Multiple leading Democrats tell CNN they feel caught in what one described as a “doom loop,” with every move to keep President Joe Biden in or push him out further destroying their chances against Donald Trump.
It’s breaking the resolve of even staunch allies. It’s feeding bad polls. It’s turning off more donors. It’s sustaining a media atmosphere where no matter what Biden does, he comes off looking like a failure.
And for those who were hoping Biden would quit, the public and private pressure, several top Democrats worry, has been backfiring.
“His last act will not be getting knocked down,” said one longtime Biden 2020 campaign aide of the family and the inner circle. “They won’t allow it.”
Even several Democrats who want Biden to go acknowledge they’ve created a situation where he will never be able to satisfy the “tests” skeptics have said he must pass to stay their nominee. They are buckling down harder, especially when the critiques are more based on vibes, like when Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin suggested in a session between top aides and Senate Democrats last week to “put him in a muscle shirt, like Reagan chopping wood,” according to one person briefed on the discussion.
CNN’s conversations with two dozen Democratic officials, aides in the White House and the campaign reelection headquarters and supportive groups demonstrate just how dark and confused the situation has become even with Trump’s rambling and combative convention speech on Thursday night giving the Biden campaign glimmers of hope for the first time in weeks.
Even among aides in the White House and Wilmington who for long after the debate were ready to stick with him, the weight has started to feel too much. They loved saying in 2020 that Joe Biden won because the party decided, and not the pundits. Now it feels like the party has decided again, and the president is drawing out the pain, damage to the party and embarrassment for himself with each hour.
Some say they’ll quit. Some have already “quiet quit,” going through the motions until Joe Biden gets to the end that many of them now believe is inevitable.
“I don’t think you can find a person who is off the record saying he should stay in,” said one person who’s been involved in several of the conversations.
“There’s a growing sense that it’s game over,” said a Biden aide.
Faith in the Biden inner circle – smaller and tighter than ever despite what they have been seeing on TV or hearing directly from top leaders in their own party – has been obliterated. Other senior political and government aides accuse them of delusion and catering to their own self-interest. Major donors are apoplectic.
Many in the next rung of senior aides – who might otherwise be spending time building out campaign operations – have been emailing and texting to check in about how far down into despair they are day by day. They’re discussing their refusal to put their own credibility on the line to make a case for a president that they can no longer see themselves. Crucially, they don’t hear anyone making the case to them.
“It feels like if he could go to Chicago and get the delegates to vote for him now, he would. It feels like if he could go to Congress and make a rousing speech, he would,” said one Democratic operative involved with the campaign. “Whatever your job is, we’re not getting the materials we need to be making the case we need to be making.”
Many tend to learn of existential information involving people who work just a few feet away by reading reporters’ tweets. Trust is low. Calls from the outside are dodged. Multiple senior aides told CNN they worry about voicing the extent of their frustration or even asking questions lest they be tagged disloyal.
Some tried to tap into that same righteous indignation that Biden is projecting at his own party. Biden himself is holding firm – and it’s not just him. Top aides keep telling people they remain sure of his path to win, pointing out how close the election was in 2020, how similar they still believe the electorate will behave in rejecting Trump-style extremism and how those people who are suddenly panicking about his age or the polls were not being realistic about where they were pre-debate.
“Here in HQ, we’re working really hard because on winning campaigns, you work really hard,” said Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz. “There’s an immense sense of pride across our office, because we know how important and critical that work we are doing here is for the fate of our democracy.”
Most leading Democrats agree that democracy is on the line, along with issues like mass deportation and ending climate protections – only intensifying the worry several Democratic officials said they had looking at the Republican convention and see not just confidence, but happiness. They think forward to their own convention in Chicago in a month and dread a week that multiple high-level Biden supporters say right now feels like will be “a funeral.”
Donors play their cards
Fundraising has slowed significantly, though not as much as some have projected. Some involved believe the campaign could end the month millions short of its goal, with both grassroots online fundraising not where they expected it to be and big donors holding out, some of whom have been making a show of sending emails saying they are stopping checks to Biden and other Democrats unless he pulls out.
Biden has never put much stock in donors, and that continues – especially because some of the most prominent names calling for a boycott, including Galaxy Digital LP founder Mike Novogratz and heiress Abigail Disney, had not given to Biden or the Democratic National Committee since 2020, and then only gave a total of $5,600 each. And if Biden doesn’t drop out, several senior people on the campaign believe, many of the donors now saying they won’t give will turn around if truly faced with the reality that the other option is rolling over to a Trump return.
Two sources told CNN Thursday that furious donors are now telling House and Senate Democratic campaign committees they would freeze contributions unless and until party leaders took stronger steps to get Biden to step aside.
“Yes, that card has been played,” a senior House Democrat told CNN Thursday night.
“They believe if Joe is at the top of the ticket, the House and Senate are gone, too,” said a Democratic strategist intimately involved in big-dollar fundraising. “They don’t want to throw good money after bad.”
Democratic strategists are divided about how seriously to take that threat when Trump is the alternative, almost daring the rich donors to hold back if Biden stays with it.
Still, loyalist donors are swamped with emails from their counterparts, asking them to justify still backing the president. Unsure of what to say, with no guidance or talking points, some smaller groups have discussed brainstorming by shared documents on Google or group text chains. But multiple people in that smaller and smaller group are losing faith too.
Sinking morale
Morale has gotten bad enough that some are finger-pointing at each other. In the White House, they look at the campaign and say that at least they are filling their time with official duties, like pushing ahead on policy and running the federal government. In Wilmington, they look at the West Wing and say that while aides there are bemoaning their lives in blind quotes for DC insider publications, they are busy in headquarters still trying to salvage the campaign.
Still, what can come off like a groundswell of calls for Biden to step aside tends to be more haphazard in reality – and with Biden perceiving them differently than those outside do.
While news of his blunt conversations with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries only leaked in the last day, several people who know the president pointed out that Biden was aware of what they said last week and barreled forward still.
One House Democrat who thinks Biden should not run told CNN of days of phone calls that show congressional leaders more actively engaged, citing as proof the decision to push back the virtual roll call vote for Biden’s nomination. People on the fence, the House Democrat said, “Question their position and wonder what more can be done (without doing much themselves, of course….)”
Asked to describe the phone calls between members, the House Democrat said, “It’s mostly talk and posturing and the meetings you’ve heard about, from what I know.”
Biden campaign says the data is still there to claw back
Even as more and more campaign aides acknowledge they could be days away from switching gears to working on the Kamala Harris campaign, some continue to make the case that this entire discussion remains overblown.
They point to numbers like 1,455 people signing up for a single volunteer shift in Pennsylvania on one day in the last week, or 150% more volunteers in the week after the debate than the entire month of May.
“All the quantitative and qualitative things you need to win a campaign, if the question is, ‘Do we have it?’ the answer is yes. I’ve never seen such a disconnect between the numbers and the cable chatter,” said Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground state director, in an interview on Thursday.
Kanninen and campaign aides acknowledge that Biden’s best path to victory is now just holding onto the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, but say they still believe that the backlash to Trump and aligned candidates for Senate and governor in Arizona and North Carolina makes those more in play than most outsiders are accounting for.
They also believe that Biden’s strength with some groups, including among seniors, will give him the ability to claw back from what they argue is likely to be Trump’s high water mark post-convention — which still doesn’t have him over 50% in nearly any poll of any battleground state.
“I feel strongly that based on the record, who he is, the broad coalition that he has assembled and kept makes him uniquely suited to win this election,” Kanninen said.
On many minds: how small the sliver of voters were that determined power in the last two elections. Despite Biden’s 7 million vote win in the popular vote, just 44,000 votes between four states delivered him the Electoral College in 2020, and just 18,000 votes across races in 2022 were the difference between the current five-seat Republican majority and a five-seat Democratic majority in the House.
To those still with Biden, that’s an argument for not creating more chaos. To those who want him out and are imagining what a dirge over the next few months could do to voter enthusiasm, that’s why he has to go. One House Democrat in a district that is not normally considered marginal described the level of worry about losing even that seat now as “DEFCON 2.”
Aides insist that once they can get back to making the contrast against Trump, the polls will change, though several acknowledged that they don’t know how that will possibly happen if Biden stays in the race.
“People are f**ing amped up about this election and they will vote for a dead guy over Donald Trump – that’s how scared people are,” said one top Democratic operative involved.
In the meantime, Biden defenders argue that their party is full of people who are making a bad situation worse and worse.
“What comes to mind is my high school baseball coach constantly reminding us we’re still in control of our own destiny. Keep your head in the game,” said California Sen. Alex Padilla. “Anybody who believes today that we’re going to lose is absolutely wrong, but the only pathway for Democrats winning in November is for all of us to do our part.”
