Former President Joe Biden's top advisor says Democrats have “mixed” after a slow performance in the June 2024 debate against President Donald Trump, and Biden remains the party's candidate He insisted that it should be.
Biden's rough performance and weak voice in the CNN president's debate sparked immense fears about his re-election odds, with the left top leader calling for him to withdraw from the race.
Biden was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris as a Democratic candidate on July 21st less than a month.
She lost to Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
“A lot of people are having a terrible discussion right now,” former senior Biden adviser Mike Donilon said during a discussion at Harvard University. “A lot of people have a terrible argument. Usually the party doesn't lose their heart, but that's what happened here. It melted.”
CNN and the BBC performed headlines calling the performance “disastrous” and “inconsistent.”
“If Joe Biden loses the November election, history records that it took only 10 minutes to destroy the presidency,” CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson wrote in the article. “It was clear that the 81-year-old commander was stiffening and shuffling on the Atlanta stage and soon a political disaster was about to unfold.”
Collinson went on to explain that Biden is giving him the weakest performance in the history of television debate.
New York Times columnist and Biden supporter Thomas Friedman called on Biden to aside as debate “crying” him.
“I can't remember the more heartbreaking moments in America's presidential election politics in my life, and that's precisely what I've revealed. Joe Biden, a good man and good president, is for re-election. I don't have a business to run,” Friedman wrote.
Donilon, who has known Biden for over 40 years, described the Democrats' response as “crazy.”
“I think the party has lost its heart,” he said. “When I ask people about this period, I tell them that Biden had lost the poll. He was about to lose. … They were saying this in the margin race of errors.”
He added that he had never seen a situation in which candidates fell three points nationwide during the summer of the general election, and that he had never seen a situation in which his party decided he couldn't win.
“But that's what happened, right?” Donilon said. “If we actually look at the votes in the first few days after the discussion, the margin between Trump and Biden was approaching. It didn't get too big.”
He discussed the focus group that was convened on the night of discussion, and they expressed concern about both candidates while they believed Trump had won overall.
“They're going to say they're worried about Biden's age, but they're going to say something else,” Donilon said. “They were really worried about Trump. They were worried about the fact that he said he wouldn't accept the outcome of the election. They said he had said, “I have nothing to do with January 6th.” I was worried that he would say, “It wasn't.” The feeling from him was that he wasn't by the people's side. ”
According to Donilon, what actually happened was not catastrophic in traditional wisdom.
“I told Biden the morning after a discussion. Sometimes I lose out on a campaign about the campaign,” he said. “That's what happened to us.”
He argued that the former president was not mentally disabled, but admitted to the tragic withdrawal of Afghanistan in 2021, recognizing that inflation contributed to Biden's downfall.
