Top Democrats are circling the wagons around President Biden with a simple response to his disastrous debate performance: It was just one bad night, and the freakout over his candidacy is overblown.
“Following Thursday night’s debate, the beltway class is counting Joe Biden out,” Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in a memo circulated over the weekend that said the president’s supporters are fired up and focused on beating Trump.
The campaign and Biden’s surrogates are trying to portray the panic over Biden’s age, which ratcheted up after the 81-year-old president struggled to speak coherently and finish sentences on Thursday night, as inside-the-beltway chatter. But it’s actually the opposite. Polling and interviews have shown that voters around the country have long harbored deep reservations about Biden’s age, while Democratic power players in Washington have been unwilling to talk openly about them.
Now, some Democrats are beginning to warn the campaign not to discount those worries and to instead address them honestly and openly.
“As someone who’s on the local level, that talks with people every single day who have all types of backgrounds, there’s been an overriding concern about President Biden’s health and ability to deliver,” said Walt Maddox, who has served as the Democratic mayor of Tuscaloosa for nearly 20 years. “Regardless of whether that’s accurate or not, Thursday night’s debate only reinforced that perception.”
“People have concerns,” said Maddox, who was the Democratic nominee for governor of Alabama in 2018, “and I think to try to ask voters to move on from those concerns would not be a wise course of action.”
Years of age-related worry
Biden had to overcome worries about his age to win the Democratic primary in 2020, and he decisively won the general election. But those worries — as well as an overwhelming sense of pessimism about his candidacy, continued from there, according to polling by The New York Times and others.
In the summer of 2022, a poll by The Times and Siena College found that 61 percent of self-identified Democrats wanted someone other than Biden to be the presidential nominee. The top reason Democratic voters provided for why they wanted someone else? His age. (Job performance wasn’t far behind.)
Last summer, a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Opinion Research found that 77 percent of voters — including 69 percent of Democrats — thought Biden was too old to be effective for another four years, a slightly different question than The Times asked .
In February, according to a Times/Siena poll, more than half of Democrats — 56 percent — said they thought Biden was too old to be an effective president. By June, before the debate, that figure had dipped to 51 percent — a sign that his strong performance at the State of the Union may have slightly improved Democrats’ perceptions of his age.
But it seems likely that the debate will have erased those gains.
Voters say what insiders won’t
Biden’s aides have consistently dismissed concerns about his age as being stoked by Republicans, as well as by journalists and pundits who have been too focused on it.
But I have often been struck by the fact that, when you talk with regular voters about President Biden, it’s one of the first things they bring up. They talk about what Democrats in Washington will not.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked readers of this newsletter how you were feeling about this debate. Many of you had a prediction that the people closest to Biden were apparently unwilling to make — that he might stumble onstage, fueling perceptions that he is too old .
Phil Laciura, 72, a retired sports editor who lives in Grosse Pointe, Mich., told me he was dreading the debate because he believed that Biden would “show his age.” I called him back today to see how he was feeling.
“He was awful,” Laciura, an independent voter, said. “He proved he can’t be president.”
Laciura voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then for Biden in 2020. He is moving to Illinois soon, so he won’t be voting in a critical swing state. But he says that, after the debate, he can’t vote for Biden again. He predicted he wouldn’t vote at all.
“I saw something today, they’re calling him ‘Ruth Bader Biden,’” Laciura said, referencing the aging Supreme Court Justice who was gently prodded to retire during the Obama administration, so a Democrat could name her replacement. She did not. And after her death in 2020, she was succeeded by a Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett.
Democrats are working hard to defend Biden. But for him to recover his standing, they will need to win back voters like Laciura — and that may need to begin with acknowledging, not ignoring, those voters’ very real concerns about his age and fitness for another term.
What the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling means for Trump
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Donald Trump is immune from official acts taken during his presidency. The decision expands presidential power and makes it all the more unlikely that Trump will go to trial for trying to subvert the previous election before the next one. But the ruling could create a new opportunity for prosecutors to spotlight his alleged misconduct, according to my colleague Alan Feuer. I asked him to tell us more.
The court ruled that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts related to core functions of the presidency, and no immunity for things that aren’t part of their official duties. The justices also ruled that presidents are presumed to be immune for official acts that fall outside their core constitutional duties, but that prosecutors can argue for criminal charges on those acts on a case-by-case basis. What does this mean for Trump?
The election subversion indictment that Jack Smith brought against Trump lays out several methods that it says Trump used in his attempt to overturn the results of the last election. The court ruled that one of those ways — his alleged strong-arming of Justice Department officials to validate his claims the election was marred by fraud — is off-limits to prosecutors, because that was a president dealing with his own top officials.
But when it comes to the other methods he used, which include pressuring his vice president to not certify the election, and seeking to persuade state or local officials not to certify their results, the judge overseeing the case will now need to determine whether those were official acts immune from prosecution, or whether they emerged from his unofficial role as a candidate for office.
How will the judge, Tanya Chutkan, do that? And how long will it take?
Judge Chutkan has a massive task in front of her, and it is now all but certain that Trump will not face trial on the election subversion charges before Election Day.
But what’s remarkable is that the court is asking her to hold a major hearing to do that. The Trump team will surely try to delay this hearing, but it’s possible that we could see a multiday evidentiary hearing, including testimony from people like Mike Pence or some of the state officials who got their arms twisted by Trump, during what could be the homestretch of the presidential campaign — possibly September or October.
There could be this mini trial that would, for all intents and purposes, look much like the real trial, except for the fact that there wouldn’t be a jury issuing a verdict at the end of it.
What does this mean for future presidents?
I think the question is, what vision of the presidency motivated this decision? I would say the conservative majority was motivated by this dark vision of the presidency under siege by partisan prosecutions, whereas the dissenting liberal justices were much more concerned about the rise of authoritarianism and the abuse of power that a protection like this will now afford presidents moving forward.
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