Democrats

History may record them as eight days that sunk a presidency, or at least the rockiest road to a convention in living memory – a week that has left Joe Biden’s re-election bid hanging by a thread.Day one – 27 JuneBiden and Donald Trump face off in an historically early yet eagerly awaited presidential debate, hosted by CNN. In a performance that leaves viewers startled and supporters horrified, the president speaks in a hoarse voice, mangles his syntax and repeatedly loses his train of thought, while abjectly failing to mount an effective argument against a gleeful Trump.At a post-debate event, the president’s wife, Jill Biden, puts on a brave face: “Joe, you did a great job,” she said. “You answered all the questions.” Her words and her husband’s frail demeanor only compound negative impressions of the debate display, as panic sets in among Democratic supporters who were shocked by Biden’s apparent frailty.Day two – 28 JuneAmid a chorus of Democratic doubts about his candidacy, the 81-year-old president attempts an immediate fightback at a campaign event in North Carolina. “I know I’m not a young man,” he tells a crowd cheering supporters. “I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know … when you get knocked down, you get back up!” Observers wonder where this vigorous Biden had been the night before, though others noted he was speaking from an autocue.The New York Times editorial board calls for Biden to end his candidacy, describing it as a “reckless gamble” that risks a second Trump presidency.Day three – 29 JuneBiden holds fundraising events aimed at calming worried donors. Not all are convinced. One placard held by supporters turned protesters outside a fundraiser in East Hampton reads: “We love you, but it’s time.”The New Yorker magazine, another weighty, previously friendly publication, calls on Biden to drop his re-election campaign.Day four – 30 JuneBiden hunkers down with his family at Camp David for a gathering originally organised as a photo shoot with veteran celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. His closest relatives tell him to stay the course, with his son Hunter Biden, recently convicted on gun-related felony charges, reportedly the most vocal.Day five – 1 JulyA far-reaching US supreme court ruling grants Donald Trump – and all future presidents – broad immunity from prosecution for their actions in office, making the likelihood that the case against Trump for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election would reach trial before the race ends. Observers note that the ruling – which one of the dissenting justices said would give Trump the powers of a “king” – makes the stakes of Biden’s poor performance even higher. Biden denounces the ruling in a short statement but does not answer questions from watching reporters.Day six – 2 JulyLloyd Doggett of Texas becomes the first sitting Democratic congressmen, to break ranks publicly tells the president to end his candidacy.Day seven – 3 JulyAnother congressman follows Doggett’s lead by telling Biden to step aside. Biden, responding to accusations of failing to reach out to party figures, meets Democratic state governors at the White House and admits that he needs to get more sleep. They emerge from the meeting reasserting their support for Biden.Day eight – 4 JulyFresh polls show Biden’s support eroding since the debate, with a New York Times/Siena survey shows him trailing Trump by 49% to 43%.Abigail Disney – the heir to the Disney family fortune and a major party donor – says she will withhold donations unless Biden dropped out of the race, following screenwriter Damon Lindelof, philanthropist Gideon Stein, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. “This is realism, not disrespect,” Disney told CNBC, adding “if Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”Biden tries to recover lost ground with a couple of radio interviews, recorded the day before, in which he admits “I screwed up”, but vows to a supporter at a Fourth of July barbecue at the White House that he isn’t “going anywhere”. More

In the minutes after Joe Biden and Donald Trump stepped on to the stage for the first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, the grand narrative of this election year shifted off its axis and, in the words of CNN’s veteran broadcaster John King, “a deep, wide and aggressive” panic set in among Democrats.A week on, and Biden has said he isn’t going anywhere, but a trickle of major Democratic donors speaking out against the president has grown into a stream.On Thursday, Abigail Disney – the heir to the Disney family fortune and a major party donor – announced she would withhold donations unless Biden dropped out of the race.“This is realism, not disrespect,” Disney told CNBC, adding “if Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”In her statement, Disney said vice-president Kamala Harris could be an alternative candidate to beat Trump. “If Democrats would tolerate any of her perceived shortcomings even one tenth as much as they have tolerated Biden’s … we can win this election by a lot,” she said.For now, Disney represents a minority of donors, but within Biden’s campaign, a clear and concerted effort to tamp down panic among campaign funders is under way.On Monday, the campaign held a hastily scheduled call with hundreds of top Democratic donors, according to the Reuters news agency. On the call, Biden’s team reportedly promised to make the president more visible at town halls and through interviews to reassure the public.Despite their reassurances, the campaign was reportedly forced to field “pointed” questions from donors, including “can the president make it through a campaign and another term?”According to Reuters and the Associated Press, another call with about 40 top donors over the weekend turned tense after Biden’s campaign manager was asked whether the campaign would offer a refund if Biden doesn’t run.In the days that followed, one major fundraiser for the Biden campaign said some donors were learning fast how little influence they had in this situation. “There are a lot of people who think they are more important than they actually are,” the fundraiser said.Some donors have taken the same path as Disney; to halt funding unless the Democratic candidate changes.Screenwriter Damon Lindelof who has been a significant contributor to the party proposed on Wednesday a “DEMbargo”, withholding funding until Biden stands aside.“When a country is not behaving how we want them to, we apply harsh economic sanctions. It’s a give and take – short term hurt for long term healing,” Lindelof wrote in Deadline.According to CNBC, philanthropist Gideon Stein will pause almost all of a planned $3m in planned donations. “Virtually every major donor I’ve talked to believes that we need a new candidate in order to defeat Donald Trump,” Stein said.On Wednesday, Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix and a Democratic party megadonor, joined calls for Biden to take himself out of the presidential race.Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, have been prolific supporters of the Democratic party, donating more than $20m in recent years, including roughly $1.5m to Biden during his 2020 campaign, according to the New York Times.The Biden campaign is eager to show its fundraising strength is holding up after the debate and have highlighted record “grassroots” fundraising in the days that followed the event. The day of the debate and the Friday after were best days for fundraising from small-dollar donors to date, with more than $27m raised across both days.But Biden’s standing in opinion polls has taken a hit, with 59% of Democrats responding to a Reuters/Ipsos poll saying that the president of their own party was too old to work in government and 32% saying he should give up his reelection bid.Biden held a $100m funding advantage over Trump just a few months ago, but his campaign and the Democratic National Committee entered June with $212m in the bank, compared with $235m for the Trump operation and the Republican National Committee.However, analysts predict that if Biden can continue to attract donations in the weeks leading up to the Democratic convention, he will be able to offer party strategist and fellow congressional colleagues a reason to stay on as the candidate.Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn and an influential donor, has continued to throw his weight behind Biden, telling his donor network in an email that he felt it was counterproductive to be “musing on Biden’s flaws” and that they should be “organising around Trump’s flaws”.Reuters contributed to this report More

Joe Biden has told a radio show he “screwed up” and made a “mistake” in last week’s debate against Donald Trump, but vowed to stay in the election race, even as a series of polls show him now trailing the ex-president by about six points.In two interviews conducted Wednesday and aired Thursday with local radio stations in the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where he will also hold events this weekend, the president urged voters to judge him on his time in the White House.“I had a bad night,” Biden told Milwaukee radio host Earl Ingram. “And the fact of the matter is that I screwed up. I made a mistake. That’s 90 minutes on stage – look at what I’ve done in three and a half years.”To Ingram’s largely Black audience, Biden pointed to achievements during his presidency that increased representation.“I picked a Black woman to be my vice-president. I’ve appointed the first Black woman to be a supreme court justice,” Biden said. “I’ve appointed more Black judges, more Black women judges, than every other president in American history combined.”Biden also attacked Trump for comments the former president made about Black workers during their TV debate a week ago, when Trump said migrant workers could be taking as many as 20m Black jobs.“He’s done terrible things in the community, and he has about as much interest and concern for Black, minority communities as the man on the moon does,” Biden said.The interviews are part of a blitz of public appearances over the next few days that the president himself reportedly told a key ally were critical for whether he could successfully make a case for his re-election to the public, following a debate performance in which he appeared at times to lose his train of thought or blank out entirely.Although he secured the continuing support of Democratic governors in a meeting on Wednesday evening, the New York Times also cited two people in that meeting who said Biden admitted to the governors he had been feeling the effects of fatigue, needed to work less and get more sleep, and was aiming to reduce his number of engagements after 8pm.As well as the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania rallies, Biden will also give an another interview on Friday to ABC News, then to Good Morning America over the weekend.Clips of the ABC interview were originally scheduled to be aired on Friday night in the news time slot, with the full interview in two parts on Sunday and Monday, but the network announced on Thursday that it would now run the interview in its entirety on Friday.On Thursday, the White House told CNN that Biden had been examined by his doctor after the debate, during which he reportedly had a cold. The statement appeared to contradict the press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s assertion a day earlier that Biden had had no medical exams since his February physical.The White House spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN “the president was seen to check on his cold and was recovering well”.A gathering number of opinion polls conducted after the debate appear to show that his worrying performance, including an inability to successfully argue against Trump’s stream of unchecked lies, has hurt Biden with voters.According to a Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday, on Trump has opened a six-point lead nationally, at 48% to 42%, with 80% of respondents saying the president is too old to run for a second term – an increase of seven points since February.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt also found that Biden is viewed favorably by 34% of voters, and unfavorably by 63%. Less than 40% approved of his handling of the economy, immigration or his time in office overall.Another poll, from the New York Times/Siena, released on Wednesday also showed a six-point advantage to Trump, up from three a week earlier. Among registered voters, Trump led by eight points.According to the Journal poll, one-third of respondents, including 31% of independents – a key bloc of US voters on whom the election may turn – said the debate made them more likely to vote for Trump, while just 10% said Biden.A similar percentage of Democrats and Republicans – roughly three-quarters – said they considered Biden too old to run. Two-thirds of Democrats said they would replace Biden with another candidate.Meanwhile, a Fourth of July campaign message from the president also attacked the recent supreme court ruling that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for an acts deemed “official”, saying it paved the way for the presidency to become a de facto monarchy.“Our nation waged a war based on the revolutionary idea that everyday people ought to govern themselves,” Biden said in the message, quoting the US constitutional principle “that we will swear fealty to no king” and that everyone is equal under the law – a founding principle that Biden said “conservatives on the court have decided presidents are free to break”.Speculation has been intensifying about whether more elected Democrats will call for Biden to step aside: only two congressmen have so far done so. Potential replacement candidates, including Kamala Harris, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and California governor Gavin Newsom, have strongly stated their support for Biden’s re-election.In a call to campaign workers on Wednesday, he is reported to have said: “I’m the nominee of the Democratic party. No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving.” In a fundraising email after the call, Biden said: “Let me say this as clearly and simply as I can: I’m running.”Trump had been running a roughly two-point lead in the polls earlier in the year, though his lead appeared to narrow and the candidates seemed to be running neck-and-neck before the debate. More