Yeah, that was bad. Really bad. President Joe Biden’s performance in last week’s debate with Donald Trump was often inaudible, frequently incoherent, and entirely painful to watch. His campaign advisers know this, whatever their modest public attempts afterward to dress up the mess. They’ve seen and heard the deluge of political-class commentary calling for Biden to drop out. And some key allies, including South Carolina congressman James Clyburn and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have added oxygen to the speculative fire while expressing support for the president.
But Biden is showing no signs he’ll quit, and he remains, at this point, the Democrats’ best hope against Trump 2024. His campaign team, while hardly ripping up the playbook it planned on using for the next four months, is already attempting to make the proverbial chicken salad out of…well, you know. The Biden campaign has accelerated its attacks on Trump, cutting an ad highlighting his debate lies and the January 6 insurrection, and it plans to ramp up Biden’s travel schedule, to try and demonstrate that the president is still physically and mentally up to the job.
Will it work? Impossible to say. Many of the points made in the past week by high-profile journalists, including The New York Times editorial board and David Remnick of The New Yorker, are correct. Is the fate of democracy at enormous risk with a fragile 81-year-old as the bulwark against a would-be dictator? Absolutely. Is the Biden family acting out of ego and selfishness? Somewhat. Yet the stakes of this election, and Biden’s large flaws as a candidate, were apparent even before the debate debacle. “So much of the reaction about Biden being bad on television is coming from people who are good on television,” a top Democratic strategist tells me. “And so much of the shock about him being old is coming from elites. But voters know Biden is old! Millions of people have seen that TikTok of him frozen still at an event while Kamala Harris dances!” And though voters are clearly dismayed by Biden’s—and by Trump’s—advanced age, they’ve priced it into their thinking about the nominees. It’s one of the major reasons the race is so close, and Biden’s camp believes—or at least hopes—that his debate performance doesn’t significantly deepen the worries about the president’s diminished skills.
Swapping in the 52-year-old Gretchen Whitmer or the 56-year-old Gavin Newsom might defuse the age problem, but it would create a world of others—starting with the assumption that Harris could or should be bypassed. Perhaps, if Biden were to step aside tomorrow, there would be an invigorating, ennobling March Madness–like sprint to the nomination. More likely it would set off a bloody intramural war. Perhaps Harris wins—she’s improved on the stump, but her previous presidential run doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Perhaps the Dems choose a first-time presidential candidate. Sure, some of those—including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump—have won, but the list of the much-hyped who have crashed and burned is long in both parties, with Ron DeSantis only the most recent example. And whoever the new Democratic nominee, they would need to introduce themselves to most of the nation while at the same time raising a shit ton of campaign money (okay, maybe not J.B. Pritzker). All in what would be roughly three months.
Perhaps simply not being Trump would be enough to win. Yet if that’s the case, Biden is the only one who has proven he knows how to do it—plus, he went on to compile a strong first-term White House record. So some Democrats, instead of pushing to dump the old guy very late in the game, are focused on finding ways to propel him across the finish line again. “I think what happened on Thursday really forced the party to do what it’s known for some time that it needed to do, and that was to activate its bench,” says Ashley Etienne, who has been a senior adviser to Vice President Harris, to Speaker Pelosi, and to Biden’s 2020 campaign. “The last time, we didn’t hear from Barack Obama until, like, three weeks before the election. That’s not going to be the case now.” Any surrogates need to make sure to pound Trump, instead of simply vouching for Biden. A Democratic consultant who was watching the debate with a group of undecided, moderate voters says that Biden’s shaky statements didn’t provoke much twisting of the reaction dials. “But when Trump speaks,” the consultant says, “the reaction to him goes way down. His floor with independents is much lower.”
The Biden campaign has already started incorporating a lesson from John Fetterman’s victorious 2022 Senate run in Pennsylvania. Fetterman, his speech and his auditory processing ability hobbled by a recent stroke, had what was deemed a disastrous debate performance against Mehmet Oz, the Republican candidate. Yet Fetterman’s campaign turned the momentum around by pouncing on an Oz debate gaffe about abortion, quickly blasting out a TV ad. “Biden needs a successful PR blitz that could assure voters that the debate was just an off night and push out the things coming out of Trump’s mouth,” says Rebecca Kirszner Katz, who was Fetterman’s Senate campaign architect. “After the debate, we had John go to essentially every media market in the state and talk, on-camera, so folks knew he was getting better and that the debate was an off night.”
Fetterman, however, had a timing advantage, relative to the president: There were only two weeks between his rocky debate and Election Day. He was also recovering from a medical event; there’s no recovery from getting older, so Biden needs to prove and sustain his cogency all summer and fall. “It’s hard for the Biden campaign to turn around the media narrative when every fucking Democrat is saying, ‘Well, that was terrible,’” the top strategist says. “Republicans don’t give a shit about how bad Trump was. You go to war with the army you have.”
The Democrats aren’t likely to change generals. They would be better off aiming their fire at the real enemy. Trump, between the debate and the friendly Supreme Court rulings, had a strong week, Biden an awful one. Yet the laws of political narrative demand that this already deeply weird campaign take even more unexpected turns in the weeks ahead. For Biden, a swing of the pendulum back in his direction can’t come soon enough.
