Is Joe Biden getting ready to remove himself as the Democrats’ presidential candidate? Publicly, there’s been no shift in his dug-in position that he’s the only one on the left who can defeat Donald Trump, but according to Axios, behind the scenes Biden is getting closer to throwing in the towel.
Behind the scenes: The private message, distilled to its bluntest form: The top leaders of his party, his friends and key donors believe he can’t win, can’t change public perceptions of his age and acuity, and can’t deliver congressional majorities.
- The president is being told that if he stays in, former President Trump could win in a landslide and wipe away Biden’s legacy and Democrats’ hopes in November.
State of play: The pressure to step aside as a candidate has been rising to intolerable levels, especially over the past few days.
- Democrats fully expect polls after the Republican National Convention to show a possible blowout that could bring down Democrats in Congress, too.
- “His choice is to be one of history’s heroes, or to be sure of the fact that there’ll never be a Biden presidential library,” one of the president’s close friends told us. “I pray that he does the right thing. He’s headed that way.”
- Yesterday’s AP poll, showing nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, ricocheted through the White House and Congress.
The latest round of state-level polling released today contains almost nothing but bad news for Biden. Emerson College unveiled their latest surveys of battleground states, and the results are absolutely brutal for Biden.
- Arizona – Trump 47 Biden 40
- Georgia- Trump 47 Biden 41
- Michigan – Trump 45 Biden 42
- Nevada – Trump 46 Biden 41
- North Carolina – Trump 48 Biden 41
- Pennsylvania – Trump 48 Biden 43
- Wisconsin – Trump 48 Biden 43
- Virginia – Trump 45 Biden 43
Biden does even worse when independent candidates like Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Cornel West are included in voter response. In Virginia, for instance, Trump leads Biden by two points head-to-head, but by five points when other candidates are available options for survey respondents to choose from.
Virginia wasn’t even supposed to be a competitive battleground state this year, at least according to Democratic consultants. But the RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump leading Biden by 0.4%. Compare that to 2020, when Biden won the state by almost 10 points, and you can understand why many Democrats are completely terrified of keeping Biden on the ticket.
Then again, we’ve seen little from Biden himself indicating that he’s had a change of heart. Even Axios couches its reporting by saying “his closest friends believe he’s fought the good fight and will succumb to reality.” It remains to be seen if that’s actually the case or just wishful thinking on the part of Democrats.
While dozens of Democrats have now called on Biden to step aside, and even more are allegedly encouraging him to drop out in private conversations, gun control groups like Everytown, Brady, and Giffords, which all endorsed Biden last year, continue to maintain their public silence on Biden’s continued candidacy. That silence speaks volumes about Biden’s position among Democrats, given that these same organizations have been among his staunchest supporters over the past four years. They might not be demanding Biden step down, but they’re not publicly clamoring for him to stand firm either, which you would expect given the time and money they’ve showered on his campaign to date.
I’m starting to be less concerned that Biden will use the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the ATF to launch a Hail Mary attempt to pander to his base of gun control supporters in order to save his flailing campaign. With Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer joining the growing ranks of lawmakers on the left who’ve talked to Biden privately about their fears that his candidacy will prove a huge drag on downticket Democrats, Biden may have moved past the bargaining stage of his grief over his decaying campaign and into the acceptance stage. We’ll see what news the weekend brings, but if I were running Everytown I’d hold off on printing any campaign signs touting Biden as their “gunsense” candidate of choice.
