Joe Biden isn’t going anywhere for now, despite his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27. It has sparked a low-grade civil war among Democrats, however, with top donors wanting Biden to get the boot, whereas 66 percent of the party base wants him to remain. Still, with devastating polling on how voters feel regarding his mental health—72 percent think he’s too old—the whisper campaign to remove Biden will continue; blood is in the water.
It also doesn’t help that, at least on its face, Democratic governors are backing the president. The emergency meeting at the White House on Wednesday, where Biden tried to convince at least 20 governors he was sane, was loaded with nuggets, both of interest to the public. The first is that Biden said he needs to sleep more, do less work, and cut down on events after 8 pm. The second was the secret doctor’s visit, which was only disclosed because of this meeting, and the president said that his health was fine, but his brain was not—a remark his campaign said was a joke. Was it, however?
Another damning development had Biden losing in Wisconsin by seven points.
As Politico reported, the message Democratic governors had to their congressional counterparts over booting Biden was “drop dead.” The situation is fluid; things could change, but the publication also discussed why governors are stacking sandbags around the Biden White House, at least for now. And it all has to do with the 2028 election. It’s politics at its best, especially the final passage of this article [emphasis mine]:
Most congressional Democrats simply see no path to take back the House and hold their Senate majority if they are led by a president who large majorities of the country, as new polls indicate, believe is too old for the job.
Yet by showing up at the White House and then, more significantly, offering public displays of support, the governors only encouraged a standard bearer many lawmakers feel is doomed — and will doom them. Most House Democrats are outrunning Biden in their internal surveys, I’m told by people familiar with the results. But they know they can’t overcome his drag if he’s losing their seats by 15 points rather than mid-single digits. “Hence the terror,” as one operative working on congressional Democratic races explained.
Even more infuriating to Democrats on Capitol Hill is the personal politics they sniff in the governors’ declarations of support. Few of the governors have to run for reelection this year, but more than a handful of them are eager to seek the presidency in 2028. And there’s no path for any of them then if Vice President Kamala Harris by then is President Harris seeking reelection. Moreover, if she runs a credible, last-minute race and loses narrowly this year to former President Donald Trump, it still may be difficult to deny her the nomination in four years.
“Sink Kamala so she’s not the nominee in both ’24 and ’28,” as one House Democrat texted upon hearing of the governors rallying to Biden.
Not all the governors are so cynical of course. And I don’t think any of them want to see Trump back in the White House.
Still, many of the chief executives are now deeply skeptical that Biden can stop him.
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For the moment, though, the governors offered Biden a temporary lift, even if that wasn’t their intention. They just didn’t want to tell the president to his face, much less the television cameras on the White House driveway, what they actually think.
“Trust me,” one Democratic governor told me after the White House session, “the governors I know are not supportive and want a change.”
That says it all. Biden is supposedly going to launch his media rehabilitation tour with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton operative, though we have reports that it might not last even 15 minutes. It also won’t be aired live. There have been training wheels on this presidency, which the media has faulted for preventing them from reporting on the president’s mental decline—a weak sauce pivot everyone sees through. They didn’t want to damage a Democratic presidency. But now that they’ve highlighted where they opted to be lazy instead of intrepid, they touched on another red flag: if Joe is fine, why won’t the training wheels come off? If anything, it’s as if the lane guards at the bowling alley just got sturdier.
We all know why.