It Was a Dark Night of the Soul for Democrats

From the very start, President Joe Biden’s debate performance was not good. He was stuttering, speaking quietly, meandering in his train of thought, and, supposedly, under the weather. Bidenworld had hoped the president would use the debate to resoundingly dispel lingering concerns voters have about his age, but the performance turned those concerns up to a crisis level instead.

In fact, it was so not good that nearly every postgame panel on every major network blasted some version of the chryon: “Democrats in crisis no longer believe Biden should be nominee.” It was so not good that CNN’s Van Jones was tearing up just talking about it.

Biden’s debate face-plant immediately cleaved the Democratic Party into two camps: unnamed Democrats who seem to suddenly believe that Biden will cost them the presidency and cannot continue in his campaign, and named Democrats who are either saying nothing or putting on a brave face trying to spin what happened on Thursday night as passable. (Said CNN’s John King after the debate’s conclusion: Democrats are wondering “should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside? The other conversations are: Should prominent Democrats go public with that call because they feel that debate was so terrible?”)

Among that second camp of Democrats—the ones putting on a brave face—are Biden’s surrogates, those who were tasked with the unenviable burden of trying to say something good about his performance and slow the fast-rising panic about the president’s chances in November. It was no easy work.

No one had it tougher than California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has made himself Biden’s most regular and willing spin doctor (and sometimes translator) in recent months. While unnamed Democrats were jumping ship (according to the many journalists getting frantic texts from them), Newsom spent the final minutes of the debate posting some half-hearted fact-checking on X:

And the most uniquely uninspired rendition:

Then Newsom took his case to television. Even on MSNBC, the panel there asked Newsom for any positive takeaways whatsoever. “Worry less and do more,” Newsom said, trying to encourage Rachel Maddow, while, beneath him, the station’s chyron told a much more dire story: “Biden aide on debate: ‘not an ideal start.’ ”

The sanguine Newsom kept at it: “We need to buck up and focus on what’s at stake. … Everything’s about tomorrow,” he insisted.

But even Maddow wasn’t entirely swayed. “They’re going to have to make up ground they didn’t have to make because of that performance,” she said, about the Biden campaign.

To this, Newsom couldn’t help but shrug.

“We’ve all had those nights,” was how he left it.

Meanwhile, Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, took on a slightly more challenging rebuttal on CNN, with an even less resounding case.

Speaking with Anderson Cooper, she was pressed on Biden’s performance and responded: “People can debate on style points but ultimately this election … has to be about substance.”

(“Substance” was a theme that Biden proxies began to coalesce around a lot more as the night got later.) But it wasn’t enough to entirely satisfy Cooper. “Can you say that you are not concerned [about the president]?” he pressed Harris.

“It was a slow start,” she conceded. “I’m not going to debate that.” That itself was a remarkable concession, and a sign of just how bleak things were.

Evan Osnos, Biden’s biographer and a New Yorker writer, was much more pointed on CNN. Biden was “diminished from where he was four years ago,” Osnos said bluntly. “There has to be some very hard conversations.”

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker—not a first-team Biden proxy—put out a statement praising the president. “Tonight, voters were presented with a clear choice—a president working hard every day to improve the lives of all Americans or a convicted felon, a selfish blowhard looking out only for himself.” Critically, Pritzker was not on hand with the campaign in Georgia and did not make himself available to be pressed on the issue by the network teams.

So for at least another night, the younger, abler Democrats—Harris, Newsom, and Pritzker would be at the top of any list to succeed Biden—showed no outward signs of wavering in their support of the president’s candidacy.

But that united front might only prove more painful for Democratic voters, donors, and volunteers, who are desperately concerned about what they saw. Among that group, now, are Democrats who were Biden diehards up until Thursday night. (Already at least one New York Times columnist has called publicly for Biden to drop out.) There is plenty of political talent in the Democratic Party—the proverbial bench is plenty deep. But if Democratic politicians remain unwilling to put their own names to their discontent, none of that will matter for 2024, or the convention, which is just weeks away.

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