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. Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, is reported to have asked Biden about his health. “It’s just my brain,” Biden said, in what he appeared to intend as a joke.
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.
It 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.
