President Joe Biden is facing a renewed wave of anxiety among Democrats over his ability to take on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Public calls for Biden to drop out appeared to subside in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on the former president and as this week’s Republican National Convention commenced, but the movement against Biden has regained steam as behind-the-scenes lobbying against him persisted.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a prominent Democrat who was an impeachment manager against Trump and is running for the Senate seat of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, on Wednesday joined 18 of his House colleagues and Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) by calling on Biden to pass the torch to a new nominee.
“A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November,” Schiff, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “There is only one singular goal: defeating Donald Trump. The stakes are just too high.”
Democratic leaders, including House Minority Leader Hakeem (D-NY) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), reportedly helped fuel a pressure campaign to delay the Democratic National Committee’s plans to nominate Biden before next month’s party convention. Neither office responded to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
Either way, the clock is ticking for Democrats.
The DNC announced to committee members on Wednesday that it would not hold a virtual roll call to nominate Biden until August. An exact date is not set, but officials have said after Aug. 1 and before Aug. 7, the date of Ohio’s initial deadline to have Biden appear on the ticket. Ohio lawmakers have since extended the deadline, with many Democrats arguing that the roll call is no longer necessary.
Democratic strategist Brad Bannon, who is president of political polling and consulting firm Bannon Communications Research, told the Washington Examiner that he thinks there is a one-week time frame before two things happen: either Biden withdraws or Democrats “suck it up.”
“Either the president needs to find a way to quell the Democratic dissent, and if he can’t do that in the next week, he should step aside,” Bannon said. “I think you could make a good argument for the president to step aside. But he isn’t going to step aside, so I think it’s incumbent on Democrats to suck it up and support the president.”
Schiff became the first Democrat to call on Biden to withdraw from the race following the shooting at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally — and many strategists, including Bannon, argue that it sent a “shock wave” through the Democratic and Republican parties.
“Because of the assassination attempt, I think that stopped everybody in their tracks,” Bannon said. “But I also do think previous to Saturday … the president and his campaign had pressed very hard to make it clear that he’s intent on running for reelection.”
Eyes will be on Biden to see if he will take the concerns from the Democratic conference in stride and push forward as the nominee or if he will bow out and allow a new face to take his place. For now, he seems to be dealing in hypotheticals.
The president said in an interview with BET’s Ed Gordon that he would consider dropping out if his medical staff diagnosed him with a new condition or disease that would make continuing his campaign impossible.
“If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, you got this problem and that problem,” the president said when Gordon asked if anything would make him change his mind about running.
The medical condition is another “if” added to Biden’s list of potential reasons he’d step down: a sign from God, urging from his family, or if polls showed that he had no chance of winning.
Following the debate on June 27, Biden found himself trailing Trump nationwide by 6 percentage points. Many swing districts and battleground states are paying the price for Biden at the top of the ticket, with several shifting further to favor Republicans.
Polling has shown, however, that Biden is still within the margin of error to win a few of the states that have shifted into GOP territory. But a new poll released Wednesday showing that a majority of voters want Biden to drop out of the race is likely to put increased pressure on congressional Democrats to decide if they support the president or think it’s time to move on to someone new.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), a Biden-Harris campaign co-chair, said in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday that he would remind his concerned colleagues there are several months to go before the November election.
“Poll after poll, nationwide head-to-head polls, still show this within the margin of error in a head-to-head race and bluntly, it’s July,” Coons said. “There are months left. I don’t know of any candidate for president in modern history who, because the polls are moving one way or the other by a few points, abandon their campaign for the presidency in July.”
Both Bannon and Hank Sheinkopf, Democratic strategist and former adviser to President Bill Clinton and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, said the Democratic Party is “torn” right now on how to approach the issue of Biden as the nominee.
Concerns over Biden’s viability to serve another term in the White House have been steadily growing over the months after the president tripped or fell down at events, messed up people’s names, and made repeated verbal gaffes. The president’s lackluster debate performance, in which he stammered and stumbled over words, only added fuel to the fire.
Initially, Biden’s allies attempted to brush off his display as one bad night compared to years of his administration’s record.
However, in the days following the debate, he misspoke while introducing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” before correcting himself. During a press conference following the NATO summit, Biden referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”
Biden has repeatedly said he will run for reelection and remain in the race despite some Democrats still stating that it is “his decision,” insinuating that the choice is not finalized.
Sheinkopf said that for Biden to change his decision now, “the pressure against him would have to be immense, and it’s nowhere near that now, not publicly.”
A new polling memo from BlueLabs Analytics released Wednesday could incentivize Democrats to join the chorus of their 20 colleagues in calling him to step aside.
The memo found nearly every other Democrat tested performed better than Biden in a matchup with Trump. It found the strongest candidates were Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Govs. Wes Moore (D-MD), Josh Shapiro (D-PA), and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), all of whom polled above Biden “by roughly 5 points across battleground states.”
Bannon thinks most Democrats are waiting to see what happens in the coming days before deciding to join their colleagues or accept the president as their nominee.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Every day that we cross off the calendar strengthens Biden’s support with Democrats,” Bannon said.
“It’s pretty clear that, I think, a lot of Democrats think that Biden’s nomination, renomination, is inevitable,” the strategist added. “Why jump out in front of a rolling freight train, because everything I see is that Joe Biden is going to be the nominee unless he chooses not to be.”