carolina, during which he spoke via teleprompter for a total of 22 minutes about the bad weather, the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave immunity and Stonewall National Monument in New York.
As anxiety began to spread within the party, a senior campaign adviser described the situation as a “deafening silence from the top,” echoing concerns from other advisers that the president was unwilling to demonstrate in public that he was fit to govern. Longtime allies of Biden have also expressed continuing frustration with the political response and a growing belief that something needs to happen quickly to change public opinion.
“I think Biden has a responsibility to speak to all of us very openly, not publicly, not to reporters, but privately about what happened. What’s the bigger question? Can we get past this?,” Rep. Sean Kasten, D-Ill., said. “We need more than just the poll report emails now from the White House legislative directors to allay those concerns.”
But ahead of a planned meeting with Democratic governors, Biden spent much of Wednesday trying to ease public concerns by speaking with campaign staff and giving interviews to several radio stations.
“The last few days have been difficult. I know you’ve been getting a lot of calls, I know you have a lot of questions,” Biden told campaign staff on a conference call, according to an aide who briefed The Washington Post. “Let me say this as clearly as I can, as simply as I can, as frankly as I can: I am running. I am the Democratic nominee. Nobody is going to get rid of me. I’m not leaving the party. I’m going to fight this race to the end. And we’re going to win, because if the Democratic Party is united, we’re going to win.”
Shortly after, Vice President Kamala Harris joined the call, saying, “We will not back down. We will follow the president’s direction. We will fight, and we will win.”
Biden campaign staff also called for a June debate between Biden and Trump to address voter apathy and age-related concerns. But Biden’s poor performance, as polls show, has unsettled the party and raised doubts about his competence among the general public.
Until now, only Republicans had expressed such concerns about Biden’s memory and cognitive deficiencies, but now Democrats are sharing the same concerns, and the wave of denial appears to have passed.
A draft open letter for House Democrats to consider asking Biden to resign was still being debated among lawmakers on Wednesday. Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Marie Grusenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) publicly declared Tuesday that Biden can no longer win, and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) said Biden should be replaced as the party’s presidential nominee. On Wednesday, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona) also called for Biden to resign.
Congressmen are new YouGov The poll showed Biden trailing Trump in a Wednesday morning text message exchange.
One senator featured in the text messages said: “We have a great chance of beating Trump, but that just shows how much we’re being held back by Biden.”
But other worried lawmakers did not take the poll results seriously.
“The president and his team have experienced the greatest joys and the worst sorrows, and that will continue to happen,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said on a conference call. “The only way we’re going to get through this is by working together as a team.”
Another source involved in the debate said Biden lost significant support from his wealthy donor base. It’s not yet clear whether Biden’s continued campaign will have a significant financial impact. Donor advisers claim that large sums of money to outside organizations believed to be supporting Biden’s campaign have been repeatedly withheld since the first debate. The Washington Post.
And in the past few days, liberal donor networks including Democracy Alliance, American Bridge and Strategic Victory Fund have all hosted conference calls in which donors expressed frustration with how the election is going. Executives at one independent group have begun turning to polls to gauge how well their planned ads might perform if Biden doesn’t become the Democratic nominee.
In one instance, an unidentified business executive who helped organize fundraisers for last year’s convention in Chicago alleged that even big donors were denied the opportunity to question Biden in private meetings with the president’s team, a denial that the person called “shocking.”
“I told them, my donors don’t care about photos, they want to talk to the president. The Biden campaign just wouldn’t allow it,” he said. “It was clear that they were manipulating the president in a way that he’d never done before: if you write a big check and have an event with the president, your donors expect to be able to talk to the president.”
Biden’s family, meanwhile, acknowledged the debate was “unsatisfactory” and the volatile situation, but said Biden would remain the party’s nominee unless the polling data dropped significantly or Democratic officials began to have concerns or doubts.
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