If Biden steps down, it won't be because of the Times or his critics in the party or left Twitter or even the polls. It will be because he has lost the confidence of the top echelons of the Democratic Party.
Everything else is decoration.
If the half-dozen most powerful people in the party were out there twisting arms telling senators and governors that they were confident that Biden is up to the job and sure that he's not dropping out, we'd see that. It'd be visible. We wouldn't be able to NOT see it.
I don't know for sure what's happening behind the curtain, but I know what it looks like when the Democratic Party's top leadership closes ranks in unity, and it doesn't look like this.
If the party's top officials were all wholeheartedly supporting Biden, nothing else would matter. Everything else would be noise. The ongoing slow-motion collapse of public support for his candidacy is a symptom of his lack of closed-doors support, not the cause of it.
Because here's the thing: All the evidence we have suggests that top Dems were as rattled watching the debate as everybody else was. We saw it on the cable news shows that night—everyone on screen, everyone sending the panels texts, was freaked out.
Last Thursday wasn't a "bad debate." It was a cognitive decompensation. And in the week since, Biden's people appear to have been unable to convince the folks who matter in the party that it was, in Pelosi's words, an "episode" rather than a "condition."
Has a single powerful Democrat given an on-camera interview forcefully making the case that Biden is cognitively healthy—or better yet, mocking the idea that he isn't—in the last week? Honest question. If it's happened, I haven't seen it.
Imagine if Obama were to go on camera and say "People are jumping at shadows. I talk to Joe all the time, and if he weren't up to the job, I'd know it. He's going to be the nominee, and he's going to do great." The whole conversation would change. But nothing even vaguely like that has happened.
No top Dems are going to publicly get their knives out as long as he's staying in. But it's crucial to look at HOW they're defending him—what they're saying, and what they're not saying—and what the second and third tiers within the party are doing.
Pelosi has said that the people have a right to be worried and that Biden needs to prove himself. And Whitmer's post-dinner tweet is exactly the kind of hedging I'm referring to: ".@JoeBiden is our nominee. He is in it to win it and I support him."
They didn't really though. They said he decided to stay and is committed to win he's the leader, they have his back like he has theirs.
No one rebutted the underlying concerns.
I don't know - I think it DOES look like this. Schumer, Pelosi, Jeffries, Clyburn, and Obama haven't wavered at all. They can't tell their donors to shut up and get them to do it, but they're not giving any hints this is open.
Clyburn and Pelosi have entertained the possibility that he might step down. Obama sent out a tweet saying we should stick with him. Similar from Schumer. They're not deserting him, but they're not out making the case for him—they're just saying he's the nominee and they support him as such.
