‘A missed opportunity’: Groups critical to Biden’s success say they’re shaking off bad debate

RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA — On calls with reporters Friday, leading reproductive rights advocates acknowledged that President Joe Biden’s showing in Thursday’s debate versus former President Donald Trump fell short. So too, to varying degrees, did women voters who came to the North Carolina state fairgrounds to see the president at a post-debate rally.

But all of them — key to Biden’s reelection chances — vowed to continue supporting him, seeing it as the way to avoid another Trump term.

Biden’s speech here was considerably more energetic than his performance in Thursday night’s debate, which spurred a fresh round of panic over his age, mental acuity and ability to serve another term. Top advocates also expressed disappointment with Biden’s remarks on abortion , which they viewed as a missed opportunity to make a strong argument and attack Trump on a top issue for Democrats. But the day after, Democratic voters and volunteers in North Carolina said Biden’s showing didn’t change their strong support for the president and opposition to another term for Trump.

“I think that he had a rough night, and I think a lot of us have rough nights, we’re human beings on the campaign trail,” said Evonne Hopkins, a Democratic candidate for the state House in North Carolina. “But I don’t think that one experience defines him as a candidate.”

Janice Lynn, a voter who lives in Raleigh and was attending her first Biden rally, said she supports the president because she believes he is an “honorable man” and tells the truth. Under Biden, “my economy’s better,” she said.

“Even if he does have age going against him, it’s not the end of the world,” she said of the debate. “He had some good moments.”

The voters who turned out for the Biden event were more upbeat than some top Democrats. Thursday night’s presidential debate, hosted by CNN in Atlanta, was the first time Trump and Biden directly faced off in nearly four years. Under conditions agreed to by both candidates, there was no live audience, and the two moderators could cut the candidates’ microphones.

Biden’s raspy voice, often-halting performance and stumbling over some of his answers did little to quell ongoing concerns over his age. Biden, 81, would be 82 upon taking office for a second term in January 2025 and 86 upon finishing a second term. Trump is 78.

Biden caused further headaches for advocates with his response to a softball question on abortion, a leading issue for his campaign. His response began with calling the loss of abortion rights “a terrible thing” before veering off into rambling comments about victims of incest and young women allegedly killed by undocumented immigrants, a top line of attack against Biden for Trump and Republicans. Later in the debate, Biden gave a somewhat difficult-to-parse description of “the three trimesters” that the Supreme Court had established in Roe v. Wade.

Biden also did not clearly articulate his campaign’s message that pregnant people, not political leaders, should make decisions about their reproductive health care.“We’re in a state where, in six weeks, you don’t even know whether you’re pregnant or not, but you cannot see a doctor, have you, and have him decide on what your circumstances are, whether you need help,” Biden said.

“For months the campaign has been discussing why Biden is the person who’s going to [restore] Roe and  his allyship with the repro movement. And then you watch the debate and you’re just thinking, this is abysmal,” said Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights policy at the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive advocacy group. “We needed him to be strong, and he just wasn’t.”

Nourbese Flint, president of the abortion advocacy group All* Above All, said Biden squandered the chance “to draw the difference between him and Trump, as well as to talk about the real impact that these abortion restrictions and the Dobbs decision [that ended the federal right to abortion] have had on people’s lives and their families.” She noted, however, that the four months until the election leaves “a lot of time for the campaign to reassert that conversation.”

“It was a missed opportunity, and there’s a lot of ground to make up,” she said. “I am very interested and ready to throw down to make up that ground because of what’s at stake.”

The Biden campaign’s efforts to make up that ground started in North Carolina, where Biden and First Lady Jill Biden traveled for the post-debate rally in Raleigh. The Biden campaign is investing significant amounts of money and resources into North Carolina, a red-leaning battleground state that Democrats see as a potent opportunity to flip blue.

“It’s showing a priority on the South, which I have been asking for,” said Anderson Clayton, the state Democratic Party chair. “The true to form is that we haven’t been investing in areas that look like this in past presidential elections like we’re seeing in this one.”

The crowd at Friday’s rally was predominantly composed of committed Biden supporters — the type of people the Biden campaign needs to turn out, but not the ones who still need to be persuaded. Voters in attendance acknowledged the president faltered during the debate but said they believed Trump’s false statements were much worse. Some criticized a lack of on-air fact-checking by the moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and said they believed the media’s response to Biden’s performance was overblown.

“My reaction is different than everybody’s else’s,” said Carla Thorpe, a voter from Willow Spring, North Carolina. “I thought Joe did fine. I think he tried to answer the questions, address the issues and to relay his policy ideas … and he was derailed by his opponent.”

Thorpe said as a woman of color, democracy is her most important voting issue. She views the health of democracy as at stake in the election. Trump did not commit during the debate to accepting the results of the 2024 election.

Beth Place, a voter who lives in Durham, said she supports Biden for the respect he’s earned on the world stage, saying, “we were a laughingstock” under Trump. She argued that though the debate “wasn’t the best showing” for Biden, CNN did a “disservice” by not fact-checking Trump in real time (CNN reporter Daniel Dale fact-checked the debate online.). Biden, in her view, gave the best answers he could under the circumstances.

“He didn’t divert like the other guy,” she said.

While some down-ballot Democrats, including on Capitol Hill, were scrambling to distance themselves following Biden’s debate performance, North Carolina’s top two Democrats — Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee — appeared at the rally to introduce Biden.

A far more energetic and engaged Biden emerged on stage, speaking for about 20 minutes with some interruptions by pro-Palestinian protesters. Biden hammered Trump on a long list of topics, charging that Trump set a record for lies told during a presidential debate, slamming him as “a one-man crime wave” and repeating his debate dig that Trump has “the morals of an alley cat.”

He also addressed some of the criticisms of his debate performance.

“I know I’m not a young man. I know I don’t walk as easy as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to,” he said. “But I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job … and I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back up.”

The Democratic party’s focus on abortion may put a renewed spotlight on Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been a key messenger on reproductive health for the administration. She has traveled around the country in support of abortion access, and hammered on the point during post-debate interviews where she also defended the president.

Aprill O. Turner, vice president of communications for Higher Heights PAC, a group that promotes Black women’s political power, said the Biden campaign would be smart to deploy Harris more in the months ahead.

“As we uplift Black women in electoral politics, we have, since day one, been a huge Vice President Harris fan, and think she’s doing a phenomenal job. And last night, got out there again and still did that. In this particular year, in the past few months, we’ve seen her out there more and more out front, and I think that she speaks to a lot of the key demographics that Democrats will need to be successful this cycle, and they need to even use her more.”

That kind of attention on Harris comes as some top Democratic strategists and pundits openly speculate on the possibility of replacing Biden during the upcoming party convention in August. Such a move in modern American politics would be unprecedented.

“I absolutely think that’s the craziest conversation I’ve ever heard,” said Thorpe, one of the North Carolina rally attendees, adding she was “really disappointed” to see MSNBC anchors considering the possibility on air. “At this stage in the game, you don’t start over again. They knew his age when they picked him. It’s not a secret.”

North Carolina state Sen. Sydney Batch said she hoped that America wouldn’t pick Trump — whom she called “ a convicted felon who has routinely lied” over Biden, and pointed to Harris as backup.

“He has an overly qualified woman who’s the vice president. So if he can’t for some reason — God forbid, something happened, he has somebody who could step in. Or you have Trump, who is a convicted felon,” Batch said.

The notion that Biden might not serve another full term has been a talking point for Republicans for some time. Shortly after the debate, the Trump campaign released an ad that equated a Biden reelection with support for the ascension of Harris.

At the rally Friday, Democrats were buoyant during and after Biden’s remarks.

Tyson Rodriguez and Maureen Dougher, who are active with the Democratic Party in Burke County, North Carolina, gave rave reviews to Biden’s rally speech. “Today he sounded great and was full of energy,” Rodriguez said.

“I also thought, ‘Why didn’t he say that last night?’” Dougher added. “They seem to be afraid to say things in debates when he had so many good points to make: just say it in the debate.”

Dougher, added, however, that she wasn’t disappointed in Biden’s debate performance.

“He answered every question, Trump did not answer questions. He had a plan, Trump didn’t have a plan. Trump just talked around in circles with no foundation in what he was saying,” she said.

Clayton said the rally was the most energizing one she’d seen in the state in the 2024 election cycle, a sign that “the South is primed and ready to go.”

“I think everyone is allowed to have a bad day. I know that I’ve had them in this job sometimes too,” she said. “But I know the Joe Biden I just saw on that rally stage is someone that’s ready to take on Donald Trump head-to-head and toe-to-toe, and we’re going to do it this year.”