Democrats were caught in an apparent stalemate on Saturday as a dug-in Joe Biden continued to endure high-profile calls to end his re-election campaign after a week of astonishing party moves to unseat the president in favor of a candidate many hope will be more likely to beat Donald Trump.
In the weeks since his disastrous debate performance against Trump, the 81-year-old Biden has attempted to fight off calls for him to step down from the top of the ticket amid concerns that his age and mental acuity are no longer up to the job. But a series of interviews, a press conference and speeches have done little to quell party nerves.
“Everyone’s waiting for Joe,” quoted the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd of one top Democrat. “And he’s sitting at home, stewing and saying, ‘What if? What if? What if?’ We’re doing things the Democratic way. We’re botching it.”
Frustration within the Democratic party establishment at what they see as Biden’s intransigence comes as the outlet also reported on Saturday that the president in private is complaining that former aides to presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton would be lecturing him on election strategy after Democratic 1994 and 2010 midterm election losses that he had avoided in 2022.
Those pressuring Biden – who also has Covid – to abandon his re-election bid, the Times reported, “risk getting his back up and prompting him to remain after all”.
Some advisers are said to believe that Biden is holding out at least until the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Washington on Wednesday. But some donors say that this is the ideal moment for Biden to step aside now that Republicans have had their convention, and Democrats have a month until their own convention in Chicago to tell a new story about a new candidate.
The vivid picture of a Covid-sick, abandoned and resentful veteran politician, sitting out the pressure in a Delaware beach house, comes as most senior Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and the current minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, are calling for Biden - at a minimum – to reconsider his position.
“We have to cauterize this wound right now and the sooner we can do it the better,” Virginia representative Gerald E Connolly, a Democrat, told the Times. Connolly, who has not publicly called for Biden to step aside, said the ongoing drama “shows the cold calculus of politics”.
According to the Washington Post on Saturday, the tight-knit Biden family has not called an emergency meeting to discuss the spiraling crisis, but is instead exchanging usual daily phone calls and text messages.
Rising anger within the family, which has enjoyed nearly half a century of Joe Biden’s power in Delaware, both as a senator, vice-president and president, is fueled by the belief that his dismal debate performance could still be overcome by a determined fight back and a display of loyalty. “It’s like they don’t know he’s Irish,” the Post quoted a person close to the family.
The past week has seen waves of Democratic elected officials make public statements of their appreciation of Biden’s record in office but dire warnings that the US will see a second Trump presidency should he remain the party’s candidate for November’s presidential election.
The latest high-profile name to join the chorus was Sherrod Brown, when the embattled Ohio senator broke cover on Friday evening to call for an end to Biden’s re-election campaign.
“I’ve heard from Ohioans on important issues, such as how to continue to grow jobs in our state, give law enforcement the resources to crack down on fentanyl, protect social security and Medicare from cuts, and prevent the ongoing efforts to impose a national abortion ban,” Brown said in a statement.
He added: “At this critical time, our full attention must return to these important issues. I think the president should end his campaign.”
Those public disavowals of support have been mirrored by an equally intense private lobbying campaign from top Democrats, party stalwarts and senior donors that is aimed at persuading Biden that he cannot beat Trump and that his political legacy is at risk unless he is replaced by a more dynamic candidate, most likely his vice-president, Kamala Harris.
On Saturday, Representative Mark Takano of California, the top Democrat on the House veterans’ affairs committee, added his name to the list of nearly three dozen Democrats in Congress who say it’s time for Biden to leave the race. The Californian called on Biden to “pass the torch” to Harris.
“It has become clear to me that the demands of a modern campaign are now best met by the vice-president, who can seamlessly transition into the role of our party’s standard bearer,” Takano said.
That campaign has seemingly inched closer and closer to persuading Biden and his close inner circles of advisers and family members that the situation has become so serious that he needs to consider taking the extraordinary step of declaring himself a one-term president and backing someone else to fight Trump.
Biden’s position has reportedly wavered from one of absolute refusal to move to now being open to the idea of considering his position. Some media reports have even suggested that a decision could come in the next few days, including as early as this weekend.
However, on Friday Biden’s campaign struck a notable tone of defiance, saying the president is anticipating getting back on the campaign trail.
“I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America: one where we save our democracy, protect our rights and freedoms, and create opportunity for everyone,” Biden said in a statement.
“The stakes are high, and the choice is clear,” Biden added. “Together, we will win.”
Biden does have prominent allies still at the heights of the party. Leftist representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders have come out in favor of Biden remaining at the top of the ticket in the past days.
“If you 10,000% are super-convinced that the candidate, our president, cannot beat Donald Trump, then do what you think is in your good conscience. But I have not seen an alternative scenario that, I feel, does not set us up for enormous peril,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
In polling over the past week, Biden has trailed Trump, especially in the crucial battleground states where the election will be won or lost. Republican campaigners have even boasted that their electoral map is broadening as previously safe Democratic states – such as Virginia or New Hampshire – might come into play.
But Ocasio-Cortez warned of potential intra-party chaos if Biden is pushed off the re-election ticket.
“If you think that is going to be an easy transition, I’m here to tell you that a huge amount of the donor class and these elites who are pushing for the president not to be the nominee also do not want to see the VP [Harris] be the nominee,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
She warned that Democratic “elites” don’t want Harris to run in Biden’s place, but a brokered convention in Chicago in which state delegates currently committed to Biden would be free to pledge support to another candidate
could lead to chaos.
Racial, ethnic and class divisions within the Democratic party had been exposed by the Biden crisis, she indicated, and she said her community “does not have the luxury of accepting loss in July of an election year. My people are the first ones deported. They’re the first ones put in Rikers. They’re the first ones whose families are killed by war.”
• This article was amended on 20 July 2024. An earlier version misdescribed Hakeem Jeffries as the “current speaker” of the House, rather than as the minority leader.
