President Biden vowed on Friday to stay in the race for president, telling a boisterous audience in Madison, Wis., that he would not bow to people clamoring for him to step aside.
“Some folks don’t seem to care who you voted for,” he said to the crowd chanting “Let’s go, Joe!” and waving signs. “Well, guess what? They’re trying to push me out of the race. Well, let me say this as clear as I can. I’m staying in the race!”
Mr. Biden started the speech forcefully, speaking rapidly and looking more ruddy than he did in the disastrous debate that called into question whether he was too old to remain in the contest against former President Donald J. Trump.
In his remarks, held inside a small, middle-school gym, he took that issue on directly, saying he was not too old to create 15 million jobs, put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court or “beat big Pharma.”
“I’m in Wisconsin for one reason,” he said, “because we’re going to win.”
Mr. Biden arrived in the state betting that a strong performance could be among his last, best hopes of saving his teetering presidential campaign.
But it is far from clear whether a short, daytime speech — delivered with a teleprompter and seen by just a fraction of the tens of millions of Americans who watched the debate — can begin to repair the political damage to his candidacy, no matter how much smoother he spoke.
His actions are taking place under an intense political microscope. Every word Mr. Biden uttered during the rally, and later in an interview set to air in prime time, is being viewed through the lens of the twin questions hanging over his campaign: At 81, is he too old? And can he still win?
For days, Mr. Biden’s team has said no, he’s not, and yes, he can.
But it took more than a week for the president to schedule the rally in Madison and the interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, letting anger fester for days as Democrats built momentum for the idea he should quit the race.
Some of the president’s biggest donors have signaled that they no longer have confidence in him and are demanding evidence that he is still capable before they will invest more in his campaign.
A group of 168 business executives and donors issued a letter on Friday calling on him to step aside, including Paul Tagliabue, the former N.F.L. commissioner; John and Tom Florsheim, the shoe company brothers; and Christy Walton, a Walmart heir.
Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, became the third sitting lawmaker calling for Mr. Biden to end his re-election bid, telling a Boston radio station on Thursday that he should “follow in one of our founding father, George Washington’s, footsteps and step aside to let new leaders rise up.”
Friday’s events are a test of whether Mr. Biden can satisfy those demands and quiet the critics, proving to skeptical supporters that he remains vigorous enough to wage a fierce battle with Mr. Trump in the remaining four months of the campaign.
After the speech, Mr. Biden sat down to tape his first television interview since the debate debacle in Atlanta raised deep qualms about his mental acuity. How he handles questions from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos may determine whether his re-election bid can survive.
It will be his first major interview since the debate, and he will almost surely face tougher questions than he did during a set of friendly interviews that aired Thursday with two Black talk radio hosts, during which he stumbled on his words and made a pair of verbal gaffes. The full ABC interview will be broadcast at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
The visit to Madison, a solidly Democratic college-town capital, is an appropriate venue for the high-stakes moment as Mr. Biden tries to stem the tide of defections.
Many supporters at the rally said they remained with Mr. Biden, despite his struggles, and blamed the media for focusing on his age.
“I’m so offended by the news,” said Tina Stratton, 61, a retired groundskeeper from Hortonville, southwest of Green Bay, wearing a Women for Biden-Harris T-shirt. “As long as he decides he wants to do this, I will be out there kicking butt for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Several younger voters, however, said that Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance had been worrying and that they had come to the event to see what he was like in person.
“If he keeps struggling, I think we need to have a real conversation” about him dropping out, said Matthew Staats, 19, a college student from Sheboygan. “But I hope he does well.”
Rohan Kommuru, 20, said many of his friends were “turned off” by Mr. Biden’s age.
“He needs to prove to the American people that he’s fit for office,” Mr. Kommuru said.
Wisconsin, which will allocate 10 electoral votes, is part of the president’s Midwest firewall, a collection of Rust Belt states that he must win if he hopes to spend another four years in the White House. Even before the debate last week, polls showed him locked in a tight race with Mr. Trump in the state, which Mr. Biden won in 2020 by about 20,000 votes out of more than 3.2 million cast.
The state is also ground zero for the yearslong battle over voting procedures that could help determine the outcome in another very close race. On Friday, just hours before the arrival of Air Force One, liberal members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed a previous ruling by conservative justices banning the use of absentee-ballot drop boxes in elections.
That change alone will likely benefit Mr. Biden if he remains on the ballot in November. Democrats tend to do better in early voting, and Mr. Trump has railed against the practice as fraudulent, urging his supporters not to mail in their ballots early.
For the moment, Mr. Biden’s future may hinge on how he appeals to Wisconsin’s electorate, which has flipped back and forth during the past two presidential elections. His appearance on Friday marks his fifth visit to the state this year. In January, he visited the Blatnik Bridge in Superior, Wis., to promote his infrastructure legislation. In May, he was in Racine, Wis., to promote the construction of an A.I. data center.
Mr. Biden had planned to give another speech on Sunday, to a meeting of the National Education Association in Philadelphia. But his campaign said on Friday that the speech had been canceled after the union’s staff declared a strike over working conditions.
In a statement, a campaign spokesman said: “President Biden is a fierce supporter of unions and he won’t cross a picket line. The president is still planning to travel to Pennsylvania this weekend, and we will have more details to share at a later point.”
During the Republican National Convention later this month, Mr. Biden plans to travel to Las Vegas and speak to the N.A.A.C.P. and UnidosUS conferences, his campaign said on Friday.
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