Sequestered at his Delaware beach house as he recovers from Covid, President Joe Biden got a bit of good news Saturday when it became public that Hillary and Bill Clinton are sticking with the president.
But the fact that it is news that the former president and secretary of state are supporting their fellow Democrat — and not even in public but privately — underscored just how isolated Biden has become in his own party, with some saying privately that it is easier to count the number of people still supportive of the president than those who think he should abandon his re-election bid.
“I’m sure he’s mad and upset all at the same time,” said Meghan Hayes, who served in the Biden White House until 2022, but added that he understands the reality of politics and is “notorious for not holding grudges.”
The defiant tone struck Friday by campaign brass, and a pledge for Biden to return to the campaign trail next week, did little to stop the hemorrhage of support for the president. Some Democrats have already started gaming out potential contingency plans, such as whether Vice President Kamala Harris should seamlessly replace Biden at the top of the ticket or whether Democrats should prepare for an open nominating convention next month in Chicago, which would be the first in decades.
“Joe Biden is our nominee,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said on MSNBC on Saturday. “But what gives me a lot of hope right now is that if President Biden decides to step back, we have Vice President Kamala Harris, who is ready to step up to unite the party, to take on Donald Trump and to win in November.”
“Remember,” added Warren, a progressive who ran against both Biden and Harris for the Democratic nomination in 2020, “80 million people voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 knowing that Kamala Harris would be ready to step up if needed.”
Biden’s shrinking circle of loyalists continues to argue that the president has made his decision to stay in the race and that the party needs to move past this crisis “yesterday,” as Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz put it on MSNBC on Saturday.
“We need to unite as a coalition like we did in 2020,” Munoz added, arguing that the party needs to instead focus on the “terrifying” possibility of another Donald Trump presidency.
Even so, as of Saturday afternoon, 32 Democratic congressmen and four senators have publicly called on Biden not to seek re-election. And 11 of those came out in just the past two days, since Trump delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, suggesting the tide is not turning.
That remains a small minority of the more than 200 Democratic members of the House and 51 Democrats in the Senate. But Democratic officials and strategists widely believe that the actual number of people wanting Biden to step aside is much higher.
And the defectors increasingly include longtime Biden allies, like Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is facing a tough re-election year.
Some, according to aides and allies, have been trying to avoid a public break with the president, hoping he would arrive at the conclusion that he needs to step aside himself, but have felt compelled to ratchet up the pressure as Biden has dug in.
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who has known Biden for years, reiterated his call for Biden not to run for re-election in a new Boston Globe op-ed, which revealed a recent incident at a D-Day commemoration where Biden “didn’t seem to recognize me.”
“Of course, that can happen as anyone ages, but as I watched the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem,” Moulton wrote. “It was a crushing realization, and not because a person I care about had a rough night but because everything is riding on Biden’s ability to beat Donald Trump in November.”
Moulton called on his fellow Democratic lawmakers “who are deeply concerned but who haven’t said so publicly” to find the courage to speak up.
Lawmakers will return to Capitol Hill next week, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak Wednesday at the behest of Republicans.
Meanwhile, in Rehoboth Beach, Biden “continues to improve steadily” from his Covid infection, according to his physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who said Biden has responded well to multiple doses of Paxlovid.
Biden was also boosted by the Clintons, who remain a powerful force in Democratic politics. They have been actively encouraging donors to stick with the president and have been in touch with the White House, offering to help however they can, according to two people familiar with their thinking.
“As soon as we have the green light, we are going to be back out on the stump, directly communicating the contrast [with Trump],” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said on a press call Saturday Morning.
Still, on the same call organized by the campaign, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., while supporting Biden herself, declined to urge her Senate colleagues to do the same. “Each of my colleagues has to make their own decision,” she said, before touting Biden’s record in Michigan.
As they wait, some Democrats are already looking past Biden and gaming out potential replacement scenarios.
Harris would be the obvious and heavily favored successor, but others want a more open process with other options.
A group of legal scholars is circulating a memo to Democratic lawmakers, opinion leaders, donors and other officials laying out the case for what they dubbed a “blitz primary,” which would allow multiple candidates to make their case in the days and weeks before the delegates to the Democratic National Convention formally select the nominee in late August.
“[A]nointing Harris would cause the Party to miss a remarkable opportunity to capture the nation’s imagination between now and the Convention,” reads the memo, which was written by, among others, Rosa Brooks, a former Obama and Clinton administration official and informal policy advisor to Biden’s 2020 campaign, who is now a professor at Georgetown Law.
Another pop-up group, Delegates for Democracy, has been directly organizing convention delegates around the idea of open convention, where the delegates would, for the first time in decades, get to actually decide who would represent the party in November.
A previously unreported memo authored by Democratic pollster Jason Boxt in support of the effort drew on his surveys to argue that Democratic primary voters “overwhelmingly favor Biden withdrawing from the race” and want an open convention, which they view as a legitimate way to select the nominee.
“Delegates have always been the end of the process, the people who nominate the president,” Elaine Kamarck, a longtime DNC member and rules expert, said at a virtual briefing for delegates organized by the group Friday. “Delegates still choose the nominee of the party.”
Many other Democrats, however, want to avoid a messy replacement process if Biden steps aside and see Harris as the party’s best — and perhaps only — option to quickly take the president’s place so close to the November election.
“Vice President Harris has the message, resources, and experience to defeat Donald Trump and safeguard our Republic,” Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., said in a statement Saturday. “Joe, I love and respect you. But the stakes are too high to fail. It’s time to pass the torch to Kamala.”