Be careful what you wish for, goes the old saying, because you just might get it. This truism may have upended the 2024 presidential campaign before either major party’s nomination convention has even taken place.
President Joe Biden wanted an early debate , largely conducted on his terms, that would give him time to recover if he faltered. But when Biden set out his debate challenge, he sounded confident the matchup was his to lose.
“ Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020,” Biden said in a video posted on X on May 15. “Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate. Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal.” No interruptions, no live studio audience, no conservative moderators, no problem, all starting on June 27.
Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee, made his day. The debate was a disaster, and now Biden’s presidential campaign is hanging in the balance. Many Democrats now concede the 81-year-old incumbent’s age is a problem and that they don’t think he can win. The restrictions that were meant to disadvantage Trump imposed discipline on him and he turned in a commanding performance. But Biden largely imploded on his own.
After an apologetic but energetic rally in the battleground state of North Carolina and a weekend spent licking wounds, with a little family blame-the-aides game thrown in for good measure, it looked like Democrats had stopped panicking and decided to circle the wagons around Biden. It was just one bad night, they kept telling reporters and cable television news hosts.
Former President Barack Obama , in many ways still the real leader of the Democratic Party, came to his erstwhile understudy’s defense. “Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know,” he wrote on X in a nod to his loss in the first debate with Mitt Romney in 2012. “But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”
That was in public. “But for months, Obama has shared with Biden and friends his deep concerns about Trump’s political strengths and the real possibility he is reelected in November,” the Washington Post reported days later. “In December, during a private lunch at the White House, Obama discussed the need for Biden to empower his campaign apparatus, suggesting he install a more senior level decision-maker at the Wilmington headquarters.”
First lady Jill Biden posed for a Vogue cover spread the weekend after her husband suffered the most lopsided debate loss in general election history. The story’s lede wasn’t exactly textbook messaging for combating a populist political opponent: “If you want to know what power feels like, try to get yourself driven around in a motorcade. … It’s as if the world is holding its breath. For you.”
In a post-debate addendum to the puff piece, the first lady told Vogue her family “will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president. We will continue to fight.” The editor’s note added, “Whatever happens in the weeks and months between now and November, it is Dr. Biden who will remain the president’s closest confidant and advocate.”
That was little comfort for Democrats looking for a viable path forward and instead seeing finger-pointing and excuse-making. The initial explanation for Biden’s weak showing was that he had a cold, which made his throat hurt and his voice hoarse. But his arguments against Trump were as bad as he sounded. Biden also decamped to Waffle House afterward, where he glad-handled and showed little outward sign of illness.
Then came leaks that Biden was overprepared for the debate, with longtime aides such as Anita Dunn and former White House chief of staff stuffing his head full of facts and figures rather than letting Joe be Joe. This was one of the defenses made of Ronald Reagan after he had a subpar first debate against Walter Mondale during his reelection campaign in 1984. Reagan, who left the Oval Office nearly five years later at a younger age than Biden entered it, was the oldest person ever to serve as president at the time.
Except Biden was given six days at Camp David to prepare. The White House cleared his schedule, as it has done ahead of other big moments in his presidency, including the State of the Union address many Democrats had hoped would put age concerns to rest. The result didn’t make it seem like Biden had been cramming. He was unaware that Snopes had rated claims about the “very fine people” Charlottesville Trump quote. Biden mangled a promising answer about abortion, his strongest issue in the midterm elections two years ago, into a mumbled mess about illegal immigrants not being the only people committing rape in the United States, in the meantime highlighting the murder of a young woman by an illegal immigrant and the broader border crisis, one of his weakest issues.
Biden’s next rationale for his debate drubbing was to blame his busy travel schedule. “I wasn’t very smart,” he said at a fundraiser in McLean, Virginia. “I decided to travel around the world a couple times, going through I don’t know how many time zones — for real, I think it 15 time zones. ... I didn’t listen to my staff.” But Biden had been back for 12 days by the time of the debate and had spent the week leading up to it in Camp David.
If this messaging didn’t accentuate Democratic concerns about their putative standard-bearer, the sight of Hunter Biden at White House meetings had them even more perplexed. The business dealings, trading on the family name, and drug use of the president’s son have been a scandal for years. The younger Biden is now a convicted felon, a label at the center of the Democrats’ campaign against Trump.
Then came the polls. The Biden campaign had warned the post-debate numbers might be bad. “If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls,” Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a June 29 memo, rattling off a series of negative headlines about Obama’s debate loss to Romney. The campaign later released internal polling showing Biden still behind Trump, albeit narrowly.
One major difference with Obama in 2012 and Reagan in 1984, aside from the extent of the defeat, was that Biden was already trailing pre-debate. The week after limping out of his Atlanta, national polls came out showing Trump’s lead had grown to as much as 6 points. Polling was then leaked from a Democratic firm purportedly showing Biden losing in all the battleground states and close or trailing in several others not previously deemed to be close.
The dam has yet to break, but fissures are showing. Congressional Democrats are going public with their concerns about Biden’s electability. Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), whose district has gone for Trump in the last two presidential elections and whose whole state may now be in play in November, wrote an op-ed saying it was just fine for democracy if the former president returned to power. At this writing, two dozen House Democrats are preparing to ask Biden to step aside if unspecified improvements are not made soon.
Former top Obama adviser David Axelrod laid out the Democratic dilemma shortly after the debate ended on CNN. On the one hand, he warned his Republican co-panelists, “If, for whatever reason, there is a change at the top of the ticket, you guys are in trouble with Donald Trump.” But making that change won’t be easy.
“This isn’t the ‘60s, OK?” Axelrod said. “Voters choose the nominee. He is the nominee, only he can decide whether he’s going to continue … this is a guy with a lot of pride who believes in himself. The idea that he’s going to say, ‘You know, I had a bad debate, I think I’m going to walk away from this.’ I find it hard to believe.”
It isn’t the ‘60s, and Democrats have bad memories of their last contested convention in Chicago in 1968. (Their sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, had bowed out after a close call against Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary.) There are, however, options desperate Democrats may explore.
Democratic delegates are technically not bound to their candidate of choice, according to rules that permit them to “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” Veteran Democratic operative Elaine Kamarck argued in her 2016 book Primary Politics that this language “leave[s] open the possibility that future conventions could overturn the verdict of the primaries and save a party from defeat in November.” A Reuters-Ipsos poll found that a third of Democrats want Biden to drop out of the race. A USA Today-Suffolk University poll determined 41% of Democrats want Biden replaced.
It would take a higher percentage of the more than 3,900 delegates committed to Biden to abandon him for his replacement. It takes 1,976 to win the nomination. If no one can secure the nomination on the first ballot, the more than 700 superdelegates, mostly elected officials and other important Democratic leaders, can then vote. Their support would be critical to either Biden’s survival or the selection of someone else.
Vice President Kamala Harris has started polling slightly better than Biden in the aftermath of the debate, though CNN found she and others frequently floated as Biden substitutes still trail Trump. She has been unpopular for most of her term, leading many Democrats to want to pass her over for the top spot or replace her entirely as well. In that scenario, they eye either Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) or a swing-state option such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI). (Both have said they are committed to Biden.)
But campaign finance experts believe Harris could keep the money Biden has raised, a big advantage now that Trump has begun enjoying fundraising success. At most, the Biden war chest could be transferred to other Democratic entities not fully under the candidate’s control if another nominee is chosen. Harris might also have more democratic legitimacy than a person who was never part of the process at all, an important consideration given that Democrats have framed the election as a defense of democracy.
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None of this has ever happened before. No major party presumptive nominee has withdrawn or been toppled at this late date. Biden would like to keep it that way.
Biden entered the debate trailing Trump. Now he may lose Democrats, too.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
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