Democratic strategist David Axelrod said Sunday that he doesn’t think President Biden understands “he can’t win this race” against former President Trump.
“There are some facts in life that you can’t change, and that was painfully clear on the debate stage, but the president doesn’t seem to get that. He can’t win this election,” Axelrod, the senior adviser to the Obama administration, said on CNN’s “Inside Politics Sunday.”
“If you look at the data, if you talk to people across the country, politicians across the country, it’s more likely that he’s going to lose this election by a huge margin than he is going to win it by a small margin,” Axelrod continued. “And if the stakes are as high as he says they are, and I think they are, he really needs to think about what’s the right thing to do here.”
Sunday’s interview came after Axelrod responded to a primetime interview with Biden on Friday, saying the president was “dangerously out of touch” with voters’ concerns.
“Listening to the interview, it seemed like he was dismissing where he stood in the campaign. He didn’t seem to understand what the big concerns are that people have,” Axelrod said Sunday about Biden’s performance in the interview.
Axelrod noted the “tremendous losses and tremendous challenges” Biden has faced in his life and said he has always “fought to bounce back from them.”
“He’s bounced back from political defeat and adversity, so he has the mentality that he can beat anyone, any odds. His father’s generation can’t be defeated. That’s really the concern. It’s not about his record,” Axelrod said, later noting that “history will be a lot kinder to him than it will be to today’s voters.”
The president has remained defiant despite concerns within his own party about whether he should continue in the race after his poor performance in the debates, and five House Democrats have explicitly called on him to resign.
The Hill/Decision Desk average of national polls shows the two candidates remain neck and neck, with Trump leading by 1.1 percentage points, 44.2 percent to 43.1 percent.
