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As President Joe Biden struggles to survive the political crisis that has engulfed his campaign, he’s faced two worsening trends in recent days.
First, major media outlets have published several new stories raising tough questions about Biden’s age and governing capacity. The floodgates for leaks have opened, reporters are intensely scrutinizing the issue, and the president is no longer getting the benefit of the doubt.
Second, a few Democratic elected officials have finally begun to openly discuss the prospect that Biden could leave the ticket — and some have outright called on him to do so.
The bulk of the Democratic Party, for now, is still behind Biden, and he maintained Wednesday that he’s staying in the race. But anxious deliberations within the party about what to do are continuing, particularly in the wake of new polling showing Donald Trump expanding his lead.
What’s being reported about Biden’s age and capacity
Before the debate, major media outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal would intermittently report on the question of Biden’s age and health, collecting accounts of what the president is like behind closed doors from aides and others who met with him in private.
Often, such reports turned up a mixed picture, finding that Biden sometimes had mix-ups and verbal flubs and sometimes appeared fully up to the job. Always, Democrats responded to these reports with intense criticism.
Since the debate, though, coverage of this issue has risen to a new level of intensity — and leaks have been coming fast and furious.
A brutal New York Times story released Tuesday dug into what the paper called Biden’s “lapses” — which their sources claimed have recently grown “more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.”
In such lapses, the Times reporters’ sources claim, Biden would sometimes appear “listless,” “lose the thread of conversations,” or react with “blank-stared confusion.” At other points, they say, Biden would appear “perfectly on top of his game.”
Axios’s Alex Thompson reported that aides believed Biden was “dependably engaged” between the hours of 10 am and 4 pm — but that outside those hours, Biden was “more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued.” (Thompson added that aides “usually” see Biden “engaged,” and have brushed off “flashes” of absent-mindedness as “ordinary brain farts.”)
Legendary reporter Carl Bernstein said on CNN that, over the past year and a half, “there have been 15 to 20 occasions” on which Biden has appeared as unfocused as he was during the debate. He characterized such instances as Biden losing his train of thought and being unable to “pick it up again.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that some senior European diplomats have said “they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer.” And the Financial Times reported that, during a meeting between Biden and an EU leader earlier this year, the president began and ended the meeting by telling the same anecdote.
Such incidents appear juicy when they come from anonymous leaks. But the reality is that many Biden incidents like this have at various points occurred in public and been reported on before.
What’s changed is that many Biden-sympathetic observers tended to view them as uncharacteristic or unrepresentative. A common reaction was: So what if he mixes up a name or forgets something? It’s not putting his governance at risk.
Now, the debate has changed the narrative around incidents like this — reasonably so, given the risks Biden’s poor performance there posed to his reelection. What could be waved away as harmless blips now look like a devastating chronic weakness.
Will this change anything?
Though left-of-center commentators have overwhelmingly called for Biden to step aside after the debate, his support among elected Democratic officials has mostly held up so far.
But a few cracks in that support started to appear Tuesday and Wednesday.
Reps. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) called on Biden to drop out. Reps. Jared Golden (D-ME) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), who represent conservative districts, both opined that Biden can’t win.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) all said Biden needed to do more to assuage concerns over his performance. Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) characterized Biden’s campaign as being far too dismissive of legitimate concerns.
The Washington Post reported that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was close to disavowing Biden over the weekend, but was talked out of it for now — and reported that former President Barack Obama had privately spoken skeptically of Biden’s chances going forward.
Reps. James Clyburn (D-SC) and Summer Lee (D-PA) both said they’d support Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee if Biden quit the race. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said that discussions on the best path forward to beat Trump were “happening very quickly.” Clyburn also said that there could be a “mini-primary” in the weeks leading up to the late-August Democratic convention to determine a replacement for Biden, though he emphasized this was a hypothetical scenario.
Into this swirl of discontent comes a New York Times/Siena poll released Wednesday, showing Biden trailing Trump by 6 percentage points among likely voters and by 8 points among registered voters.
Biden has done little to quiet these concerns so far, having avoided unscripted public settings since the debate. But he plans to sit for an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News on Friday. Anything less than a dazzling performance will imperil his political future further.
