Why Biden Was Really Forced Out of the Race, According to Anita Dunn

Anita Dunn has no regrets about holding a historically early debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — and still disputes the notion that Biden’s performance was “catastrophic” for the voters he needed to win over.

In an interview with the Playbook Deep Dive podcast , the longtime Biden adviser recalled watching the debate while monitoring a group of undecided voters turn their dials in positive or negative directions as the event went on. And she said the results might surprise Washington.

“Voters didn’t particularly like Biden’s performance in the first half hour. He wasn’t scoring well at all. But it’s not as though they walked out,” she said. “They very much liked a lot of the second half of the debate for Joe Biden. They hated Donald Trump.”

But the fallout was devastating. If the campaign’s goal was to turn the race into more of a choice between Trump and Biden rather than simply a referendum on the president, it backfired.

Still, even in the ensuing weeks, Dunn thought Biden could hold on.

She had seen him at his political low point in the 2020 campaign — after he had lost the first three primary contests and looked like he was toast — and had helped him turn things around in South Carolina. In Biden world, the press, pundits and politicians always underestimated him.

Indeed, Dunn and the Biden team thought they had seen this movie before. They developed a strategy to power through the media and party mob dumping on Biden, and race to the virtual convention vote, after which they bet that everyone would move on.

But this time it was different. Unlike Biden’s core team, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama and Hakeem Jeffries were never convinced on the legend of Biden.

Dunn’s work for Biden is over, but she’s still campaigning — now headed to the Future Forward PAC, which will work to help elect Kamala Harris as president. In her interview, Dunn discussed Biden’s final days as the nominee, the new political opportunities available to Harris and a lot more.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive producer Kara Tabor and senior producer Alex Keeney. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here:

Given your history in politics, how crazy has the summer of 2024 been in American politics for you?

The crazy quality is very high now. There have been other crazy periods. I would say going back to 2020, that the month of February in 2020 was one of the genuinely crazy experiences that people will have a difficult time replicating in the future, and in particular, the three days between the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday. I've never experienced anything like that. I don't think anybody else has.

Let's back up a little bit to the pre-debate period. In May, you announced jointly that there would be a debate on CNN on June 27. Tell us about the decision-making process that led to this decision to have the earliest debate ever and ditching the Commission on Presidential Debates format. We had your friend Commission co-Chair Frank Fahrenkopf on this podcast not long ago.

I was quite amused by all of the hand-wringing over the commission.

He says you hate the commission.

Yeah, I know, but then he walked that back a little. I am not a hater, okay. And I think people know that I'm not a hater. To be clear, the commission never reached out to the Biden campaign ever to say, “We're thinking about these dates. We're thinking about these locations. What do you guys think about 2020, when we didn't enforce our own rules and let your candidate be exposed to Covid?” We never had those conversations because they didn't reach out to us.

So what led to the decision to do the early debate?

There were a couple of reasons. One is that the race was fully formed quite early, that Biden was the nominee of the Democratic Party, and Trump was going to be the nominee of the Republican Party. Trump was not getting the kind of scrutiny that we felt he deserved, in terms of what he was saying, the policies that he was proposing and the media was trying to figure out how to cover him.

Still are.

They still are. But the net effect of it was that you continued to have a referendum on Joe Biden, and you had Donald Trump, who basically could go and say and do anything without any scrutiny. It was always our belief, and certainly bolstered by our research, that once voters actually were exposed to him again, they would be reminded strongly why they had not felt that they should reelect him to begin with. So we thought the sooner we could have that process begin, the better off we would be as a campaign.

We had started discussions early in the spring, late in the winter about whether we wanted to change that format up, whether we wanted to do it earlier. I think all of us felt very comfortable having news organizations host them as opposed to having the commission host them. And the Trump campaign had already said they didn't want the commission to host them. So we didn't think that would be a problem, as it was not.

We knew that the news organizations would have no problem with hosting them instead of the commission. So we felt that this was something that was imminently doable and that made sense, from a strategic point of view, to force the choice as opposed to the referendum.

Did you have any doubts about the president and putting him in that situation that early?

No we didn't. The president won both debates in 2020. The president went into a pretty hostile chamber for the State of the Union and performed brilliantly.

On a teleprompter, though.

And ad libbing, my friend. A lot of ad libbing there. And his best moments were the ones he ad libbed. He has a history of doing very well in these events, so we felt very comfortable with his ability to do it.

We felt that strategically it would help the campaign enormously to jumpstart the choice piece of this and give us good momentum, particularly given the fact that the Republican convention was mid-July, that Trump would have a vice presidential nominee. So he was looking at a period where he was going to have some decent political momentum and we wanted to have some decent political momentum as well.

So part of it was you take a bite out of the two big free media events that you get in a presidential campaign, the VP and the convention.

Yeah that's right. When you're the non-incumbent, you have the advantage of having one additional big media event when voters kind of pay attention, when you have significant news coverage, and that is your choice of the vice presidential nominee. And we obviously didn't have that. We already had a vice president, so they already had a bit of an advantage in terms of that ability to go out and roll out a vice presidential nominee going into their convention. Also the people who are running his campaign this time are very good.

Running the Trump campaign?

The Trump campaign, no question. They're much smarter. They're running a very competent campaign. We saw that early in this process. And so we had a reasonable expectation that they were going to have a fairly competent roll out and a fairly good convention.

Whose idea was the debate?

It was a joint idea. Everybody had these discussions. We as senior advisers constantly were revisiting assumptions we had made: “Do we have to do it this way? Have we always done it this way?”

Tell us a little bit about the prep, because obviously what people want to know and understand is the Biden that they saw on the debate stage triggered this unprecedented series of events.

One of the questions I get asked all the time is, “Did his advisers do this on purpose because they saw him behind the scenes like we saw him on the debate stage, and they wanted the public and the Democratic Party to see it to air this conversation publicly?”

Okay, so that's ludicrous.

You've heard this, right?

But it's totally ludicrous. The idea that we ever would have put him in that situation is just crazy. You know, we have all been through debate preps with Joe Biden. Some people have been through them since the 1987 campaign.

Like Ron Klain?

And Mike Donilon. I mean people have been through these for a long time with him. There are certainly people who went through it in 2008 and many of us went through it in 2020.

I think all of us have a very good sense of Joe Biden and his strengths. And we felt coming out of the prep that he was fairly well prepared now. He also had a terrible cold that got worse in the course of the week. He was Covid tested I think more than one time by the time we got to Wednesday and it was a Thursday debate. Certainly his voice started sounding raspy and he had a bad, bad cold that was not Covid but I think there was no question that it played a role. He didn't feel well.

Did anyone ever think in the run-up, given the cold and the chances that he might not perform so well, that you should cancel?

Again, we've all worked for Joe Biden for a long time. We've seen him go out there when he wasn't feeling well. We've seen him go out there with colds. He is a game-day player. It also wasn't clear just how badly he was feeling. And I will say I went home Wednesday night, so I did not go to Atlanta on Thursday. I didn't see him that day.

But he came out of that debate and went to a debate watch party and was terrific. He went to a Waffle House and worked the crowd and was terrific. Landed in North Carolina at 1:30 in the morning and greeted every single person there. Did a rally in North Carolina that Friday with a big crowd and did a great job. So I don't think any of us really know why it was. He said it himself, he had a bad night.

But you didn't see that in debate prep?

We did not see it in debate prep. Nope.

Does he blame any of you for this decision to put him in that debate early?

He has not blamed anybody. That is not who Joe Biden is.

Where were you watching the debate?

I watched the debate at home. I watch it on dial groups.

Oh really?

Oh, yes. I watched the dials.

Alright, tell us about the dials.

I will tell you about the dials, because it is a very good illustration of the, shall we say, distance between voters and the elites.

What's the universe of voters you're looking for in those dials?

They are people who are undecided. Some of them voted for Biden in 2020. Some of them didn't vote. A few of them may have voted for Trump, but they're all people who are undecided for 2024 who are not sure they're going to vote for either candidate, who are not sure they're going to vote. So they were undecided.

Set the scene for us. You've got a TV screen with the debate. When you say you're looking at the dials, what is the data or information you're looking at?

When you watch dial groups, people are instructed to start at 50 on their dials. That is the neutral position. If they feel better, they turn it to the right and the numbers go up. And if they don't like what they're hearing, they turn it to the left and the numbers go down.

So it’s immediate feedback.

It's immediate feedback. But you also do a focus group before with a vote and you do a focus group after with a vote. And you hear people's reactions.

And so voters experience this differently. And one of the things that was interesting was that voters didn't particularly like Biden's performance in the first half hour. He wasn't scoring well at all. But it's not as though they walked out. They very much liked a lot of the second half of the debate for Joe Biden. They hated Donald Trump. By the end of this, the first part of the strategy had absolutely worked in that people were like, “Oh, I'd forgotten. I really don't like this guy. He's all about himself, he’s bragging.” I mean, they really did not like him.

So Trump didn't gain any ground in the debate whatsoever. And we actually picked up a few votes in the group. So it was a bad debate, but it didn't feel catastrophic at all, certainly in terms of voters. And I think other people who did independent research saw roughly the same thing. If you go back and you look at the polls, what you will see is you didn't see much movement whatsoever coming out of the debate because the structure of this campaign had been fairly static for a long time, and the debate didn't change that.

What did change it was 24 days of unremitting negative, horrible attacks on Joe Biden.

From his own party?

From his own party and from the press.

So the dial groups that we reporters were all looking at were our iMessages with Democrats across the country who were saying, “Biden has to drop out. They need to replace Biden.” It was immediate. It was within the first 15 minutes.

It was. And then he —

Tell us about that dial group of Democrats across the country who know you and trust you. What's their reaction? When are you getting that feedback?

People start getting that feedback, I would say within 48 hours. And we were sitting there thinking, “You know, the polls really haven't moved. He's out there performing well.” Then this whole narrative took place about how he was,“holed up at Camp David.” He spent Friday campaigning. He spent Saturday fundraising in the Hamptons and then in New Jersey — he ended the day with Governor Murphy.

On Monday, he returned to the White House and spoke to the Supreme Court's decision on immunity in a very strong statement. So this idea that somehow he was “holed up” — now he was recovering still, and that was absolutely true — but the sort of snowball effect really didn't start picking up, I would say, until that week.

That Monday was the Supreme Court opinion, just so people have the timeline. You're saying that that next week is when it started picking up?

Yes. And the data still didn't support this at all. We were looking at it and we were not seeing huge changes. But we were seeing an environment in the press that was just unremittingly negative. And nobody was covering Trump whatsoever. I mean, Donald Trump was out there doing and saying whatever he wanted to do and the press was like, “We don't care.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden is still governing. He's still doing all this important stuff. He's out there campaigning. I went to Wisconsin with him for an event, and people felt very strongly about the bullying. They didn't like it and voters didn't like it. They felt that it was unfair and that it was wrong. So you had a lot of different things going on here. You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public.

Are you talking about senators and House members? Or do you mean like when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate?

Absolutely.

Key moments.

Key moments where people made the decision when it looked like we were reaching a point where we would fight our way through it. I had a lot of Republican friends who were sending me texts during this period saying, “Your party is insane.” They were saying, “We've never seen anything like this. Our party closes ranks. You know, you fight it through. You have a 24-hour news cycle. He had a bad debate, and you move on.”

They could not believe what was going on here. And then you had this decision that the Democratic Party made to ignore their primary voters and ignore their primary process, and that was a very donor-driven thing.

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Do you agree with some of the people who were disappointed about this, that it was essentially a “coup?”

I don't regard it as a coup, for a couple of reasons. One is because the vice president was nothing except unremittingly loyal and supportive to the president throughout this, and was fully engaged in the “What is your plan? What is our plan? What are we doing next?”

So if you're going to have a coup, usually someone has to lead it. And she was 100 percent terrifically loyal. I give her remarkable props. Her staff, she made sure there was never a murmur from anyone in that camp, and that takes an enormous amount of discipline and also an enormous amount of loyalty.

What we have reported and others have reported is that the most significant players in this were Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. How difficult was it to be in the White House and watch those four leaders of the Democratic Party try and push Joe Biden out?

We were just trying to figure out a way to keep Joe Biden in as long as he wanted to. As long as he wanted to run, we wanted to make sure that we were coming up with a way to make sure he could run. And Joe Biden is a person whose personal resilience and ability to get knocked down and get back up is unquestioned.

And I think that we, as a team, have always tried to do our best for him in times like this, when they're tough. Some people on that staff have been through some exceptionally tough times with him. I was on that campaign after he came in fifth in New Hampshire. Had no money. We had people calling us all the time to say he should drop out. And he wasn't ready to do that. He ran because he believed he was the best person to beat Donald Trump. And because he also believed he was the best person to lead the country. Now, if he's not a candidate, he made it very clear that the second-best person was his vice president. And that is where we are now. And I think if you look at the way the vice president has been able to unify the party and excite the party, it was the right decision.

When you say you had a strategy to sort of keep him in, what was the strategy?

Well, the first piece of it was to make it very clear to people that he wasn't getting out. So that was the letter that was sent to Capitol Hill.

Which among some members in Congress, it backfired.

Well, I'm sure it did. But at the same time —

Who wrote that?

I'm not going to talk about the internal details here.

There was a rumor that his son Hunter —

That is not true.

…contributed to it. That rumor turned off some members of Congress when they heard it.

Is that wrong?

To my knowledge, that was not the case. But I will say, he was the nominee. And so this idea that there was a discussion going on was something that we felt — and I think all of us as a senior team felt — we needed to shut down and make it very clear that he actually was not going anywhere, that there wasn't a discussion, there was no open primary to be had out here.

I've been through an open primary kind of push at a convention, and I've been through contested primaries for an incumbent president. It's very simple. They don't have happy endings. The person who's in the White House loses. And we did not want that. We had built throughout this process a lot of protection in there against that.

When these leaders would come and make this argument to you. Was that your best argument against it — that this kind of disruption will lead to Donald Trump winning?

You know, our best argument was that there's only one person who's ever beaten Donald Trump, and he happens to be the Democratic nominee of the Democratic Party, who won over 14 million votes in the primary system in which people were allowed to go out and vote — in which somebody challenged him in New Hampshire, a place he wasn't even on the ballot, and spent a huge amount of money up there, to make the case that he was too old and lost overwhelmingly to a write in campaign for Joe Biden. That was part of our argument. But clearly, this fantasy idea that there was going to be town halls across the country — anyone who knows anything about nominating processes — I’ll just say, we just had a very compressed, two-week process to choose a vice president — how much oppo got dropped on people during that?

A decent amount. Ugly is what you're saying.

It would have been extraordinarily ugly. People don't emerge from that. But also Joe Biden had won the nomination. You know, we're a party that likes to talk about voting and voting rights — and some leaders made a decision that they wanted to go disenfranchise everyone who participated in the primaries. People went and they voted for Joe Biden. So we felt that we were in a fairly strong position.

When did you personally think that you guys weren't going to win this fight?

That weekend when he was at home.

The final weekend.

The final weekend. I tend to be someone who doesn't like to walk away from political fights. And I felt that some of the pieces that we had been putting together in terms of some key core constituency groups —

The CBC was behind him.

The CBC was behind him. Obviously, a lot of progressives were behind him because of his progressive agenda. AOC. Sen. Sanders. I can't say enough good things about him, who has been just a loyal supporter and a good partner and someone who has always been willing to tell us when he thinks we're making a mistake. But that is what you want in a good partner. So we had a strategy, and we felt that we really could fight this thing through, until we couldn't.

Can you tell us about your conversation with him when you got the news?

I think it's been reported publicly that he got on a call with his senior advisers and told us right about the time he was sending it out. But everyone had figured it out by then.

So on Saturday you'd figured it out?

I would say Saturday night, Sunday morning.

And how did you take it?

You know, it was rough. And no reflection on the vice president because I think one of the greatest things about Joe Biden's legacy will be that he made sure that there was a pipeline in which Kamala Harris was going to be the natural person everyone turned to if something happened to him. And putting people in the pipeline for these jobs is so critically important.

But it's a very tough thing to have worked so long towards something and have it end. But at the same time, it's not ending because there is going to be a battle for the soul of the nation with a new standard bearer at the top. And we're all going to have to work very hard because it is a tough race.

In his speech in his Oval Office address, he didn't really explain why he wasn’t going to run again. He didn't say, “I'm not going to be the nominee of my party anymore because I don't have the energy to campaign,” or “If I'm reelected, I can't serve for four more years,” or “I feel fine, but the voters think I'm too old.” He made an allusion to party unity. But he never really said why.

I think you’re going to have to wait until he writes his book. Maybe he'll come on your podcast.

Well, I know the reasons that Schumer and Pelosi were saying to him, which were about those things. It doesn't seem like he ever agreed with those arguments.

Well, I would say he was campaigning. He was campaigning in front of large and enthusiastic crowds. So the idea that somehow he couldn't campaign was just ludicrous. The second thing, though, is he had been performing the job of president and has transformed this country and has been a great president. And even as recently as last week, when he brought the hostages home from Russia.

His approval rating is going up too.

So the idea that he couldn't be president or couldn't campaign for president are both just ridiculous.

So that's not why.

Read his book when he writes it.

I interpret the “unity” thing as, “I think I'm fine. I can run and serve, but they don't think I can. So to preserve party unity, I've got to step aside.”

He'll speak to this when he's ready to speak to it.

Let's talk about the aftermath, the decision to endorse Harris, and her quick consolidation of the party. I assume there was never any question that once Biden made this decision that he was going to endorse Harris?

Never a question.

Because previous presidents have not. Barack Obama famously did not. No question, as far as you know, that that was going to happen?

No, this was not a traditional kind of time. It's a 100-day sprint. And when he chose then-Sen. Harris to be his vice presidential nominee in 2020, it was because he believed she was ready to be president and because he believed politically that she was also very strong. Nothing that has happened over the last three and a half years has changed his view. In fact, it has only solidified that view. He feels that she's ready to be president, and obviously he felt that she was the strongest person politically to come in, unite the party and go beat Donald Trump.

Speaking of running mates, I was reminded today that Tim Walz organized the governors' call and meeting with Biden to talk about Biden staying in the race. I don't know if you were on the call or in the room, but is there anything notable that you remember about Gov. Walz at that moment in time? You don't think he was plotting this whole thing?

[Laughs] No, I did not think Gov. Walz was plotting this whole thing.

In fact, Gov. Walz, somebody we think very highly of, was the co-chair of the Rules and Bylaws Committee.

I did not know that.

We had asked him to play that role. And obviously he was important in the decisions around pushing back a couple of days — but keeping the virtual vote intact — which was something that was very important to us. So he is seen as someone who was very loyal to us. He put together the governors' meeting, and I was not in the room for it, but I think everyone felt that he ran it very well and that it was a constructive and productive meeting.

Just on the virtual vote, because we didn't talk about that: Was the popular view at the time accurate that you were trying to race to the virtual vote to end this conversation and get Biden nominated officially?

We had set the virtual vote a long time before the debate. And we set it because of Ohio but we also set it —

But I thought Ohio changed their law.

Ohio did, but we were concerned. Because they had taken so very long, unlike in the past because the Republican Party has become what the Republican Party is now in terms of how they deal with these issues. And we didn't want to put our candidate in a position where we were going to end up being in federal court in the fall, having to sue to try to get on the ballot, especially because there's a critical Senate race in that state.

We felt that we had already started putting the process in place to do the virtual vote, to make sure it was done early. And even after Ohio said, “Don't worry, we're going to take care of it,” you know, I think a high degree of skepticism toward Republican voting officials these days is not unwarranted.

Are you worried at all that Nebraska could change its rules? Or is that issue basically behind us?

I haven't tracked it that closely in the last month, but it felt as though it was in a pretty good place the last time I checked.

Looking forward to the convention: In terms of party unity — and when people talk about that, they talk about Gaza — what do you think could disrupt party unity at this point?

I think the party is so happy to be unified. The party is just in a great mood. I think that this convention is going to be a very joyous convention. I think that the contrast with the Republicans will be strong, but it's going to be done with a very future oriented thing.

This is a change electorate: 75 percent of the people in this country think the country is on the wrong track. We've all seen this now for two years. That is a change electorate looking for change. And what happened over the past two and a half weeks is that the Democratic Party grabbed the mantle of change, which is very difficult to do when you happen to control the White House and be the incumbent party. But our nominee has grabbed that mantle of change and is moving forward in a way that I think that the Republicans were not prepared for at all.

Donald Trump is still talking about Joe Biden.

And probably will be on Election Day. But also just the dynamic. If you look at what they're trying to do right now, they're trying to run a very conventional playbook against her —

“Liberal, liberal, liberal…”

Exactly. And she's been vice president for three and a half years. She's a very known quantity. She's known but not as known as you think she should be. So she has the opportunity to define herself. But what she has that is so critically important is that she's got change .

Trump had an advantage to some extent on change against Biden because Biden was the incumbent and he was getting to run as the outsider again. Suddenly he's kind of the past. And if you recall, a lot of voters were like, “I don't want either one of them.” Well, now they actually don't have to make a choice between either one that they didn't want. They actually have a very different alternative. So the dynamic here, and in particular, her ability to kind of be and speak and feel and look like a significant change from what's come before — that spirit and that emotion is going to be throughout this convention.

This is where I imagine it's got to be kind of weird for you, and difficult because the argument that you just made is the argument that all of these party leaders were making to you at the White House. For example, “If we just do this, switch up the age issue, the change issue, it will be resolved, we'll have a new race and we'll be back in it.”

That was not the argument they were making. Not at all.

Obviously you're working for Kamala Harris now. You want her to win.

We absolutely want her to win.

But you just went through this whole period where you were absolutely fighting for that not to happen because you were working for Joe Biden. You believed that he should remain. So just psychologically, that's got to be really weird for you to deal with both of those things simultaneously.

It’s not as difficult as you would think. Because first of all, I think the president has set the example for all of us by being the toughest competitor I have ever worked for in my life.

Everyone says he's still very angry at Pelosi, Obama, Schumer, to a lesser extent —

But he is 1,000 percent all-in for Kamala Harris. And that is absolutely true. The task in front of us is to win this election and to not let Donald Trump become president again and to win the House of Representatives, which had certain leaders in 2022 done a slightly better job, maybe we would control today, but we don't.

So to win, to make Hakeem Jeffries a historic speaker, and he will be a great speaker. To keep Chuck Schumer, Democratic leader of the Senate, which is going to be a very, very tough job, but that is the job ahead of us. And it's critical because, as the president has said, this country is at an inflection point. All of us who believe that and who believe Joe Biden when he said that he has one job right now and that is to make sure she wins and that we win the House and we keep the Senate.

Did Biden ever consider not running for reelection?

He told us to assume that he was running for reelection until he told us he wasn't. And so we planned accordingly. And we ran a campaign.

So there was never one meeting where it was like, “All right, we’ve got to make the decision about the reelection. ”

There was never a meeting like that.

It was just always assumed.

It was always assumed.

This is your first day out of the White House in how long?

Since May of 2022.

So what happens when you wake up after the pressure cooker, especially over the last few months, on your first day out?

It's pretty much like any other day. You get your coffee, you check your email, you read the clips. I had a client call, so I got to work.

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