Have the Democrats ever been in greater disarray? Not in recent years. The resulting social media schadenfreude has been entertaining as White House aides, members of President Joe Biden’s family, Democrat lawmakers, and media pundits trade barbs and leak damning details.
In the chaos, however, a growing number of Democrats have arrived at the same conclusion that the Biden family is furiously trying to avoid: even if he's still on the ballot, Biden won’t win this election and Trump will return to the Oval Office.
“The dam breaks on Biden” is how Politico characterized the developments on Tuesday as lawmakers began publicly declaring defeat on the president’s behalf.
First, it was longtime Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett, who has served on Capitol Hill through five presidential administrations. In a statement on Tuesday, the representative from Austin rang the alarm bell over Biden running “substantially behind Democratic senators in key states” and trailing Trump in “most polls.”
It is “too great a risk to assume that what could not be turned around in a year, what was not turned around in the debate, can be turned around now,” Doggett noted in his call for Biden to withdraw from the race.
The same day, an op-ed by Democrat Rep. Jared Golden of Maine was published declaring “Donald Trump is going to win” in November.
Golden emphasized that “Biden’s poor performance in the debate was not a surprise” — despite the surprised reaction feigned by many Democrats and mainstream media pundits. “It also didn’t rattle me as it has others, because the outcome of this election has been clear to me for months,” Golden’s piece continued. “While I don’t plan to vote for him, Donald Trump is going to win. And I’m OK with that.”
Also on Tuesday, Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington revealed to ABC affiliate KATU 2 that she had tuned into last Thursday’s debate “for about five very painful minutes.”
“We all saw what we saw, you can’t undo that,” Gluesenkamp Perez concluded in the interview. “The truth, I think, is that Biden is going to lose to Trump,” she concluded. “The damage has been done by that debate.”
Indeed it has.
In addition to these three Democrat lawmakers, reports quoting a Democrat aide in the House suggest that there are “25 Democratic members of the House of Representatives preparing to call for Biden to step aside if he seems shaky in coming days” as “ moderate House Democrats in competitive districts — often called ‘frontliners’ — were getting hammered with questions in their districts” following the debate. "It looks like the dam has broken,” the aide said.
Even President Joe Biden himself seems to be coming around to the idea that he might be finished before he thought he’d be. Reporting from The New York Times and confirmed by CNN said that Biden had told one of his allies he knows that his political career and 2024 campaign are on the line — with an eye toward an interview with George Stephanoupolos later this week along with campaign events and a press conference at the NATO summit in D.C. next week.
Specifically, the reports stated that Biden “knows he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince the public in the coming days that he is up for the job.” The White House tried to issue a blanket denial of the story despite both the Times and CNN confirming the ally’s conversation with Biden about his political future.
The left will always eat its own — it’s a tale as old as time. Watching it play out at the highest levels of the Democrat machine with the White House press shop brawling with some of its closest allies and blame being traded between the Biden family and Biden’s aides is, in a word, delicious.