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      If Biden drops out now, how do the Democrats choose a new candidate?

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      Joe Biden gave no indication on Friday that he planned to drop out of the presidential race, even as his widely panned performance in his debate against Donald Trump attracted censure from many fellow Democrats.Some commentators had called for replacing Biden as the nominee even before the debate, largely citing the president’s age as a potentially decisive vulnerability in the election. (Biden is 81, and Trump is 78.)Biden’s dismal showing on Thursday transformed those conversations from scattered whispers to a full-blown shouting match, with many in Washington openly speculating about who might step in for the president.With all of the presidential primaries over, the process for replacing Biden would be complicated and politically volatile. Biden has already won far more delegates than he needs to secure the nomination, and the Democratic national convention, which will bring a formal end to the primary process, is less than two months away.Here’s everything you need to know about the process for replacing Biden:Have Democrats already officially named Biden as their nominee?No. Democrats will convene in Chicago from 19 to 22 August to formally select their presidential nominee, so Biden is still considered the presumptive nominee at this stage. The Democratic national committee plans to virtually nominate Biden before the convention to meet an Ohio ballot deadline of 7 August, but no date has been announced for that vote.However, Biden has amassed 3,894 pledged delegates through his victories in state primaries, so he already has more than enough delegates to secure the nomination.What will happen to Biden’s pledged delegates if he withdraws from the presidential race?If Biden drops out of the race, his pledged delegates would arrive in Chicago uncommitted to any specific candidate, which would likely kick off a frenzied fight to win their support.“Candidates who step into the breach hoping to take the place of the fallen candidate will find out who these delegates are and woo them in as many ways as they can. The outcome will be a convention where the result may not be known ahead of time,” Elaine Kamarck, a member of the Democratic national committee rules committee and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in January.Democrats have not seen a floor fight for the presidential nomination since 1968, when their convention was coincidentally (and infamously) held in Chicago. In a potentially eerie parallel to 2024, then president Lyndon Johnson decided against seeking re-election just months before the election. The assassination of Robert F Kennedy left Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president, as the main opponent against Eugene McCarthy, the anti-Vietnam war candidate.The fraught nominating process was overshadowed by the violence on Chicago’s streets, as tens of thousands of police officers and national guard officers confronted anti-war protesters. In the end, Humphrey won the nomination – even though he had never appeared on a state primary ballot – but he went on to lose to Richard Nixon in the general election.Would Kamala Harris automatically win all of Biden’s delegates if he dropped out?No. Because the delegates would be uncommitted if Biden withdraws, they could theoretically vote on the floor for any candidate. In the hours after the debate on Thursday, a number of names – including California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer – were floated as possible replacements for Biden.But Harris would probably go to the convention as a strong favorite for the nomination. As the vice-president, she has the largest national profile of any potential candidate, and Biden’s pledged delegates are mostly party loyalists who would be looking for the safest possible choice if he stepped aside.How would a nominee be chosen on the floor?On the first ballot, a winning nominee would need to secure the votes of a majority of Democrats’ roughly 4,000 pledged delegates. If no candidate won a majority on the first ballot, Democrats would continue on to a second ballot, in which so-called “superdelegates” would have an opportunity to vote.Superdelegates are mostly senior Democratic party leaders, and they would go to the convention not pledged to any candidate. With the roughly 700 superdelegates added to the voting pool, the winning candidate would then need to secure about 2,300 delegates to capture the nomination.Although superdelegates would make up a relatively small share of the delegate pool, they could play an important role in choosing the nominee. Their support for a particular candidate would speak volumes and could sway fellow delegates.How likely is any of this to occur?It appears highly unlikely at this point. Biden and his top advisers insist he will continue on to November, and Democrats do not have a mechanism to force Biden out of the race. Unless Biden undergoes a radical change in thinking or suffers a major health setback in the next few months, he will be the Democrats’ nominee in November. More

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      Could Kamala Harris be a winner for the Democrats if Biden steps aside?

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      Joe Biden’s stumbling debate performance left Democrats so panicked some are searching for an alternative to replace the 81-year-old president as the party’s standard-bearer.Biden has given no indication that he intends to exit the race, and his campaign has flatly dismissed the suggestion. But that has done little to silence critics who are openly questioning whether Biden is the right person to take on Donald Trump, a figure the president – and his party – view as a grave threat to American democracy.In the unlikely scenario Biden decides not to run, the most obvious choice to replace him would be his 59-year-old vice president and running mate, Kamala Harris. But it would not be automatic – and other candidates would likely challenge Harris, who has suffered her own low approval ratings, for the nomination.Already some Democrats are looking past the vice-president at other possible contenders – Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois governor JB Pritzker, California governor Gavin Newsom and Maryland governor Wes Moore.It’s a sign that Democrats have yet to fully embrace Harris as Biden’s heir apparent.“To even discuss Biden stepping down while COMPLETELY IGNORING THE VP … is a serious look into how we see the importance, capacity and seriousness of women of color,” writer Tanzina Vega, said on X.Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, is the highest-ranking female elected official in US history and the first Black and first Asian American to serve as vice president.Democrats, traumatized by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016, rallied behind Biden in 2020 over a younger, more diverse and progressive field of candidates that included Harris. As a candidate, Biden promised to be a “bridge” to the next generation of Democratic leaders, which many interpreted as commitment to serve one-term and before passing the baton to Harris.But when the time came to make a decision, Biden argued that he was still the Democrat best-positioned to beat Trump.For the past three and a half years, Harris’s barrier-breaking vice-presidency has divided Democrats. Negative press, some of it self-inflicted, compounded by sexist and racist attacks, and a challenging policy portfolio weighed on public perception of the former California senator. Nearly 50% of voters have an unfavorable view of Harris, according to 538’s polling average, compared with the roughly 40% who view her favorably, figures that are comparable with Biden’s.Despite a rocky start to her tenure, Harris has eased into the role, especially since becoming the administration’s leading voice on abortion rights. On Monday, Harris marked two years since the second anniversary of the US supreme court decision that overturned Roe v Wade with a fiery warning that Trump would not hesitate to further restrict women’s reproductive rights in a second-term.Nodding to her background as a prosecutor, the vice president declared: “In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty.”Harris’s clear defense of abortion rights, by far Democrats’ strongest issue, stands in stark contrast to Biden. During Thursday’s debate, Biden fumbled an attack on Trump over Republican bans on the procedure, pivoting bizarrely to immigration and raising the case of a young woman murdered in Georgia.Moments after Biden finished the debate, it was Harris who came to his defense first in a pair of interviews. On CNN and MSNBC, Harris spun his performance, saying voters must look at the last three-and-a-half years of accomplishments and not just at the 90-minute debate. Harris conceded that Biden had a “slow start” but insisted he finished “strong.”“I’m talking about the choice for November,” she said on CNN. “I’m talking about one of the most important elections in our collective lifetime.”In a sharp back-and-forth, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper pressed Harris about calls for Biden to step aside.“I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last three-and-a-half years of performance,” she said, emphasizing his legislative and executive achievements he’s pulled in his first-term.At a rally in Las Vegas the following day, Harris doubled down on her support.“In the Oval Office, negotiating bipartisan deals, I see him in the situation room keeping our country safe,” she said, adding that the election would not be decided by “one night in June”.The Atlanta debate was the first of the election cycle, with a second scheduled in September. The Biden campaign has agreed to a vice-presidential debate between Harris and Trump’s eventual running mate, but the terms have not yet been to confirmed.In a hypothetical matchup against Trump, Harris performed roughly on par with Biden, trailing the former president by six points in a February Times/Siena poll. Biden trailed Trump by five points in the same poll. Meanwhile, the poll found Harris ran stronger than Biden with Black voters, though worse with Hispanic voters and men.Biden’s age has long been an electoral challenge. But his shaky debate performance shocked even his staunchest supporters. At a rally on Friday, Biden acknowledged his stumbles, but insisted he was still the best candidate to defeat Trump.“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he said at a post-debate rally in North Carolina. “I know I don’t walk as easy as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth.”But mounting concerns about Biden’s mental acuity have drawn even greater scrutiny of Harris, particularly from the right. Republicans have sought to make Harris a boogyman, with Nikki Haley warning during the GOP primary a vote for Biden was a vote for “a President Harris”.With the convention scheduled for mid-August in Chicago, and the formal nomination process to take place virtually at some point before that to meet an Ohio ballot deadline, many Democrats have said there is not enough time to replace Biden at the top of the ticket.Former South Carolina lawmaker and Democratic commentator Bakari Sellers, who endorsed Harris in the 2020 primary, said wishing for an alternative to emerge at this stage was futile.“You’re not nominating Gretch or Gavin or Wes over Kamala. Stop it,” he wrote on X, adding: “Choice is Trump, Biden or couch. I choose Joe.” More

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      The stakes of the US election are higher than ever | Sidney Blumenthal

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      I saw western civilization pass before my eyes as Joe Biden drowned.“Putin is waiting for Trump,” John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, has said. When the presidential debate turned to foreign policy, the former president made an apparently startling revelation. He implied that he had a previously unknown conversation with Vladimir Putin before his invasion of Ukraine, perhaps in late 2021 or early 2022. According to Trump, Russia’s president discussed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “When Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream,” he said. That dream, of course, is the conquest of Ukraine as the restoration of the major piece of the collapsed Soviet Union after the cold war.Biden, overprepared to hit his voluminous talking points, was not listening closely. He did not pick up on Trump’s astounding claim: “I talked to him about it, his dream.” The president’s response was accurate and so concise his words jumbled: “And listen to what he said when he went in, he was going to take Kyiv in five days, remember? Because it’s part of the old Soviet Union. That’s what he wanted, to re-establish Kyiv. And he in fact didn’t do it at all. He didn’t – wasn’t able to get it done. And they’ve lost over – they’ve lost thousands and thousands of troops, 500,000 troops.” Abruptly, Biden ended.He had the time, but did not explain the meaning. He bollixed what he wanted to say about Putin’s effort to occupy Ukraine into “re-establish Kyiv”. Biden did not draw any conclusion. He had not listened closely to Trump’s winding patter. He didn’t sift through the word salad to find the nugget of gold. He did not expose Trump’s worship of Putin, whom he “idolizes”, according to Fiona Hill, the Russia expert formerly on Trump’s national security council, who also wrote that Trump believes Ukraine “must be part of Russia”. Trump shares Putin’s “dream”, to make Russia great again. He aspires to be an unfettered strongman like Putin, dictator “for day one”. That is why, as Bolton says: “Putin is waiting for Trump.” Trump’s campaign is the essential linchpin of Putin’s strategy. Without Trump, he faces endless winter. Trump is his indispensable useful idiot.Biden’s whiff on this or that exchange was more than isolated missed opportunities. His painful performance showed him trying to spew out his numbers, often missing the main point. He often countered without making any argument. It seemed like a PowerPoint presentation missing the closing slides. At times, he lost the plot. “We beat Medicare,” he said confusedly. His acuity and agility were evanescent.Yet sometimes Biden hit his mark. He tore into Trump’s low character, “the morals of an alley cat”, though unfair to cats who don’t choose to be in the alley. He called out Trump’s lies, though accounting for them would have consumed every second in every response.But Biden’s physical appearance was more than a problem of optics. His stiffness was accompanied by a frequently vacant look. He was not the Biden of less than four months ago with his firm and adroit handling of his State of the Union address in which he spontaneously talked down his Maga hecklers.Biden cannot hope for a recovery through a future performance. There is not another State of the Union. The acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention will be read through a teleprompter. There will almost certainly not be a second debate with Trump. What’s in it for Trump? He has already banked what he needs, a gift beyond his wildest dreams, not to mention Putin’s. Trump will not lend Biden a second chance. And would Biden’s handlers risk it?Biden’s halting image will cast a shadow over any message he wishes to make. He will not be able to deflect the fake videos because of the real debate. He will not be able to have his aides explain his capability as chief executive without doubt falling on him.Biden’s age had been set aside until the debate. His accomplishments are the result of his political skill, experience and knowledge. For the Democratic party, Biden was a political necessity. The center held around him. His renewed candidacy prevented a tumultuous free-for-all. But his ability to run on the platform he has built through three and a half years has been severely undermined in 90 minutes.Biden has run for more reasons than his grasp of the state of the party. He understands the state of the world. Biden has held together the center of the western alliance. He decided he would run again because he was the crucial leader at an unprecedented, perilous time. His premise that he must win the presidency to sustain the west against the overarching menace of Putin and his sidekick Trump has been the fundamental reason for his second candidacy.Post-debate, Biden soldiers on. He flies to fundraisers. He campaigns. He is overcoming another obstacle in the pattern of his story, his self-image up from underestimation. But if Biden is not politically viable, the stakes not only remain but are even higher than ever. The cause is always greater than the man.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Biden comes out swinging in first speech after presidential debate with Trump

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      In what several supporters described as a “night and day” difference from his performance in last night’s debate, President Joe Biden on Friday vowed to keep fighting against what he framed as an existential threat to America.In his first campaign stop following the debate, Biden showed off a louder and more dynamic voice at the North Carolina state fairgrounds in Raleigh.“I know what millions of Americans know,” Biden said. “When you get knocked down, you get back up.”During the 15-minute speech in a sweltering building that saw at least one person faint, Biden ran through a list of issues from high-speed internet to border security, but spent a good deal of his time denouncing Donald Trump’s honesty and integrity.“I don’t walk as easily as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden said, addressing the widespread criticism of his Thursday performance. “But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth.”Repeating a line from the debate, he said of Trump, his rival for the White House, “I spent 90 minutes on a stage debating a guy who has the morals of an alley cat.” Biden added: “I think he [Trump] set a new record for the number of lies told at a single debate.”Although there was enough empty room in some of the bleachers for people to move around easily, the crowd shouted an encouraging: “Yes, you can!” when Biden began to talk about how well he could do the job of president in what would be his mid-80s.If some in the crowd came to the rally holding their breath, many seemed relieved to see more energy from the Democratic president.“Night and day,” said Brenda Pollard, a delegate to the Democratic national convention from Durham, North Carolina. “I mean, to me, today was who he is. And there it is, just like I just said, he’s energized by the people. Last night he didn’t have that. That’s no excuse, but I think it played a factor in it.”Pollard was one of the Biden supporters who met the president on the tarmac when his plane landed at Raleigh-Durham international airport at about 2am Friday.Pollard said she would not consider nominating any other candidate but Biden at the convention and had not heard any “serious” talk about doing so, despite many voters, pundits and operatives suggesting that was the Democrats’ only way forward.Biden played to the North Carolina crowd after he was introduced by the state’s popular and outgoing Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, who at one point was himself mentioned as a possible 2024 presidential candidate.“I want you to know, I’m not promising not to take Roy away from North Carolina,” Biden said.One of the hallmarks of Cooper’s time in office has been his negotiation with the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to expand Medicaid coverage last year. Margaret Kimber, a grandmother from Wendell, North Carolina, gave Biden much credit for the expansion as well.“It helps with the insurance, the supplements are fantastic,” she said while leaning against her walker after the rally. “And without them, whew!”Pollard also said that Biden’s support of social security and Medicare were some of the most important issues for her.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The loans are for the next generation. That’s our future coming in,” she said. “But we’re seniors and we’ve invested in this country and we have paid in. And now we just want that. It’s not an entitlement. We paid for it. It’s ours. And President Trump wants to take it.”Kimber said that the issues that matter most to the young people she knows are school safety and gun violence. She said she thought Trump’s focus on immigration restrictions was just an appeal to fear.“Because people were pissed off that the borders were open, Trump is using that as a tool to scare the people of the United States, and he’s using scare tactics to make people think that if we don’t close the borders we’re going to be overrun,” Kimber said. “And we’re going to be overrun with guns and violence. And we already have guns and violence.”Wesley Boykin, who ran as a Democrat for the state legislature in 2022 in rural Duplin county, said that education, safety and healthcare were the issues that drew him most to Biden. Boykin said that as a Black man, he felt fear when Trump was president and no longer has the same fear during the Biden administration.Boykin also said the Raleigh speech was a welcome departure from what he called a “lackluster” performance by the president on Thursday, especially the first seven minutes.“I concluded nine o’clock is not the appropriate time,” he said. “After he basically woke up – after that seven minutes – he was more like he was today. And I realized he didn’t get a great deal of sleep.”Boykin and others said that economic issues were not as important to them in this campaign as issues of character. Biden hit Trump on both fronts, reusing his “morals of an alley cat” line and calling his challenger “Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump”, after the Republican president who was in office at the onset of the Great Depression.Tina Bruner, a Democratic precinct chair in Raleigh and mother of three school-age children, said Biden’s handling of the pandemic demonstrated both his character and what she said was his superior economic policy.“The way Trump handled the pandemic was terrifying, and I immediately felt like we’re going to make it out of this whenever Joe took over. The vaccine rollout happened and the way school lunches were funded for everyone. I don’t think I could have counted on schoolchildren to be fed by Trump.”“So, yes, my life definitely felt safer, my family felt safer because of Joe Biden,” she said. More

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      Joe Biden bombed during the debate. But who will ask him to step down?

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      In March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson abandoned his re-election bid, citing the “awesome duties of this office”, partisan divisions in the country and “America’s sons in the fields far away” in Vietnam. “I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” Johnson said.It was a remarkable moment, recalls veteran Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf: “No one gives up being the most powerful person in the world,” he says. “It just doesn’t happen.”But LBJ was an exception, Sheinkopf says, in part because of his wife. Lady Bird Johnson “was not wild about the idea of becoming a political spouse”, biographer Julia Sweig wrote.On Friday, as the White House mounted a push-back against calls for Joe Biden to abandon his re-election bid to allow another Democrat to step in, there is a dawning reality that despite Biden’s catastrophic debate performance the night before, the decision to step aside or remain and potentially go on to a catastrophic defeat is his to make, and his alone.And without any formal mechanism for Democrats to force Biden to step aside, the job of convincing him to do so would likely fall to Biden’s closest adviser: the first lady.US elections 2024: a guide to the first presidential debate
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      Jill Biden has reacted forcefully in the past against calls for her to persuade her husband to step down, including to taunts that she is “guilty of elder abuse” and is said to enjoy the trappings of White House prestige. In Atlanta on Thursday, she led her husband off the stage and was heard to tell him: “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question, you knew all the facts!”Others in Biden’s inner circle who may have the ear of the president include Biden’s younger sister, Valerie Biden Owens, who has played a key role throughout the president’s political career; campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez; campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon; campaign senior adviser Anita Dunn; and adviser Ron Klain.Alongside them are senior Democrats, some of whom fear that Biden’s weak re-election chances will drag down Democrat hopes to retain control of the Senate and retake Congress.Party heavyweights Bill Clinton and wife Hillary, who voiced her support for Biden on Friday, are key Biden backers who have his ear, as are former house speaker Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, South Carolina congressman James Clyburn – who helped turn around Biden’s campaign in 2019 – and Delaware senator Chris Coons.But ultimately, it may be big Democrat donors whose pressure makes the biggest difference. The aging political leadership in US politics is ultimately a reflection of the elders’ proven ability to fundraise – but that ability on Biden’s part may now be threatened. One Democratic fundraiser who planned to attend a debate performance in the Hamptons on Saturday evening said Biden’s performance was “a disaster”, CNBC reported, and called it “worse than I thought was possible”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Everyone I’m speaking with thinks Biden should drop out,” the network quoted the person as saying. Another said simply: “Game over.”According to Sheinkopf, Democrats are in uncharted waters. “It’s a terrible position to be in, but on the other side you have Donald Trump, who many people do not like, more they detest him, but he has a loyal following. He may not have acquitted himself as a liar last night but he appeared strong and not in any way weak.“The only way Biden can leave is to leave himself, and he can’t leave unless there’s a replacement Democrats can agree on.”But any agreement is far off, except perhaps one: “Democrats will do everything they can not to have Kamala Harris because her polling numbers are atrocious and she is not trusted to be commander-in-chief at a time conflict is breaking out throughout the world.”The unenviable job of breaking the news to the US president falls now to one person, Sheinkopf said: “The most logical person to suggest to Biden he not do this for his health and for the good of the country is Jill Biden.” More

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      It’s risky, but Joe Biden needs to give way to someone who can beat Donald Trump | Jonathan Freedland

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      What was the worst moment? Perhaps when one especially rambling sentence of Joe Biden’s ended in a mumbled, confused declaration that “We finally beat Medicare”, as if he were the enemy of the very public service Democrats cherish and defend. Maybe it was when the president was not talking, but the camera showed him staring vacantly into space, his mouth slack and open? Or was it when he was talking, and out came a thin, reedy whisper of a voice, one that could not command the viewer’s attention, even when the words themselves made good sense?For anyone who cares about the future of the United States and therefore, thanks to that country’s unmatched power, the future of the world, it was agonising to watch. You found yourself glancing ever more frequently at the clock, desperate for it to end, if only on humanitarian grounds: it seemed cruel to put a man of visible frailty through such an ordeal.In that sense, the first – and, given what happened, probably last – TV debate between the current and former president confirmed the worst fears many Biden supporters have long harboured over his capacity to take on and defeat Donald Trump. For more than 90 excruciating minutes, every late-night gag about Biden’s age, every unkindly cut TikTok video depicting him as doddery and semi-senile, became real. There was no spinning it, despite White House efforts to blame a cold. Joe Biden delivered the worst presidential debate performance ever.Expectations were rock bottom: all he had to do was turn up and show some vigour, reassure people that his marbles were all present and correct, and it would have been enough. The bar could scarcely have been lower. But Joe Biden could not clear it.And if the debate confirmed Biden’s limitations, it also served as a reminder of why those limitations matter. For one thing, Trump’s entire framing of this race is strong v weak: he offers himself as a strongman, against an opponent too feeble to lead and protect the US in an increasingly dangerous world. Purely at the physical level of what people could see and hear on their TV screens, the Atlanta debate reinforced Trump’s frame.But, no less important, Biden’s inability to deliver clear, intelligible statements meant Donald Trump’s lies went unchallenged. And there were so many, lie after lie after lie. Trump claimed Democrats favoured abortion at nine months, even if that meant killing babies after birth. He claimed the real culprit for the 6 January storming of Capitol Hill was not him, but Democratic former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. He claimed it was he who had lowered the cost of insulin, when it was Biden who did that.There were dozens more in that vein, an unceasing firehose of lies. But because CNN had made the baffling decision to have the hosts do nothing but read out scripted questions – never challenging any statement made by the candidates – it was left to Biden to hit back in real time. And he couldn’t do it. The post-match factcheckers stayed up into the early hours, attempting to set the record straight. But by then it was too late.In that sense, the debate was the 2024 campaign in microcosm. Trump is a liar, convicted felon and would-be dictator who plotted to overturn a free and fair election so he could cling to power, but he is set to return to the Oval Office because his opponent is too weak to stop him. As the former Obama administration official Van Jones put it after the debate, this is a contest of “an old man against a conman” – but the weakness of the former is allowing the latter to prevail.The simple fact that Trump spoke loudly and clearly and with, by his standards, relative self-discipline, coupled with the lack of interrogation from the moderators, granted him a plausibility he should have been denied. He is a failed coup leader, nationalist-populist menace and racist who would suck up to the world’s autocrats and throw Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s wolves: he should be allowed nowhere near power. But because he was up against a man who could scarcely complete a sentence, he was presented as a legitimate option for the world’s highest office.The expectation must now be that, if he faces Biden on 5 November, Trump will win. He was ahead in all of the battleground states even before the debate and there is now no clear further chance for a reset. Thursday night’s head-to-head was supposed to be that moment. Indeed, that is why the White House opted to have the debate so unusually early: to allay fears about the president’s age and to reframe the race not as a referendum on Biden, but as a choice. That gambit doubly failed, making a bad problem much worse.So what now? Unfortunately, there is no letters-to-Graham-Brady mechanism in US politics, no equivalent to Westminster’s short, sharp defenestrations. Some imagine the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having a quiet word, but Biden is a proud and stubborn man who feels he was passed over too long, including by those two. Perhaps Democratic leaders in the House and Senate could do it: given Biden’s decades-long attachment to Congress, he might listen to warnings that “down-ballot” candidates could suffer if he stays at the top of the ticket.But ultimately this will have to be his decision. He won his party’s primaries earlier this year, all but unopposed; the Democratic party’s nomination is his, unless he gives it up. Some say the only person who could ever persuade him to do that is his wife, Jill. But after the debate, she loudly congratulated her husband, albeit in a manner that reinforced the sense of a man well past his prime. “Joe, you did such a great job!” she said. “You answered every question! You knew all the facts!”Even those Democrats who concede Thursday was a calamity worry that a change now is fraught with risk. Biden could make way for his vice-president, but Kamala Harris is even less popular than he is – and Trump would relish mining the rich seams of sexism and racism that would open up. The party could throw it open to a contest fought out at its convention in August among the deep bench of next-generation Democratic talent – the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, her California counterpart, Gavin Newsom, and others – but that could be messy, bitter and rushed. None of the contenders has been tested under national lights, and Democrats would be turning their fire on each other when they need to be aiming at Trump.One thing Democrats agree on: Joe Biden is a good and decent man who has been an unexpectedly consequential president. But communicating is a key part of governing, and Biden has all but lost that ability. For the past year or so, Democrats have crossed their fingers and hoped the evidence taking shape before their eyes might fade, not least because any other course of action entailed great risk. After this disaster of a debate, they can no longer deny that inaction, too, is a risk – and, given the perils of a second Trump presidency, surely the much graver one.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      The only silver lining to Biden’s painful performance? US voters had already made up their minds | Emma Brockes

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      Who could have foreseen that the scariest thing about the presidential debate on Thursday night wouldn’t be the lies, the bombast or the threats to democracy, but the spectacle of Trump’s slightly wolfish restraint. Heading into the encounter, Democrats felt the kind of anxiety more usually endured before watching a child perform, with that same crushing sense of raw emotions. That Trump barely mocked Biden, or went after his age or his son, seemed less rehearsed than a shrewd response to what all of us were seeing: a president so compromised that all Trump had to do was grin, lean back and let the optics work for him.And still, despite the evidence, it feels wanton to say this. Biden, whose voice was hoarse from a cold, rushed his delivery, fought to find words and stumbled in a style not entirely new to him. The difference on Thursday night was one of degree. “Oh my God” was the general consensus, texted around the country, when the debate opened in Atlanta. While Trump’s remarks were predictably ludicrous, full of lies and inflated claims, nothing he said could distract from the image of Biden saying sensible things in a manner so crepuscular that the entire event jumped from politics to tragedy. It made me think of a line from Rilke: “It had almost hurt to see.”This was the near-universal response among Democrats on Friday morning. Spoken with slightly too much relish and accompanied by a lot of “we’re doomed” hand-waving, it drew attention once again to everything that’s wrong with political discourse. There was Trump, claiming, crazily, that in Democratic states something he called “abortion after birth” was endorsed, while Biden soberly listed his achievements in job creation, managing inflation and proposals to better tax those paid more than $400,000. The president pushed back against Trump’s lies as best he could, unaided by the two CNN moderators who, scandalously, were far more corpse-like in their affect than the president. It didn’t matter. The gut response of everyone watching was not “here are two men, one vastly superior to the other”. It was simple shock at how Biden has aged.There was anger here, too. A point widely made on social media on Thursday night was that this is what a race for the most powerful job in the world looks like when people won’t vote for a woman. Two elderly men, in various states of impairment, addressing each other as “this guy”, squabbling over who has the better golf handicap and accusing each other of being sore losers. It was like one of those bad 90s satires involving Warren Beatty, in which the joke is too broad to land. Trump thinned his lips, repeated the phrase “kill the baby”, and accused Biden of running the worst administration in history, to which Biden, correctly but uselessly, in effect responded “no, you are”.And still there was worse to come. For me, the hardest parts of the 90 minutes were the brief flashes of Biden as he once was, full of easy charm and conviction. It was clear that the president was operating in a mode less professional than personal; that his unfiltered state was, on occasion, less strategic than the result of some other, inhibition-suppressing dynamic. But in those moments of pure, visceral response to Trump’s awfulness, Biden seemed like a stand-in for all of us.Several times, one saw Biden look across at Trump with pure, unmoderated hatred. “He didn’t do a damn thing,” he said in reference to Trump and 6 January. “Such a whiner, he is,” said Biden, the odd syntax removing the remarks from the context of a presidential debate to what felt like an honest and off-camera response. “Something snapped in you when you lost,” he said and it was an extraordinary moment, watching a man present Trump with a flat truth about himself. When Biden cracked a huge smile in response to the audaciousness of yet another Trump lie, the pathos was almost unbearable. There he was, fully himself for a moment, the man we recognise as a capable and charismatic leader.Trump, in these moments of confrontation, pursed his lips and smiled thinly. You could almost see the machinery of his personality working, the split-second flare of his wounded narcissism, followed immediately by denial and attack. By the end of the debate, while Democrats started talking, pointlessly, about replacing Biden on the ticket, the only consolation was in the broken political system itself. These debates don’t move the needle. They exist in the absence of any better ideas on how to engage the electorate. Americans are so polarised that no one is changing their minds. If Biden’s performance was terrible, one could self-soothe with the observation that it hardly matters at this stage; which is, of course, the most terrifying conclusion of all.
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More