All Joe Biden needed to do was replicate his State of the Union address performance. Instead, he stammered, stumbled, and with fewer than five months until November, played into Democrats’ worst fears — that he’s fumbling away this election to Donald Trump.
The alarm bells for Democrats began ringing the moment Biden started speaking in a haltingly hoarse voice. Minutes into the debate, he struggled to defend the economy under his watch and flubbed key health initiatives central to his reelection bid, mistakenly saying “we finally beat Medicare” and incorrectly stating how much his administration lowered the price of insulin. He brought up his administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan unprompted, repeatedly mixed up “billion” and “million,” and spent long stretches of the 90-minute debate on the defensive.
When he wasn’t speaking, he stood frozen behind his podium, mouth agape, his eyes wide and unblinking for extended periods.
“Biden is toast — calling it now,” said Jay Surdukowski, an attorney and Democratic activist from New Hampshire who co-chaired former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2016 presidential campaign in the state.
In text messages with POLITICO, Democrats expressed confusion and concern as they watched the first minutes of the debate. One former Biden White House and campaign aide called it “terrible,” adding that they kept asking themselves, “What did he just say? This is crazy.”
“Not good,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) wrote.
POLITICO spoke to about a dozen Democrats, some of whom were granted anonymity to discuss Biden’s performance.
Biden’s team was quick to defend the president’s performance, first attributing it to a cold (and noting he tested negative for Covid-19), and then insisting Trump hurt himself by attacking Biden’s record.
Biden grew stronger throughout the night, at one point seizing on Trump’s reported dismissal of fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers” to label the former president the real “sucker” and “loser.” He also hammered Trump on his criminal conviction in New York.
“The only person on this stage who’s a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now,” Biden said.
However, first impressions matter — particularly to voters just tuning into the election who were more likely to watch the first debate than the second scheduled for September. Instead of setting the tone for the next phase of the presidential campaign, Biden’s shaky performance reignited fears among Democrats that the octogenarian whose mental acuity and physical fitness have been major voter concerns might not be able to carry the party through to November.
“Time for an open convention,” one prominent operative texted.
Biden’s team had tried to engineer the debate in his favor, pushing for it to be early and without an audience. The president agreed to hold the event partly to calm Democratic nerves about whether he could win in November.
Afterward, they didn’t try to cover up his poor performance but emphasized that Trump remained a threat to American interests at home and abroad.
“It was a slow start, that’s obvious to everyone. I’m not going to debate that point,” Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper an hour after the debate wrapped. “I’m talking about the choice in November. I’m talking about one of the most important elections in our collective lifetime. And do we want to look at what November will bring and go on a course for America that is about a destruction of democracy?”
While some Democrats were quick to brush aside Biden’s blunders — Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) said Biden “isn’t a TV showman, he’s a workhorse” — the race’s trajectory appears dramatically changed.
“My job right now is to be really honest. Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight. And he didn’t do it,” former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told MSNBC. “He had one thing he had to accomplish. And that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age. And he failed at that tonight.”
Already, some Democrats were openly saying Biden should end his campaign. One major Democratic donor and Biden supporter said simply: “Biden needs to drop out. No question about it.”
Biden struggled at times to articulate strong arguments on some of his campaign’s biggest selling points, bungling his health care record and stumbling through a response on his support for abortion rights.
“I support Roe v. Wade. You have three trimesters. First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. Third time is between the doctor — I mean, between the woman and the state,” he said.
Trump made his own mistakes, calling former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, a documentary filmmaker, a “fil-i-maker.” He accused Democrats of wanting to “take the life” of a child “after birth.” He inflated the country’s economic strength under his presidency.
He reiterated his defense of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, launching into a lengthy diatribe against the convictions of hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. Asked repeatedly if he would accept the election results no matter the winner, Trump refused to give a straight answer, eventually saying he’d only do so “if the election is fair and free.”
But Trump largely did what Republicans had begged him to do: show a modicum of restraint while exposing Biden’s weaknesses. The former president, who delights in calling Biden “sleepy” and “crooked” at every turn, waited a full 20 minutes to draw attention to the Democrat’s initially shaky performance.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said, after Biden stuttered through an answer to a question about immigration. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
In a relatively staid debate, Biden fell short of even the lowest expectations.
“Biden seems to have needed a few minutes to warm up,” said one veteran Democratic operative. “Poor guy needs a tea. Maybe a whiskey.” Another suggested that Biden get a throat lozenge.
Both Biden and Trump, who is just three years younger than the incumbent, faced questions toward the end of the debate about their fitness for another four years of the presidency.
Biden, with a cough, urged voters to judge his competence based on his record, attacking Trump as “three years younger and a lot less competent.”
“Look at the record. Look at what I’ve done,” he said, reprising a line he’s often used on the campaign trail.
Trump then offered his own meandering case for his aptitude, claiming to have “aced” a pair of cognitive tests and pointing to golf tournament championships he’s won at his own golf course as evidence of his physical stamina.
The exchange quickly devolved into a game of one-upmanship — “I’m happy to play golf if you carry your own bag,” Biden shot back at one point. But by then, many viewers’ opinions were likely already formed.
Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chair and “Never Trumper” considering voting for Biden, had warned that Democrats would need to reconsider their ticket if the president delivered a poor performance on Thursday.
After the debate, Cullen said: “Anyone who has watched a parent grow old, frail, and foggy recognizes what they are seeing and knows it only gets worse, at an accelerating rate, from here.”