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      Biden Told Ally That He Is Weighing Whether to Continue in the Race

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      President Biden has told a key ally that he knows he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince the public in the coming days that he is up for the job after a disastrous debate performance last week.The president, who the ally emphasized is still deeply in the fight for re-election, understands that his next few appearances heading into the holiday weekend — including an interview scheduled for Friday with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and campaign stops in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — must go well.“He knows if he has two more events like that, we’re in a different place” by the end of the weekend, said the ally, referring to Mr. Biden’s halting and unfocused performance in the debate. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said the claim was “absolutely false” and that the White House had not been given enough time to respond.The conversation is the first indication to become public that the president is seriously considering whether he can recover after a devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta on Thursday. Concerns are mounting about his viability as a candidate and whether he could serve as president for another four years.A top adviser to Mr. Biden, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the situation, said the president was “well aware of the political challenge he faces.”Campaign officials were nervously watching polls, recognizing that bad numbers could fuel the crisis. A CBS News poll on Wednesday showed former President Donald J. Trump edging ahead of Mr. Biden since the debate with 50 percent to 48 percent nationally and 51 percent to 48 percent in battleground states.Mr. Biden is slowly reaching out to Democratic elected officials and has a meeting with Democratic governors at the White House scheduled for Wednesday evening. He is also continuing to reach out to people he has long trusted and has told at least one person that he is open to the possibility that his plans to move on from his debate performance — and flip the focus back to his challenger, Mr. Trump — may not work.Several allies of Mr. Biden, who has huddled with the family and advisers since the debate on Thursday, have underscored that the president is still in the fight of his political life and largely sees this moment as a chance to come back from being counted out, as he has done many times throughout his half-century career.But he is also cleareyed, they said, about his uphill battle to convince voters, donors and the political class that his debate performance was an anomaly. More

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      Biden to Hold Crisis Meeting With Democratic Governors at the White House

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      The president is trying to reassure his supporters that he can still win in November despite his debate debacle last week.President Biden is scheduled to meet on Wednesday with several Democratic governors in a closed-door meeting at the White House, part of a push to reassure the president’s supporters that he can still win the election in November despite his debate debacle last week.The White House has not released the names of the governors who will be meeting with Mr. Biden in the Roosevelt Room, just down the hall from the Oval Office.The meeting was added to the president’s schedule even as he is trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy in the middle of the biggest political crisis since he took office almost four years ago. Before meeting with the governors, Mr. Biden will posthumously present the Medal of Honor to two Civil War Army soldiers for their actions fighting the Confederacy in 1862.But the situation swirling around the president is anything but normal.Democrats are openly talking about whether Mr. Biden, 81, should abandon his bid for re-election because he is too old to effectively campaign against former President Donald J. Trump. Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, called for Mr. Biden to step aside on Tuesday.At the same time, the first independent polls since the debate are beginning to emerge, showing that the president has lost ground against Mr. Trump. A CNN poll showed Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump by six percentage points, 49 percent to 43 percent. A series of polls by a pro-Biden super PAC leaked to the news site Puck showed the president slipping across the battleground states and in New Mexico, New Hampshire and Virginia, where he was previously winning.Privately, Mr. Biden and his top lieutenants are trying to reassure lawmakers, donors and activists that he can turn things around. Publicly, the White House and the campaign have scheduled a series of events intended to show voters that the debate was just an off night.Mr. Biden will sit for an interview with the ABC host George Stephanopoulos on Friday, his first lengthy interview since the debate. That same day, he will travel to Madison, Wis., for a campaign event. On Sunday, he will campaign in Philadelphia. More

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      Two Vulnerable House Democrats Say Biden Will Lose Against Trump

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      Two House Democrats facing challenging re-election races in rural districts said on Tuesday that President Biden would lose in November to former President Donald J. Trump, adding to widespread pessimism within the Democratic Party about its presidential nominee.The two Democrats, Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, did not call on Mr. Biden to step aside, nor did they indicate that any other Democrat stood a better chance of defeating Mr. Trump in the fall.But Mr. Golden and Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, who are some of the most vulnerable incumbents in Congress this election cycle, essentially delivered a warning that they were preparing for Mr. Biden to be a critical liability at the top of the ticket. A poor performance by Mr. Biden in the presidential election could doom their own chances for re-election.In an opinion essay in The Bangor Daily News, Mr. Golden, who represents a district that Mr. Trump won in 2020, said that he had assumed Mr. Trump would win for months now and that he had made his peace with that outcome.“Lots of Democrats are panicking about whether President Joe Biden should step down as the party’s nominee,” he wrote. “Biden’s poor performance in the debate was not a surprise.”“It also didn’t rattle me as it has others,” Mr. Golden added, “because the outcome of this election has been clear to me for months: While I don’t plan to vote for him, Donald Trump is going to win. And I’m OK with that.”In an interview with a local television station, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, a first-term Democrat from a rural red district, also predicted that Mr. Biden would lose, blaming his dismal debate performance.“About 50 million Americans tuned in and watched that debate,” she told KATU News, appearing crestfallen throughout the interview. “I was one of them for five very painful minutes.”After carefully considering her response to a question about whether the president should step aside, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez said: “The truth, I think, is that Biden will lose to Trump. I know it’s difficult, but I think the damage has been done.”She added that Democratic primary voters had already chosen Mr. Biden and that “a core tenet of democracy is that you accept the results of an election.”“Biden is the nominee,” she said. More

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      Biden Says He ‘Fell Asleep on the Stage’ During Debate With Trump

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      President Biden acknowledged on Tuesday that he “fell asleep on the stage” during his disastrous debate last week, blaming his performance on the fact that he had traveled “around the world a couple times” in the two weeks before the face-off with former President Donald J. Trump.“I wasn’t very smart,” Mr. Biden, 81, told donors at a fund-raiser in Virginia. “I decided to travel around the world a couple times, I don’t know how many time zones.”“It’s not an excuse but an explanation,” he said.White House officials have blamed Mr. Biden’s having a cold at the time for his disjointed debate performance. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, repeated that explanation at a briefing for reporters on Tuesday afternoon.But Mr. Biden offered a different reason to the donors on Tuesday night. He referred to his decision to travel to France for several days two weeks before the debate and return to the United States before heading back to Europe for the Group of 7 summit in Italy.He decided to make that cross-Atlantic trip back and forth, Mr. Biden said, blaming himself for not having “listened to my staff,” which he implied had told him not to do that. He said the decision caused him to be tired during the debate.Mr. Biden’s comments came as the White House struggled to respond to a chorus of anxiety within the Democratic Party about whether the president is capable of mounting a winning campaign against Mr. Trump in November.For more than a year, Mr. Biden and his aides have repeatedly denied that the president’s age has affected his ability to perform his duties. They have repeatedly criticized journalists who raised the issue that large majorities of voters say they believe Mr. Biden is too old to be president.But the debate, which was watched by about 51 million people, raised serious doubts among voters and many Democratic activists. Lawmakers in the party also expressed concerns, with Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas on Tuesday becoming the first Democrat in Congress to call on Mr. Biden to drop out of the race.The president and his campaign have refused to even consider doing that. They say Mr. Biden remains determined to stay in the race and to defeat Mr. Trump, who he says is a threat to democracy in America. More

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      Who Is Lloyd Doggett? Texas Democrat Calls for Biden to Exit Race

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      Representative Lloyd Doggett, a little-known Texas progressive, on Tuesday became the first Democrat in Congress to call on President Biden to step aside as the party’s nominee after a halting debate performance that has raised major questions about his health, age and mental acuity.In going public with his concerns, Mr. Doggett, who has represented his Austin-based district for close to 30 years, spoke aloud what most other Democrats have only dared to say in private since Thursday’s debate.Mr. Doggett is a rank-and-file congressman with little national profile. But his public statement gave voice to a growing sense of doom and worry among Democrats about whether Mr. Biden can continue as the party’s nominee, and if by doing so he might cost the party not only the White House but also any chance of controlling Congress.“President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020,” Mr. Doggett said in the statement. “He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”In an interview on Tuesday afternoon, the congressman said he made the decision to break with his party and call for Mr. Biden to take himself out of the race after feeling “alarmed” as he watched the debate with his wife at their Washington home.He was dismayed when Mr. Biden did not even try to debunk many of the falsehoods that former President Donald J. Trump put forward in his answers. He was disconcerted when the president seemed to lose his train of thought and trail off in discussing health care, ending an answer with the words, “we beat Medicare.” And “we were all troubled,” he said, by Mr. Biden’s lack of forceful answers on abortion and reproductive freedom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tim Ryan Says Kamala Harris Should Replace Biden as Democratic Nominee

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      Tim Ryan, a former Ohio congressman, called on Democrats to replace President Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the party’s ticket in the November election against former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Ryan, in a Newsweek opinion column, wrote that he had lost confidence in Mr. Biden’s ability to defeat his rival after watching the president struggle in Thursday’s head-to-head debate with Mr. Trump. He noted that Mr. Biden had said he would be a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leaders, an idea he said he liked. “Regrettably, that bridge collapsed last week,” he wrote.“Witnessing Joe Biden struggle was heartbreaking,” Mr. Ryan wrote of the debate. “And we must forge a new path forward.”In 2020, Mr. Ryan endorsed Biden after his own bid for the party’s nomination failed. During the midterm elections in 2022, he lost his bid for Senate in Ohio to J.D. Vance, a Republican who is said to be on Mr. Trump’s shortlist of running mates.Since Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance last week, the noise has intensified about whether Democrats should replace him as the party’s nominee. He is scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in August in Chicago.While figures such as Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom, the governors of Michigan and California, have drawn attention as potential replacements, Mr. Ryan wrote that Ms. Harris gives Democrats their best shot at holding the presidency. “Those who say that a Harris candidacy is a greater risk than the Joe Biden we saw the other night and will continue to see are not living in reality,” he wrote. “It is not just utterly preposterous for the haters to say that, it is insulting.” More

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      There’s No Reason to Resign Ourselves to Biden

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      Though Joe Biden’s debate performance last week was among the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed, it at least seemed to offer clarity. Suddenly, even many people who love this president realized that his campaign has become untenable.For years, loyal Democrats have been suppressing their private anxiety about Biden’s decline. In the debate’s miserable aftermath, there was finally space to acknowledge the obvious: Biden is too old for this. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” James Baldwin wrote. The Democratic Party’s predicament is an awful one, but there was a cold, flinty relief in being forced to reckon with it.Since then, however, the Biden campaign has quickly moved to squash that reckoning, framing the divide in the Democratic Party as one between naïve, hysterical outsiders and savvy, resolute insiders. Biden surrogates fanned out to discount the debate as a single “bad night.” A campaign email slammed those calling on the president to step aside as the “bed-wetting brigade,” and offered tips for responding to “your panicked aunt, your MAGA uncle, or some self-important podcasters,” an apparent reference to the former Obama officials who host “Pod Save America.” On Monday, I listened to a recording of a Zoom meeting with Biden’s national finance committee in which his deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, accused the media of blowing the debate “out of proportion,” and his campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, compared it to Barack Obama’s lackluster performance against Mitt Romney in 2012.Some allies of the president have even suggested that Democrats learn from Donald Trump’s unswerving followers. “If Republicans are standing lock step” with the 78-year-old disgraced criminal Trump, said the MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart, “then Democrats damn well should be standing lock step with their ethical and morally decent 81-year-old president.”I don’t blame people in the Biden camp for doing everything they can to tamp down an intraparty revolt. That’s their job, and I take some comfort that they’re doing it as well as is possible, since if Biden is the nominee, it’s imperative that he defeats Trump. But as long as there’s time to replace Biden, Democrats should not allow themselves to be bullied into fatalism and complacency.More than a setback, Biden’s showing at the debate was a revelation, confirming the worst fears of his doubters. Since then, several news reports have made it clear that the Biden we all saw onstage is familiar to those who see him behind the scenes. Axios reported that, according to presidential aides, Biden is alert and engaged from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but not necessarily outside of those hours. The Wall Street Journal reported that European officials were worried about Biden’s “focus and stamina” even before the debate, “with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer.” This is not a fixable problem.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jill Biden Is Vogue’s Cover Star

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      During the most challenging period of President Biden’s re-election bid, the first lady appears on the cover of a high-fashion bible.The August cover of Vogue featuring Dr. Jill Biden was released online Monday — four days after the big debate — and brought with it a fresh round of scrutiny over her role as a die-hard campaigner for her husband, who is locked in a nail-biting campaign for re-election.During much of President Biden’s term, the first lady was a figure of minimal controversy. That began to shift when campaign season heated up. Laura Ingraham of Fox News claimed that Dr. Biden was covering up the president’s unfitness out of her own desire for political power and prestige. Sounding the same theme, The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, began referring to her as “Lady Mac-Biden.”Dr. Biden took center stage after Mr. Biden struggled to finish his sentences during a dismal debate performance on Thursday against former President Donald J. Trump. Afterward, The New York Times reported that Dr. Biden was the first person he had turned to: “The first lady’s message to him was clear: They’d been counted out before, she was all in, and he — they — would stay in the race.”On the Vogue cover, Dr. Biden wears a white Ralph Lauren tuxedo dress. She was photographed in the spring by Norman Jean Roy, whose recent contributions to Vogue include portraits of Nicki Minaj, Alicia Keys and the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. The accompanying profile of the first lady, by Maya Singer, describes her as a “vision of calm amid utter cacophony.”Dr. Biden has been on the cover of Vogue twice before. Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, noted that an appearance on the Vogue cover is a “rite of passage” for first ladies. Still, Ms. Brown added, the implications of Dr. Biden’s appearance on the cover of a fashion magazine are “always a risk.” And at this moment, the Vogue cover “is not particularly helpful,” she added.Soon after the magazine posted the cover image to its Instagram account on Monday, the comments were overwhelmingly negative. Some were from Trump supporters who took Dr. Biden’s appearance as an opportunity to complain about the fact that Melania Trump had been passed over for a Vogue cover when she was first lady. A number of other critical remarks seemed to come from Democrats, one of whom argued that Dr. Biden was pursuing her and her husband’s own ambitions “at the expense of Americans safety and happiness.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More