Coming off one of the most disastrous televised debate performances in American history, President Biden’s campaign continues to try to reset his persistent argument that he should not govern the country until he is 86 years old.
While there is plenty of evidence to bolster the case that the president cannot serve another four years (including a Washington Post poll showing 82% of people think Biden shouldn’t run and evidence that Biden can only tolerate a six-hour workday), the re-election effort is still trying to convince the media and the public that none of what they saw on Thursday night mattered.
At a fundraiser in Red Bank, New Jersey, on Saturday, Biden tried to downplay the significance of his first showdown with former President Donald Trump, joking that, as Barack noted, “it wasn’t the best debate we’ve ever had,” before launching into his strategist spin.
“The polls have remained pretty stable since the debate, and my approval rating has gone up a few points since the debate. Polls during the debate showed that our supporters are converting more undecided voters to their supporters than Trump is, and that’s primarily because of his actions on January 6th and fighting for the working class, which he has not done,” Biden said.
After his various smears of Trump, Biden again resorted to self-deprecating remarks, saying it “was not a great night for me, but neither was Trump” and acknowledging, as he did at Friday’s post-debate North Carolina rally, that he “has not debated as well as he has in the past.”
Biden’s embargo came after a defiant memo from his chief strategist arguing, to the media as much as the candidate himself does to donors, that the debate wasn’t that bad for the president despite what people saw him do onstage, but that it was essentially beside the point.
“The debate did not change the tide of the race, which reflects what our internal campaign polling after the debate showed: the President maintains his popularity among 2020 voters and voter opinion has not changed,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a “View from the Battlefield” memo released to reporters on Saturday night, citing multiple exit polls and asserting that the debate “did nothing to change the American public’s perception.”
She suggests that, based on Democratic focus groups, her client actually won the debate with a demographic of persuadable voters: “After the debate, our internal indicators showed that President Biden led President Trump by more than 20 points on key indicators like being presidential, addressing important issues, and favorability. The indicators showed that independent voters were put off by President Trump’s personal attacks and had strong negative feelings when he spoke about January 6th, his support for Putin, and his refusal to present a vision for America. Our internal polling confirmed the indicators: Trump’s performance made independent voters feel less confident in his positions on reproductive rights and abortion, respect for the Constitution and the rule of law, and integrity.”
Further “debate dials” conducted by a group called “The Outside Group” in Phoenix supported the same conclusion: neither candidate was able to sway the other side’s voters, so it didn’t matter in the end.
“Overall, voters say the debate did little to change their overall outlook for either candidate,” the memo claims, further alleging that the president’s performance drove record fundraising, including in the hour immediately following the debate, and that a “massive mobilization campaign” and volunteer registrations were three times higher than the Biden campaign’s usual day.
But O’Malley Dillon sidestepped her own argument by attacking media outlets whose liberal editorial writers and commentators have said Biden’s performance should prompt a change of candidate: “If we see a shift in the polls in the coming weeks, it wouldn’t be the first time that exaggerated media coverage has led to a temporary drop in the polls.
In 2012, media coverage of President Obama’s performance in the first debate led to a large but temporary drop in his approval ratings, but this was almost entirely due to fewer Democrats responding to polls in the days following the debate, rather than a true change in approval ratings.”
In a final attempt to lower the profile and expectations Thursday night, O’Malley Dillon said the campaign “knows a thing or two about working hard to win a tough race” and that it knows this election will be “very close.”
A very close election that will be an existential test for Biden and his political team.
Whether or not it’s because of the debate or its aftermath, Joe Biden’s chief strategist is speaking in a much more humble tone than he did a week ago. I told Puck.“We will win,” a sign that, whatever the numbers and dials may say, the campaign understands the gravity of the president’s predicament and the aura it left in Atlanta beneath the CNN heat.
What about the president? There are more than two months until his next debate with Donald Trump, and there’s a limit to how many times the president can say it doesn’t matter to donors that he can’t go toe-to-toe with the same challenger he faced four years ago.
