After wall-to-wall Trump assassination attempt coverage, with the coda of the Republican convention visuals and speeches, Biden’s future, or lack thereof, is back in focus. Many prognosticators had assumed that the failed Trump kill shot would give Biden a respite. And since running out the clock favored Biden, he’d win up being able to hold his ground.
Despite the fact that, on paper, only Biden (or God) can dislodge Biden as the Democratic Party chosen, reality is more complicated. In US, with its grotesque TV ad spend, a candidate with no or not enough money is effectively not a candidate. The many reports, both public and private, of a big donor rebellion was and remains the one thing that can shift the seemingly immovable Biden. The actions of party leaders are merely reflections of that.
I said to Lambert some days ago, and should have put down a marker, that I did not see how Biden would survive the moneybags withholding contributions if they continued to do so en masse. There are simply too many at too many levels, from fundraisers to consultants to legislative staffers to other flexian operatives, who depend on Team Dem for their survival. It’s one thing to suffer a loss of the Presidency, another to suffer a wipeout that severely diminishes the viability of the party. Too many college tuitions depend on it remaining a credible political force.
And that’s before considering, as we have mentioned repeatedly, that spook whisperers like David Ignatius have been saying explicitly or signaling loudly for quite some time that Biden should step aside. Opposing the CIA is not a pro-survival move, on many levels.
Those who know party machinations will hopefully correct my assumptions as needed and add details, but an elephant in the room is that it seems vanishingly unlikely that a Democrat will win the Presidency in 2024. Lambert linked to the report in Puck of yet another Biden-confidence-building session with insiders doing precisely the reverse, with only the shameless Debbie Wasserman-Shultz claiming that Biden had performed well. Even though those in the party with operating brain cells or adequate survival instincts know that, even if they have to do their best to spin otherwise. Biden continues to come apart at the seams. No amount of porcine maquillage application will meaningfully improve Harris’ popularity. And as for the wannbes, there isn’t enough runway to build President-level support.
As most readers also likely know, the best of the dimming Democratic Party prospects is to try to and succeed in retaking the House. That would argue for diverting a lot of the money that goes to the top of the ticket to House races. That certainly can’t happen with Biden in the race and controlling the Presidential pot. Can he be persuaded to step down and turn his funds over in a way that allows some (a lot!) to be redirected to downballot contests? One can imagine that the party’s best 11th dimensional chess player, Nancy Pelosi, who is also personally very attached to Democratic standing in the house, is laser focused on this and related funding matters.
Let us first look at some of the sudden outbreak of lead stories on Biden being back on the ropes.
Notice this campaign to get Biden to quit looks to have picked up considerable steam before the announcement that Biden again has Covid and is cancelling campaign events over the next few days. The official count is that Biden now has his third case of Covid. A widely-reported study found that the odds of Long Covid at infection 3 were 38%. Perhaps Covid will be the agent of God that Biden was insisting had to remove him for him to stop his Presidential bid.
This struggle is very much in play, so I am not sure how much sense it makes to try to discern exactly where things are. The key is that the trajectory is increasingly against Biden and the Trump shooting (if not the Covid case) will allow him to rationalize exiting. Nevertheless, some accounts, first from the pink paper:
Democrats in Congress including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the party’s top representative in the House, have privately expressed their concerns to Biden, it emerged on Wednesday.
Adam Schiff, another senior House Democrat who is close to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, publicly called on the president to “pass the torch”, citing “serious concerns” about whether Biden could defeat Trump in November….
Separately, CNN reported that Pelosi told Biden it would be hard to win if he stayed in the race and that doing so could damage other Democrats’ prospects. Pelosi’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
But the US president has remained defiant. Referring to Biden’s conversations with Schumer and Jeffries, a White House spokesperson said: “The president told both leaders he is the nominee of the party, he plans to win and looks forward to working with both of them to pass his 100 days agenda to help working families.”
From the Washington Post:
[Hakim] Jeffries (D-N.Y.) met with Biden on Thursday night at the White House, and [Chuck] Schumer (D-N.Y.) met with him on Saturday in Rehoboth Beach, Del. In the meetings, the congressional leaders discussed their members’ concerns that Biden could deprive them of majorities, giving Republicans a much easier path to push through legislation, according to four people briefed on the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private talks.
In a separate one-on-one conversation, a person close to Biden told the president directly that he should end his candidacy, saying that was the only way to preserve his legacy and save the country from another Trump term, the person said. Biden responded that he adamantly disagreed with that opinion and that he is the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump
And the New York Times:
President Biden has become more receptive in the last several days to hearing arguments about why he should drop his re-election bid…
Mr. Biden has not given any indication that he is changing his mind about staying in the race, the Democrats said, but has been willing to listen to rundowns of new and worrying polling data and has asked questions about how Vice President Kamala Harris could win.
The accounts suggest that Mr. Biden, privately at least, is striking a more open-minded posture than he did last week when he lashed out at a number of House Democrats who pressed him to step aside.
One person close to the president said that it would be wrong to call him receptive to the idea of dropping out but that he “is willing to listen.” But this person emphasized there was no sign that Mr. Biden was changing course at this point.
So at a minimum, weakening poll results might dent Biden’s resolve.
Regardless, a big countervailing factor is that Team Dem may have lost a lot of its former big supporters across the entire ticket, and not just for Biden. In other words, bad outcomes may already be baked in and Democratic Party efforts to turn the tide may be too little, too late.
I have gotten quite a few private reports of companies run by one-time Team Dem loyalists who have moved all operations out of New York due to the Trump tax case. Antipathy for the party among the very rich increased with the hush money case. Since when is it illegal to give money or services to your own campaign? The failure of the judge to instruct the jury on campaign law or to let the Trump attorneys present a witness to contest repeated and unsubstantiated prosecution insinuations of campaign law abuses set up what many see as an indefensible verdict due to the judge putting his finger on the dial in a very big way.1
Similarly, I have received private reports of heavyweight Democratic Party supporters turning their backs not just on the Biden campaign, but potentially the entire ticket. The most systematic sightings come from IM Doc, who practices in a very wealthy, connected, and until recently deep blue pocket, and has billionaires, CEOs, and operatives among his patients. A sampling of recent reports, first from mid-June, as in before the debate:
I have now been told by two different what I would call scions of Hollywood business people (not talent ) both Jewish – that they and their families have pulled all financial support from Biden. They will both be sending big bucks to Trump – and will be voting for him. The talent is saying somewhat the same although not as vociferous. They will talk to me about it as a friend – but never in their wildest dreams would they say so out loud.
From the end of June, as in after the debate:
At a big party today – lots of politicos there that are in the know. Both Dem and GOP.
Official party polls are showing Trump has gained 2-5 points in 13 states since Thursday. No indication if they are swing states. Also learned that Trump is now in striking distance in VA and MINN. And WASH, ORE, NEW JERSEY, AND COLORADO Trump is really getting close. These are not public polls but party polls.
The Biden numbers in the Asian and Jewish communities are in free fall for Dems. The numbers in Latinos have collapsed and the Blacks are not doing well either. They are having no good ideas that work in any of these groups. “People are pissed”. “The Dem coalition we have depended on has split and is shrinking before our eyes in real time” “Inflation is a bitch” “Kamala is an albatross around the neck of the party” The cope is amazing.
These people are literally shitting their pants. The problems were already bad before the debate but now are in the toilet. A few of them seem to realize that the lies are finally catching up with them.
At the start of this week:
2 billionaires and 1 Hollywood person this AM – all 3 previous Biden supporters.
1 billionaire will be supporting Trump –
The other 2 have completely cut off all funding to Biden – and are now sitting on their hands. “What a disgrace – I do not think I will even bother to vote.”
Later in the week:
The number of these billionaires/hundreds of millionaires that are switching to Trump has been a big surprise to me. They talk to me about it literally ALL the time. Part of my job is being “mother confessor” – and I am also one of the few people in their lives they can trust – their lives are filled with vipers. They are almost universally telling me how guilty they feel doing it – but they just cannot not do it. It is almost like they are asking me – a member of the normie class – for permission.
So even if Biden actually does get Long Covid, which given his ego looks to be the fastest track for him to turn over the reins to another contender, it’s not clear that Team Dem can rescue its Federal elections. “Orange Man bad” has lost its selling power with too many important audiences. Even worse, the revulsion that was supposed to focus on Trump him looking increasingly, at least among top donors, to be attaching to Biden.
____
1 Let us not forget that Judge Merchan’s daughter, a Democratic party operative, has been reported as fundraising off her father’s case. I have been told, but have not been able to independently confirm that there are 24 judges in New York’s lowest trial court, which is confusingly called the Supreme Court. Cases are supposed to be assigned at random. Yet all three Trump case in New York were assigned to Merchan. Pull out your calculator. The odds of that happening are 0.0072%. No typo. As in one in .000072.
