U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at a post-debate campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C. on June 28.Allison Joyce/Getty Images
U.S. President Joe Biden is vowing to continue his bid for a second term despite a disastrous debate performance, but a growing chorus of Democrats is calling for his replacement as the party’s nominee amid mounting concerns over his age and mental acuity.
In a campaign speech in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday afternoon, a fired-up Mr. Biden nodded to his poor outing against Donald Trump the previous evening. But he insisted “when you get knocked down, you get back up” and “I intend to win.”
“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” he said, before thundering that “I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done.”
The energetic tone was a stark contrast to Thursday night, when the 81-year-old Mr. Biden frequently fumbled for words, garbled his sentences and lost his train of thought. Throughout the debate, he spoke in a quiet, raspy voice and often stared into the middle distance with his mouth open.
In one particularly difficult moment, the President sputtered then froze for several seconds while enumerating social programs he wants to fund, appearing unable to recall the items on his list. Then, he nonsensically blurted out “we finally beat Medicare.”
At another point, Mr. Biden promised a “total ban on the – the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.” Mr. Trump fired back: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
For months, the White House has dismissed criticisms of Mr. Biden’s fitness. Now, his faltering 90-minute tilt with Mr. Trump has blown open a debate over his ability to win another election – let alone complete another four-year term. The alarm for Democrats is heightened by their view of the unprecedented threat to democracy Mr. Trump represents as a convicted felon who tried to overturn the past election.
“We have to beat Donald Trump. We have to have a nominee who can do that,” Jon Favreau, a speechwriter for former president Barack Obama and influential liberal podcaster wrote on X. He called for a “serious discussion” about whether Mr. Biden “is up for the job” ahead of the party’s nominating convention.
David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s former campaign manager, described Mr. Biden’s debate performance as a “DEFCON 1 moment” in an appearance on MSNBC.
After the Presidential debate, Biden and the Democrats are left to ponder all the terrible ifs
The Democratic National Convention, which is set to formally renominate Mr. Biden in Chicago in August, could choose a different candidate. This would almost certainly, however, require Mr. Biden to voluntarily stand aside, since most of the convention’s delegates are committed to back him.
If Mr. Biden does bow out, his party has no shortage of contenders to replace him. The governors of Michigan, California, Kentucky, Illinois and North Carolina – Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker and Roy Cooper, respectively – are all possibilities. So are Vice-President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
In the debate’s aftermath, they rallied around the President.
In a fundraising memo, Mr. Newsom vowed: “We aren’t going to turn our backs because of one performance. What kind of party does that?” On CNN, Ms. Harris pushed back on suggestions that her boss had a rough time. “Yes, there was a slow start, but it was a strong finish,” she said.
In any event, Mr. Biden is known to mostly trust the advice of a tight circle of long-time advisers, including White House aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, and his sister, Valerie. It is unclear whether they would ever push Mr. Biden to step back.
Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina congressman whose 2020 endorsement helped lift Mr. Biden above a field of younger presidential hopefuls, said on Capitol Hill Friday that the debate was “strike one.” But he said he planned to tell Mr. Biden to “stay the course.”
Mr. Obama tweeted that Mr. Biden had a “bad debate night” but that “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”
A spokesman for the Biden campaign, Michael Tyler, said on Air Force One that there were “no conversations about that whatsoever,” when asked if Mr. Biden would step aside. The campaign earlier sought to blame Mr. Biden’s performance on a cold.
Mr. Biden, who suffered from a childhood stutter, has struggled with public speaking for decades. This, combined with visible physical frailty from arthritis, a series of public slip-and-falls and low-energy appearances, have stoked concern about his age and accusations from Mr. Trump of cognitive decline.
Mr. Trump is less than four years younger than Mr. Biden and himself has regular public memory lapses. But he has largely avoided the criticisms lobbed at his opponent by maintaining a pugilistic style.