WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s political world is collapsing. Top allies 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 he has no path to victory.
Since a 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.
But there is now a palpable sense that the ground has shifted underneath him, 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 have unfolded, the president tested positive with 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.
Outwardly, campaign officials remain steadfast in their assertion that Biden isn’t going anywhere.
“The president is feeling fine, he is self-isolating in Delaware,” Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for the Biden campaign, said at a news conference in Milwaukee. “Our campaign is not working through any scenarios where President Biden is not the top of the ticket. He is and will be the Democratic nominee.”
Since a televised debate where Biden appeared confused, at times unable to complete a sentence, his every move has been scrutinized. Biden accelerated his usually severely limited media exposure to demonstrate he can make a cogent argument for reelection.
“I’m old,” Biden told NBC News’ Lester Holt in an interview on Monday. “But I’m only three years older than Trump, No. 1. And No. 2, my mental acuity’s been pretty damn good. I’ve gotten more done than any president has in a long, long time in 3½ years. So I’m willing to be judged on that.”
But rather than allay concerns, Biden’s exposure only intensified them among allies. Biden has stumbled, mixing up names and seeming to lose his train of thought.
Before coming off the trail on Wednesday, for instance, Biden mistakenly called Nevada’s Democratic state attorney general the state’s governor, who is a Republican, according to a pool report of the exchange.
“Sad,” is how one close Biden ally described the dynamic around the president.
“There’s no excitement in this campaign at all,” another ally said.
Some Biden aides have cautioned that the campaign has picked up on some voter anger in battleground states over the feeling that people are trying to chase the president they voted for off the ballot.
And even as the calls for Biden to step aside grow louder, a campaign official said as of this past weekend, said no one had yet presented a detailed plan for an alternative to Biden.
Biden at one point said he might consider stepping aside if he were told there was no path. In an interview that aired Wednesday evening, Biden said there was something else that would prompt him to reevaluate his campaign.
“If I have some medical condition that emerged,” Biden suggested. “If somebody, if the doctors came to me and said you got this problem, that problem.”
Carol E. Lee and Monica Alba reported from Washington; Natasha Korecki reported from Chicago.
