As Joe Biden fights off calls for him to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, he's been seeing formerly loyal supporters come out against him. Actor George Clooney wrote an op-ed calling on him to drop out. Donors aren't shelling out any money. Elected Democrats are starting to speak out publicly, and even former Obama officials have been trashing him.
Now it appears that even those inside the Biden campaign see no viable path for him to continue.
According to a report from NBC News, close Biden allies, including campaign officials, "now see his chances of winning as zero — and the likelihood of him taking down fellow Democratic candidates growing."
“He needs to drop out,” one Biden campaign official told NBC News. “He will never recover from this.”
For two weeks, Biden has struggled to stabilize his campaign following a late-June debate debacle. His ongoing clean-up effort, which is scheduled to include top aides meeting privately with Democratic senators and a presidential news conference Thursday, has done little to reassure lawmakers and party officials.
Instead, the reverse is happening.
The set of Democrats who think he should reconsider his decision to stay in the race has grown to include aides, operatives and officials tasked with guiding his campaign to victory. Those who spoke to NBC News said the sentiment that he should exit and leave the Democratic nomination to someone else — most likely Vice President Kamala Harris — is widespread even within the ranks of the campaign and the outside Democratic entities supporting it.
“No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” said a second person working to elect him.
A third person close to the re-election campaign said the present situation — the questions swirling around Biden’s cognitive abilities, the dearth of fundraising and more polls showing Biden dropping in support and other candidates faring better — is unsustainable. This person also said they didn’t see how the campaign could win.
All of the sources chose to remain anonymous, not wanting to appear as though they were undermining the very candidate they had been working for.
The only silver lining for Biden is that some of those who spoke with NBC News say that they haven't entirely abandoned hope for a comeback, although they recognize that it is becoming increasingly improbable.
Yeah, that's not much of a silver lining, but if you're Joe Biden, it's something.
In the end, they believe that defeating Trump in November should be the priority over supporting Biden, which means that if they don't think Biden can win, they want someone else to take over.
Related: Obama World Completely Destroys Joe Biden
“The question for me, and a lot of us, is: Who is the best person to beat Donald Trump?” another person involved in the campaign said. “There are a lot of us that are true blue that are questioning our initial thoughts on that.”
Campaign leadership is now scrambling to boost morale among the team. On Thursday, campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez issued a memo to staff, detailing their reasons for believing the president can still secure a victory.
“Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: this remains a margin-of-error race in key battleground states,” the memo states. “The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race — while some of this movement was from undecided voters to Trump, much of the movement was driven by historically Democratic constituencies moving to undecided.”
They claim that Georgia and Arizona are still winnable, despite polling suggesting otherwise, as well as the Great Lakes battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — all of which Biden is behind in the polling.
“No one is denying that the debate was a setback,” the memo continued. “But Joe Biden and this campaign have made it through setbacks before. We are clear-eyed about what we need to do to win. And we will win by moving forward, unified as a party, so that every single day between now and election day we focus on defeating Donald Trump.”
It likely won't be long before we see people quitting the campaign.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member