Joe Biden’s position appeared shaky on Thursday, amid reports that his aides and advisers were discussing how to persuade him to leave the presidential race while his own campaign was secretly testing Kamala Harris’s popularity, suggesting it was preparing for that very scenario.
Then just before the US president was scheduled to face journalists at a potentially pivotal news conference marking the end of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit, he spoke to reporters there and mistakenly referred to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “President Putin”.
Biden quickly realised he had mixed up one of his international allies, who was there, with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and corrected himself, but the gaffe could not have come at a worse time.
Earlier, two separate New York Times reports suggested his efforts to keep his candidacy for re-election afloat were close to foundering.
The Times reported on its website that his campaign’s analytics team was quietly testing the strength of Harris, the vice-president, among voters in a match-up against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Biden has consistently argued that he has the best chance of beating Trump, citing polling evidence.
A separate report suggested that unnamed longtime aides and advisers to the president had become convinced in recent days that his campaign to beat Trump in the election was doomed and were trying to find ways of persuading him of their argument.
The story was met by denial by the White House and the Biden campaign, which respectively called it “unequivocally not true” and “patently false”.
But the picture of diminishing support for the president even within his own camp was further strengthened by an NBC report suggesting that three people involved in his re-election campaign had written off his chances.
“He needs to drop out,” the network’s website quoted one Biden campaign official as saying. “He will never recover from this.”
The glut of damaging stories followed a number of Democratic party members calling on him to step down and as senators from the party prepared to meet key members of Biden’s staff at the White House to air their concerns about his electability following last month’s disastrous debate performance with Trump.
On Thursday afternoon, three more House Democrats called for Biden to withdraw, Greg Stanton of Arizona, Ed Case of Hawaii and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
Schneider said in a statement: “I fear if he fails to make the right choice, our democracy will hang in the balance,” while Stanton posted a statement on Twitter/X effusively praising Biden’s record and his character but saying he should step aside as the nominee amid the need to save US democracy from the “existential threat” of Donald Trump.
The Nato-related press conference on Thursday evening was seen as crucial as a test to compare Biden’s performance with the dire one he displayed in the debate, followed by a less than convincing performance in a TV interview with ABC the following week.
The event is the kind of unscripted set piece that Biden’s staff stand accused of shielding him from, and any repeat of the calamitous debate display could turn the steady trickle of public calls for Biden to stand aside into a flood.
Some of Biden’s most loyal acolytes at the top of the Democratic party have issued less than full-throated statements of support in recent days.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, who has repeated the mantra “I’m for Joe” throughout the crisis, was reported to have signalled openness to having the president replaced at the top of the presidential ticket.
Axios reported that Schumer had been taking close account of the feelings of party donors and fellow senators in the 12 days since Biden’s meltdown in the 27 June debate, when he plunged the viability of his candidacy into doubt by abjectly failing to defend his own policies or counter Trump’s lies.
“As I have made clear repeatedly publicly and privately, I support President Biden and remain committed to ensuring Donald Trump is defeated in November,” Schumer said, in comments that fell short of a ringing endorsement. On Wednesday, Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democratic senator to publicly tell Biden to step aside. Nine members of the House of Representatives have already done so.
“He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not,” Welch wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece.
The president ostensibly retains the support of Democratic governors, senators in the vital swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, the Congressional Black caucus, key progressive House members including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and many others.
But a meeting between senators and Biden staff on Thursday apparently did not go particularly well, with reports that things got heated as the lawmakers complained that Biden was not taking control of the situation and that they were in a very difficult situation. It took place against the backdrop of backstage manoeuvring. The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi placed added pressure on Biden on Wednesday by telling MSNBC that it was up to the president to decide, and “we are encouraging him to make that decision”. Behind the scenes, Pelosi has reportedly told Democratic Congress members that Biden cannot win the election and should step aside, according to Politico.
She has also reportedly encouraged Democrats in swing districts threatened with losing their seats in November to do whatever is necessary to defend themselves, including calling on Biden to stand aside.
Crucially, she is also said to have advised members to wait until the end of the Nato gathering before going public.
A fresh Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed 56% of Democratic voters agreeing that Biden should end his campaign, against 42% who said he should stay put – a finding that undermined the president’s assertion that the effort to oust him was led by “elites” in the party.
Biden has held fewer news conferences with journalists in his three and a half years in office than any president since Ronald Reagan.
A previous press conference at the White House in February to counter criticisms by Robert Hur, a special prosecutor who criticised the president’s “poor memory”, backfired somewhat when Biden referred to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, as “the president of Mexico”.
