Locked away in his Delaware beach house while recovering from COVID-19, President Joe Biden received some welcome news Saturday when it became public that Hillary and Bill Clinton were staying by his side.
But the fact that it is news that the former president and former secretary of state are endorsing their fellow Democrat — and not even publicly but privately — underscores how isolated Biden has become within his own party, with some privately saying it is easier to count the number of people who still support the president than those who think he should abandon his reelection bid.
“I’m sure he’s angry and upset at the same time,” said Meghan Hays, who served in Biden’s White House until 2022, but added that he understands the reality of politics and is “known for not holding grudges.”
The defiant tone struck by campaign officials Friday and Biden’s promise to resume campaigning next week were not enough to stem the hemorrhage of support for the president. Some Democrats have already begun to map out potential contingency plans, such as whether Vice President Kamala Harris should seamlessly replace Biden as the top candidate or whether Democrats should prepare for an open nominating convention next month in Chicago, which would be the first in decades.
“Joe Biden is our nominee,” Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Saturday on MSNBC. “But what gives me a lot of hope right now is that if President Biden decides to step down, we have Vice President Kamala Harris, who is ready to step up to unite the party, to take on Donald Trump and to win in November.”
“Remember,” added Warren, a progressive who ran against Biden and Harris for the Democratic nomination in 2020, “80 million people voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020, knowing that Kamala Harris would be ready to step up if necessary.”
Biden’s shrinking circle of loyalists continues to insist that the president made his decision to stay in the race and that the party must overcome this crisis “yesterday,” as Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said on MSNBC Saturday.
“We need to come together as a coalition like we did in 2020,” Munoz added, saying the party must instead focus on the “terrifying” possibility of another Donald Trump presidency.
Still, as of Saturday afternoon, 32 Democratic congressmen and four senators have publicly called on Biden not to seek reelection. And 11 of them have done so in just the last two days, since Trump delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, suggesting that the trend is not reversing.
That remains a small minority among the more than 200 Democratic members of the House of Representatives and the 51 Democrats in the Senate. But Democratic officials and strategists widely estimate that the actual number of people who want Biden to step down is much higher.
Increasingly, the defectors include longtime Biden allies, such as Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who faces a tough re-election year.
Some, advisers and allies said, tried to avoid a public break with the president, hoping he would conclude that he himself should step down, but felt compelled to increase the pressure as Biden retreated.
Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who has known Biden for years, reiterated his call for Biden not to run for reelection in a new Boston Globe op-ed, which revealed a recent incident at a D-Day commemoration where Biden “didn’t seem to recognize me.”
“Sure, this can come with age, but after watching the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem,” Moulton wrote. “It was a crushing realization, and not because someone I care about had a rough night, but because everything is riding on Biden beating Donald Trump in November.”
Moulton called on his fellow Democratic lawmakers “who are deeply concerned but have not said so publicly” to find the courage to speak out.
Lawmakers will return to the Capitol next week, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to speak Wednesday at the request of Republicans.
Meanwhile, in Rehoboth Beach, Biden “continues to steadily improve” from his COVID infection, according to his physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who said Biden has responded well to multiple doses of Paxlovid.
Biden has also been endorsed by the Clintons, who remain a powerful force in Democratic politics. They have actively encouraged donors to stick with the president and have reached out to the White House, offering to help in any way they can, according to two people familiar with their thinking.
“As soon as we get the green light, we will be back on the ground, communicating the contrast (with Trump) directly,” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said at a news conference Saturday morning.
Yet on the same campaign call, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, while endorsing Biden herself, declined to urge her Senate colleagues to do the same. “Each of my colleagues has to make their own decision,” she said, before touting Biden’s record in Michigan.
In the meantime, some Democrats are already looking beyond Biden and considering possible replacement scenarios.
Harris would be the obvious and widely favored successor, but others want a more open process with other options.
A group of legal scholars is circulating a memo to Democratic lawmakers, opinion leaders, donors and other officials laying out the case for what they have called a “snap primary,” which would allow multiple candidates to make their pitches in the days and weeks before delegates formally select a nominee at the Democratic National Convention in late August.
“Harris’ anointing would cause the party to miss a remarkable opportunity to capture the nation’s imagination in the run-up to the convention,” reads the memo, written by, among others, Rosa Brooks, a former Obama and Clinton administration official and informal political adviser to Biden’s 2020 campaign who is now a professor at Georgetown Law School.
Another short-lived group, Delegates for Democracy, directly organized convention delegates around the idea of an open convention, where delegates could, for the first time in decades, actually decide who would represent the party in November.
An unpublished memo written by Democratic pollster Jason Boxt in support of the effort relied on his surveys to argue that Democratic primary voters “overwhelmingly favor removing Biden from the race” and want an open convention, which they see as a legitimate way to select the nominee.
“Delegates have always been the end of the process, the people who nominate the president,” Elaine Kamarck, a longtime DNC member and rules expert, said during a virtual briefing for delegates hosted by the group Friday. “Delegates always choose the party’s nominee.”
However, many other Democrats want to avoid a complicated replacement process if Biden steps down and see Harris as the party’s best — and perhaps only — option to quickly take the president’s place so close to the November election.
“Vice President Harris has the message, the resources, and the experience to defeat Donald Trump and preserve our Republic,” Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., said in a statement Saturday. “Joe, I love and respect you. But the stakes are too high to fail. It’s time to pass the torch to Kamala.”
