Democrats panic as Biden stumbles in bad-tempered debate with Trump

Leading Democrats have urged Joe Biden to reconsider his re-election campaign following a lackluster performance in the presidential debate with Donald Trump. The debate reignited concerns about the 81-year-old president’s age and mental acuity. During the event, Biden, speaking with a hoarse voice, frequently stumbled over his words, delivered incoherent responses, and seemed to lose his train of thought. Meanwhile, Trump seized the opportunity to label Biden as the worst president in US history.

The debate was a critical opportunity for Biden to address widespread concerns about his age in front of a television audience of tens of millions of American voters. However, a Democratic lawmaker stated that Biden’s performance had triggered serious panic on Capitol Hill. “Many House Democrats tonight, representing a wide cross-section of the Democratic caucus, were privately texting one another that Biden needs to announce he’s decided not to run for re-election. We need a new nominee,” the lawmaker said. “Biden needs to do the patriotic thing and step aside. We need an open convention, which would excite the American people unlike anything we have ever seen.”

One Democratic party insider said after the debate that there was a “higher level of panic than I’ve seen or thought possible”. “He confirmed our worst fears,” said another. Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, said the Democrats were “in panic for very good reason”. He added that the party was now “forced to say openly what they have known for quite some time: Joe Biden cannot be the president in the next term”.

David Axelrod, a one-time senior adviser to former president Barack Obama, said on CNN that Biden had scored points on some policy matters, but added: “There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue.” Obama’s ex-campaign manager David Plouffe described it as a “Defcon 1 moment”, referring to the label for the highest alert level for US armed forces. “It really pains me to say this,” he told MSNBC. “[Biden and Trump] are three years apart. They seemed about 30 years apart tonight. That is going to be the thing that voters really wrestle with.” But Biden seemed undeterred, telling reporters at a late-night stop at a Waffle House restaurant in Atlanta: “I think we did well.”

Asked about calls for him to step aside, and whether he had any concerns about his debate performance, Biden — who said he had a “sore throat” — replied: “No. It’s hard to debate a liar.” Biden was due to hold a rally in North Carolina on Friday, with a spokesperson for his campaign saying he would be “riding on the momentum of [his] decisive win” in the debate.

The Biden team had advocated for an unprecedented early presidential debate in June, more than four months before the November election, in an effort to rejuvenate the president’s struggling campaign and remind voters why they chose him over Trump in 2020. However, this strategy backfired, as Biden failed to alleviate the widespread concerns among voters, as indicated by polls, that he is too old for another four years in the White House.

In one rambling answer early in the debate, Biden appeared to lose track of what he was saying: “Making sure that we continue to . . . strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we are able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I have been able to do with the Covid, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do . . . look, if we finally beat Medicare.”

The Biden campaign later announced that Thursday had been its single biggest day for grassroots, or small-dollar, donations since the president launched his re-election bid. But big-dollar Democratic donors were raising alarm bells after the debate. “When I last saw him he wasn’t great but definitely more coherent than in tonight’s debate,” one dealmaker said. “I’m not sure there is an alternative at the moment but if there ever was a chance to change things up it’s now.”

Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic strategist and adviser to prominent donor Reid Hoffman, wrote that Biden “had a horrible night, cementing concerns about his age, his greatest electoral weakness”, according to a letter seen by the Financial Times.

In one of the debate’s exchanges on abortion rights, which has proven to be a winning electoral issue for Democrats in the past two years, Biden pivoted instead to illegal immigration, an electoral weakness for his party. Kyle Kondik, a non-partisan analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said: “If people were concerned about Biden’s age, I don’t think he did anything to ameliorate those concerns.” “I would imagine there is going to be a lot of bedwetting [among Democrats] after this debate,” Kondik added.