By agreeing to debate live on CNN with Donald Trump on Thursday evening, early in the American electoral calendar, Joe Biden had a very simple goal: to mark his difference from his Republican opponent and, above all, to quickly set the tone for the campaign that is beginning, by including it in the crucial choice that Americans will have to make according to him in four months.
A choice in favor of a former president who incited his troops to insurrection in 2021 (and a criminal convicted last June by a New York court) or a choice in favor of protecting democracy and its institutions.
But at the end of 90 minutes of a debate that was often laborious for the outgoing president, it was ultimately panic that he managed to instill in the Democratic ranks, where several voices were heard, in the wake of this face-off, on Joe Biden’s ability to sustain a second term. And what should be a breaking point in the campaign between him and Donald Trump now risks turning into a referendum on his candidacy, less than two months before the Democratic National Convention, scheduled for Chicago in August, which is supposed to confirm it.
“I’m not the only one who’s heartbroken right now. There’s a lot of people who watched this tonight who have suffered terribly for Joe Biden,” former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said on MSNBC Thursday night. “I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done to fix that.”
“Panic has set in,” David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser and CNN political analyst, said immediately after the debate about Biden’s performance. “There’s going to be discussions. I don’t know where they’re going to go. But there’s going to be discussions about whether he should continue.”
“Do we still have time to choose someone else?” asked Mark Buell, a major donor to Joe Biden’s campaign, quoted by the New York Timeswithout calling for the president to resign. “We have a responsibility to take the measure of American opinion right now and present it to Joe Biden, because the stakes are far too high in this race.”
“This would be a good time for Biden to drop out of the race citing health concerns,” commented Nadia B. Ahmad, a Florida member of the progressive wing of the Democratic National Committee, after the first hour of the debate.
“A hell of a nightmare”
In mastering the facts to defend his record and attack the alternative realities of his Republican opponent, Joe Biden has often struggled with a disastrous delivery of his message, a hesitant tone, unfinished sentences, confused thinking and a sometimes lost look that contrasted with the strong personality and erroneous assertions confidently launched by the populist.
“A real nightmare,” commented a close friend of the president, quoted anonymously in the pages of the daily newspaper. The Hilla kind of slow-motion accident that will slowly lead the Democratic Party towards electoral defeat, according to him, and which viewers have not failed to see either.
Forty-three percent of Americans give Donald Trump the victory in a first poll launched Friday morning by YouGov among a pool of more than 3,000 respondents. Twenty-two percent call Biden the winner, compared to 35% who were unsure of either victory. In total, 59% of those surveyed said they watched the debate in its entirety or in part.
Joe Biden “had a bad debate night,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a rising Democratic figure, acknowledged Friday morning on MSNBC, “but that doesn’t change the fact that Donald Trump was a bad president.” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who endured a chaotic and laborious debate during the 2022 midterms before winning the election, called on the Democratic camp to “chill out.” “I refuse to join the Democrat vultures hovering over Biden after the debate,” he wrote on the X Network. “No one knows better than I do that a heated debate is not the sum total of a person and their record.”
“Joe Biden is doing a great job as president and he’s going to be the Democratic nominee unless he decides he doesn’t want the job anymore,” Democratic political strategist Mark Mellman said Friday morning in Washington. The duty. “Yesterday and every day, Donald Trump has proven himself to be a serial liar. We cannot have that as a president.”
Stop or continue?
There is no formal mechanism within the Democratic Party and its national convention, which will be held in Chicago at the end of August, to replace the candidate who won the primaries. Some 95% of voters opted for Joe Biden’s candidacy. Only a voluntary departure could force the holding of an “open convention”, which would then be responsible for finding a new candidate.
Vice President Kamala Harris would then be the top contender, but the 700 delegates could also choose several other potential candidates whose names regularly crop up in Democratic circles when discussing the post-Biden era: California Gov. Gavin Newsom; Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
From Atlanta on Thursday evening, where he was in the president’s entourage, Gavin Newsom nevertheless called these “speculations” absurd. “I will never turn my back on President Biden’s record,” he said. “I would never turn my back on President Biden and I don’t know any Democrat in my party who would, especially after tonight.”
The maneuver, which would then give the new candidate three months to make himself known to the entire country — and, above all, to unite the party towards victory — also proves highly perilous in light of the “13 keys to the White House,” a predictive system established in part by political historian Allan Lichtman, who, since 1984, has been able to accurately anticipate the outcome of presidential races, including the 2016 election that brought Donald Trump to power.
Now, the Democratic Party has certainly just lost one of its keys on Thursday evening, that of the “charisma” of the outgoing president, which flew away at the end of this debate. At least seven are needed to ensure a victory.
Triggering a primary with a heartbreaking race to replace him would cause the Democratic camp to lose another one. Which could be fatal for it at the polls next November.