“No one involved in the effort feels they have found their way”

WASHINGTON — Several of President Joe Biden’s closest allies, including three people directly involved in the effort to reelect him, told NBC News they now view his chances of winning as zero — and that the likelihood of him beating other Democratic candidates is increasing.

“He has to give up,” a Biden campaign official said. “He’ll never recover from this.”

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For the past two weeks, Biden has struggled to stabilize his campaign after the debate debacle in late June. His ongoing cleanup effort, which is set to include a private meeting of his top advisers with Democratic senators and a presidential press conference on Thursday, has done little to reassure lawmakers and party officials.

On the contrary, the opposite happens.

The group of Democrats who think he should reconsider his decision to stay in the race has grown to include aides, operatives and officials tasked with guiding his campaign to victory. Those who spoke to NBC News said the sentiment that he should leave the race and hand the Democratic nomination to someone else — most likely Vice President Kamala Harris — is widespread even within the ranks of the campaign and outside Democratic entities that support it.

“No one involved in this effort thinks he has a path forward,” said a second person working on his election.

A third person familiar with the reelection campaign said the current situation — questions about Biden’s cognitive abilities, a lack of fundraising and a growing body of polls showing Biden losing ground and other candidates doing better — is untenable. The person also said he or she doesn’t see how the campaign can win.

All spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen as further damaging a candidate they liked for his victory over then-President Donald Trump in 2020 and his political successes in the White House. But two others close to Biden told NBC News that while they had not given up hope for a turnaround, they viewed it as increasingly unlikely. And they said the goal of defeating Trump in November should take precedence over supporting Biden.

“The question for me, and for many of us, is: Who is the best person to beat Donald Trump?” said another person working to elect Biden. “A lot of us are true supporters and are questioning our initial assumptions about this.”

“This is patently false,” Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said. “This team supports the president.”

Ultimately, it’s up to Biden to decide whether he stays in office, and the president insisted this week that he won’t leave. But these sources say Biden is done, whether he steps down before November or loses to Trump on Election Day.

Hours after NBC News asked Biden advisers about that conclusion, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez sent a memo to staff on Thursday explaining why they think the president can still win.

“Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: This is still a race on the margin of error in key states,” they wrote. “The movement we observed, while real, does not constitute a sea change in the state of the race – while some of that movement came from swing voters to Trump, much of the movement was driven by historically Democratic constituencies that shifted to swing voters.”

O’Malley Dillon and Chavez Rodriguez said they still view Georgia and Arizona – states Biden won in 2020 but now trailing in polls – as winnable, as well as the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“No one denies that the debate was a failure,” they wrote. “But Joe Biden and his campaign have overcome failures before. We are clear about what we must do to win. And we will win by moving forward, united as a party, so that every day between now and Election Day, we focus on defeating Donald Trump.”

Biden’s defenders pointed to a 538 forecast for the fall election that shows the president’s chances of winning were virtually unchanged after the debate, remaining at 48 out of 100. In the 538 average, Biden is 2.1% behind Trump.

But Democrats this week saw shifts in other polls that raised alarms, including an AARP poll showing Biden trailing in Wisconsin, which was his best swing state.

“This is the brightest spot in the presidential campaign,” said a longtime Democratic presidential campaign strategist. “We have this window of time and the White House is running out the clock, which is very selfish. We’re all waiting for Joe Biden to make another mistake, which is not a good position to be in.”

NBC News reported Wednesday that campaign fundraising was slowing as major Democratic and grassroots donors closed their wallets. At the same time, Trump, who is set to accept the Republican nomination next week, has raked in significant amounts of money.

Many Democrats fear that Biden will not only lose, but perform so poorly that he will serve as an anchor for second-tier candidates.

“I worry that the symbol of our party is who runs for president and that absolutely carries over to the races down the ballot,” said the chairman of a state party who wants Biden to drop his campaign.

The Biden campaign has begun quietly assessing the viability of Harris’ candidacy against Trump in a new comparative poll, a source familiar with the decision told NBC News.

The person said the survey was conducted amid an intensification of the presumptive Republican nominee’s attacks on her, as he did at a recent rally in Florida. The survey will take place this week and was commissioned by the Biden campaign’s analytics team, as The New York Times reported.

Separately, one Democratic official noted that testing Harris’ standing against Trump would be instructive in showing Biden whether she could fare better, worse or on par with him in current polls, and that could be a reason to do it now.

But as more Democrats come to the conclusion that Biden can’t win — and shouldn’t try — his innermost circle has shrunk to include only family members and a few longtime advisers, according to two people familiar with the deliberations over the campaign’s future.

The combination of Biden’s public failures and his reliance on an increasingly insular cadre of advisers in private has damaged Democratic insiders’ confidence in his ability to make the best decisions for himself, the party and the country.

A Democratic lawmaker close to Biden said that while he would “never publicly disavow” the president, he believes stepping down would be “the right thing to do for himself and the country.”

The lawmaker argued that Biden still has a chance to beat Trump. Still, he said Biden’s legacy would be “completely ruined” if he ultimately loses and drags down Democratic candidates. Public calls for Biden to withdraw from the race, the lawmaker said, are “counterproductive” because they make the president more likely to retaliate.