‘He’s Toast’: No Sale for Biden Among Dems; UPDATE: 5th House Dem Calls for Biden to Withdraw

Did Joe Biden do enough last night to rescue his nomination? As I wrote last night, I wasn’t the target audience for Biden’s prime-time job interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. The fumbling president didn’t intend to pitch voters of either party, but instead the Democrat establishment that is worried about having gaslit voters for the last three years about Biden’s real cognitive collapse.

Did it work? According to Axios’ Andrew Solender, Biden got a No Sale from last night’s pitch:

What we’re hearing: “No one’s mind has been changed,” a House Democrat said, adding that a growing number of lawmakers agree “it’s time” for Biden to step aside and are “hoping to give him space to do this on his own.”

• Another House Democrat said their colleagues feel Biden’s interview was “not impressive” and that “he’s toast” in November.
• Said a third: “The interview hardly inspires confidence. It changes nothing.”
• A fourth House Democrat said they were “shocked” by Biden’s “refusal to recognize reality” in terms of polling and his “failure to make an argument about why he wants a second term.”

Clearly, Biden’s toast in November if he decides to stay in the race. Regardless of what Jeh Johnson tried to argue this week, no one voted for the Annie Tomasini Regency for one term, let alone voting for a second term with aides operating behind a propped-up dementia patient. Biden needed to reassure Democrats that he’s still all there so that they could tell voters to trust them again. 

Instead, while Biden sounded more engaged last night than during the debate — a low bar, of course — he sounded just as disconnected from reality. Politico reports that Democrats on Capitol Hill are aghast at Biden’s fact-free assertions during the interview about his standing in the race, and are convinced that Biden’s “in denial” … at the very least:

Biden’s repeated dismissals and refusal to seriously address concerns about his age and mental acuity struck many Democrats watching the interview closely. A Democratic official who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign said it appears Biden’s team “isn’t being straight with him, and that’s dangerous.”

And Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) said she particularly found Biden’s answer about taking a cognitive test unnerving.

“I found the answer about taking a cognitive test every day to be unsettling and not particularly convincing, so I will be watching closely every day to see how he is doing, especially in spontaneous situations,” she said.

On the hill, Democrats have discussed gathering signatures for letters that would call on Biden to step aside. Those efforts are likely to pick up steam once they gather again in Washington. A growing number of Democratic members and operatives have said privately — and a few publicly — that they believe Biden will be a serious drain on their efforts to wrest back control of the House.

Given the Democrats’ participation in gaslighting voters over Biden’s cognitive collapse, that would prove the democratic process of accountability. Voters will not soon forget that the entire Democrat Party and its media enablers kept insisting that Biden was not just competent but super-competent, running rings mentally and physically around his aides, but always off-stage. These same Democrats insisted that voters couldn’t trust their own eyes when it came to innumerable images and videos showing Biden falling down, getting lost on stage, and most infamously being bodily blocked by the Easter Bunny from talking to reporters on the White House lawn.

Biden’s not the only drain on Democrats’ electoral hopes this November. 

However, Biden certainly is the catalyst. Now the question is whether to keep gaslighting voters for another four months and hope to make Donald Trump so scary that they can get away with it, or get Biden out of the way quickly enough to have voters forget four-plus years of gaslighting. A good performance last night by Biden might have had them considering Plan A, but Politico suggests that Plan B is a-comin’:

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is set to meet Sunday afternoon virtually with Democratic ranking members of committees to discuss mounting concerns over Biden, according to two people familiar with the situation who were granted anonymity to speak freely about the meeting. And Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has approached Senate Democrats to organize a discussion on Biden’s path forward. Both chambers of Congress will be back in Washington from their Fourth of July recess for votes Monday evening, when Democratic leaders will inevitably have to address the topic in person with rank-and-file members.

“Democrats have spent the last few days trying to give him space and grace,” said a former Biden administration official. “Because he’s digging in, we’re seeing an effort to take it up a notch or two. And that should be more worrying to the Biden operation than anything.”

No one will be surprised to see that they’ll have to get past Jill Biden to demand his withdrawal. The Daily Mail reports that the First Lady has already gone on offense against Warner’s effort to organize a demand for Biden’s exit, and has enlisted Hunter in the pushback where it matters most:

While the president has said he has no plans to step aside, he is known be talking to vast number of people, but only listening to views of a very tight circle, including those of his wife.

And Jill is said to have taken a dim view of those wishing to kick her husband off the ticket, as it’s claimed she’s the driving force between his insistence on staying in the race.  The claim was made by ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz moments after Biden’s make or break interview with the network Friday night. 

The ‘inner circle’ of voices that include a select circle of advisers – including son, Hunter, are telling Biden, 81, that he can win and that he needs to keep going with his re-election bid.  

If Jill and Hunter are telling Joe to stay, he’s going to stay — and that will be it. It will be almost impossible for Democrats to forcibly remove Biden from the ticket. A few people have begun to spin scenarios where the delegates can free themselves, and it may be theoretically possible, but it would be a political disaster. Biden won more than 14.4 million votes out of 16.6 million ballots cast in the Democrat primaries, getting 87% of the vote and 99% of the delegates. Will Democrats ignore democracy, especially the democratic results of their own Democrat primaries, to hand-pick a successor while ignoring their own voters — over the objections of the clear winner?

Furthermore, Biden is the current president of the United States. Pulling this off would require Democrats to argue that Biden’s not competent for a second term, which will raise all sorts of questions about his current competency and why he’s still in office. This opens up a cascading series of cans of worms for Democrats. If they can’t talk Biden into leaving, they’ll probably just try to keep bluffing over Biden’s cognitive decline and hope that the presidential election doesn’t infect down-ballot races. Either that, or they may decide to chalk up 2024 altogether and hope for a comeback in 2028. 

All of these options will likely produce the same result in November. The only difference will be in Democrat credibility. 

Update: The momentum has not turned in Biden’s favor. This morning, another House Dem — by Politico’s count, the 5th — called for Biden to pull out. This time it’s a battleground incumbent from a district with which I am very familiar:

“Given what I saw and heard from the President during last week’s debate in Atlanta, coupled with the lack of a forceful response from the President himself following that debate, I do not believe that the President can effectively campaign and win against Donald Trump,” [Angie] Craig said in a statement Saturday morning.

“That’s why I respectfully call on President Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee for a second term as President and allow for a new generation of leaders to step forward,” she added, arguing that the party had “only a small window left” to find the best candidate.

She is the fifth House Democrat to call for Biden to step aside after his debate with Donald Trump[.]

Angie Craig represents my old CD in Minnesota, MN-02, which used to be fairly conservative but drifted liberal over the last decade. If Democrats are worried about MN-02, then they’re likely worried about MN-03 too, and might be worried about carrying the state in November. Minnesota hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1972, the longest streak in the country. I wouldn’t bet on Trump winning this time, but I might not bet against it either.