Under siege from fellow Democrats, President Biden’s campaign is quietly testing the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Donald J. Trump in a head-to-head survey of voters, as Mr. Biden fights for his political future with a high-stakes news conference on Thursday.
The survey, which is being conducted this week and was commissioned by the Biden campaign’s analytics team, is believed to be the first time since the debate that Mr. Biden’s aides have sought to measure how the vice president would fare at the top of the ticket. It was described by three people who are informed about it and insisted on anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information. They did not specify why the survey was being conducted or what the campaign planned to do with the results.
The effort, which comes as a growing number of prominent lawmakers call for Mr. Biden to step aside or suggest he should reconsider his plans to run, indicates that his campaign may be preparing to wade into a debate that has consumed the Democratic Party behind closed doors: whether Mr. Biden should step aside for his vice president.
While some of Mr. Biden’s top aides have quietly argued that Ms. Harris could not win the election, donors and other outside supporters of the vice president believe she might be in a stronger position after the debate, and could be a more energetic communicator of the party’s message.
In memo to campaign staff on Thursday, Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and his campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, wrote about the “path ahead.”
“In addition to what we believe is a clear pathway ahead for us, there is also no indication that anyone else would outperform the president vs. Trump,” they wrote. “Hypothetical polling of alternative nominees will always be unreliable, and surveys do not take into account the negative media environment that any Democratic nominee will encounter. The only Democratic candidate for whom this is already baked in is President Biden.”
The memo also appeared to acknowledge an erosion of Mr. Biden’s support.
“The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race,” the memo says.
As the White House and the Biden campaign try to project a unified front, some of their supporters are engaged in a tough assessment of who should top the ticket.
Mr. Biden’s political future will be determined in part by his performance during Thursday’s news conference at the NATO summit in Washington at 6:30 p.m., which party lawmakers, officials and donors have said they will closely monitor. It will be his longest unscripted appearance since the faltering debate performance two weeks ago.
Ahead of the news conference, Mr. Biden is dispatching some of his top aides — Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon and Ms. O’Malley Dillon are expected to go — to Capitol Hill to settle nervous Democratic senators who have begun to break ranks. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado has predicted that Mr. Biden will lose and deeply damage Democrats in down-ballot races. And Senator Peter Welch of Vermont on Wednesday evening became the first senator to explicitly call for Mr. Biden to drop out.
Much of the attention is on Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who has said publicly that he is “with Joe” but who has signaled privately, Axios reported on Wednesday, that he is open to a ticket not led by Mr. Biden. In a statement provided after that article published, Mr. Schumer said, “As I have made clear repeatedly publicly and privately, I support President Biden and remain committed to ensuring Donald Trump is defeated in November.”
One person who spoke directly with Mr. Schumer last weekend, who discussed the conversation on the condition of anonymity to protect the relationship, said that the majority leader was looking for a way to find a different candidate while being mindful of Mr. Biden.
So far, much of the discontent has been voiced in similarly private and vague ways. The Democracy Alliance, a powerful network of major liberal donors, released a memo to members on Thursday morning stressing its commitment to funding House races in what Pamela Shifman, the president of the group, framed as a “challenging moment.” The memo made no direct mention of Mr. Biden, other than alluding to the fact that he could lose.
“The House is a bulwark against authoritarianism and our insurance policy against Project 2025,” Ms. Shifman wrote, referring to the far-reaching policy plans by Trump allies. “We can’t be caught flat-footed like we were eight years ago. After 2016, it would be malpractice for us not to have a plan in place for if the worst happens.”
The president’s team had felt bullish earlier in the week after a hard push on Monday to silence his Democratic critics, which included an open letter to Congress, a cable news call-in, a presidential appearance on a top donor call and a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.
But any progress in moving past the debate was undone early on Wednesday when former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Mr. Biden still had a decision to make about whether or not he was running — nearly a week after he told Democratic governors and the ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos that he was staying in the race.
Ms. Pelosi delivered her message — implying that Mr. Biden should reconsider his candidacy without explicitly saying so — on “Morning Joe,” the MSNBC show Mr. Biden often wakes up to watch. It was the same program to which the president had phoned in for an interview on Monday to declare that he was committed to running.
Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, are seen as three of the most influential figures in the debate over whether Mr. Biden should step aside.
The question of what might come afterward if he does drop out has convulsed the Democratic Party and shaped the conversation about what to do. Many in the party have doubted Ms. Harris’s ability to unite a sufficiently broad coalition to defeat Mr. Trump in November.
While the Biden campaign is littered with aides panicked about Mr. Biden’s political standing, the president has been sanguine in his discussions with donors and Democratic elected officials, blaming the party and news media “elites” for the anxiety.
Since the debate, Mr. Biden’s innermost circle has shrunk to his family and a very small group of his closest aides, effectively cocooning the president. It is not clear how much Mr. Biden has been informed about how his standing has dropped among Democrats.
Ms. Harris has been careful to demonstrate complete loyalty to Mr. Biden’s bid. But outside supporters of her candidacy have been quietly and carefully floating the idea that she might be a stronger contender against Mr. Trump — with some even going so far as to suggest potential running mates for the vice president.
This week, strategists and donors who were supportive of Ms. Harris circulated a presentation of polling assessing her strength with younger voters and showing that two out of three Democratic voters in battleground states supported the idea of Ms. Harris as the nominee in a scenario where Mr. Biden dropped out.
Some of Mr. Biden’s aides have been privately skeptical of Ms. Harris’s ability to win the election.
Shortly after the debate, Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, Ms. O’Malley Dillon, and his White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients, met with a group of anti-Trump Republicans at a hotel near the White House. The meeting had been planned weeks before the debate, but the two Biden advisers found themselves fielding pleas from some in the room that Mr. Biden drop out after his poor showing onstage. Mr. Biden’s advisers said the conversation was a nonstarter.
When some of the Republicans suggested that Democrats had a number of other options among the party’s governors, Ms. O’Malley Dillon said that the options were either Mr. Biden or, if he were to drop out, Ms. Harris, and indicated that the discussion was a waste of time, according to one person briefed on what was said.
“Jen was clear: The 2024 ticket is President Biden and Vice President Harris,” said Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman.
Another person who was briefed on the meeting, and who recounted the discussion about Ms. Harris, said the implication some took was that the Biden advisers did not think she would fare any better than the president.
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