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BY: Jacqueline Desrosier’s
WASHINGTON — It appears that Joe Biden has outlived his significance and importance to the Democrat party. Less than twenty-four hours after Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had a meeting with him to discuss his viability as the nominee of the party, people close to Biden are now saying that “it is not a matter of if but when” Biden will step aside.
Joe Biden’s political world has collapsed after top allies and big wigs in the Democrat party have either publicly or privately called on him to step aside. Major donations have fallen off a cliff. Grassroots fundraising is not keeping up with the demands of a campaign that needs to aggressively scale up three months before the presidential election. Members of his own re-election effort have already declared that Biden has no path to victory.
Since this disastrous debate in Atlanta upended the trajectory of his campaign three weeks ago, Biden has again and again attempted to dig in, bucking efforts to dislodge him from power.
However, there is now a palpable sense that the ground has shifted underneath him, especially after former President Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and others have told him he must step aside. According to five people with knowledge of the situation, even among some of the president’s most defiant backers internally who now believe the writing is on the wall.
“We’re close to the end,” a person close to Biden said.
That person, who previously doubted Biden would ever step aside, acknowledged that it’s still the president’s decision but joined in the array of Biden allies who say he is nearing a point of no return.
As the extraordinary events unfolded, the president tested positive for COVID on Wednesday and retreated to his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, taking him off the campaign trail. Once again, it offered a sharp contrast with former President Donald Trump, who, even after his brush with death on Saturday, will appear at a raucous coronation at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday night.
Also Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff, who is running for the Senate in California, made a remarkable public call for the president to abandon the nomination, a move that ended up exposing that other Democratic leaders — including Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Chuck Schumer — had brought dire concerns, supported by polling, to the president, indicating that he risked taking down control of Congress with him if he stayed on the same path.
In the hours after the assassination attempt on Trump last weekend, some Democrats said — even feared — that the calls for Biden to step aside would be “frozen” as the president dealt with a national crisis. But that faded quickly. Some allies now say that the shooting, which has caused an even more intense rallying around Trump within his party, only makes it more glaringly obvious that the nagging narrative of whether Biden is on a cognitive decline cannot win the White House.
A person with knowledge of the projections said the Biden campaign now expects it will raise only 25% of the big donor money it had originally projected to raise in July — that’s a further downgrade from the expectation last week that large-dollar fundraising would be down by as much as 50%. The money has “dried up,” this person said.
One Democratic lawmaker on Wednesday said if Biden didn’t agree to step aside, the cacophony of calls will grow only louder, with more lawmakers expected to urge him to do so. The lawmaker called it a “sad moment” for the party.
A sense of reality is beginning to wash over some of the president’s top campaign lieutenants, who have endured streams of phone calls from donors and one-time supporters flagging that they cannot back Biden.
A person who spoke with a senior campaign official said a sense of a new reality has fallen over the campaign.
“They’re finally realizing it’s a when, not if,” the person said.
There has been a shift behind the scenes in the president’s openness to stepping aside, according to multiple people close to Biden, despite his aggressive insistence in public appearances and private phone calls with allies that he is not going anywhere.
Biden had already, in the opinion of some of the president’s aides, shown signs that if he were convinced he had no path “he would not go forward with this,” a person with knowledge of the president’s conversations with aides said.
NBC News previously reported that Biden’s private conversations with aides grew more “reality-based” and included talk of how Biden’s legacy could be defined by his having a prolonged stalemate with his own party or by losing the White House to Donald Trump, whom Biden himself has repeatedly warned is a danger to American democracy.
