FILE - President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C., June. 28, 2024. It’s been two weeks since Biden’s debate with Donald Trump and there’s rampant gloom in the party about Biden’s chances in the fall if he stays in the race. On Thursday, July 11, the 11th lawmaker joined the list of Democrats calling on Biden to end his candidacy. After days of reckoning, many more are known to be harboring that wish. FILE - Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., speaks on Capitol Hill, Feb.
“I think we could lose the whole thing and it’s staggering to me,” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado told CNN, speaking for many others as well as himself. He meant the presidency, the Senate and the House, in what he worries may be a Trump landslide.With the calendar rushing toward the Democratic convention in August, the debate in Atlanta upended Democratic officials, lawmakers and voters. Biden was befogged from the first words he uttered, or muttered.
The White House, in the first of its shifting explanations for Biden’s troubling demeanor, said he was sick with a cold or the like when going into the debate. After watching the debate, “I had to take a few more antidepressants than usual,” cracked Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York. In the email, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty branded the Biden doubters the “bedwetting brigade.” More sheets were about to be soiled.On the Sunday news shows, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman stepped up to offer a defense of the president. He, too, had epically flopped in a debate.
For days, Democrats had been imploring Biden to get out more, call more lawmakers and put himself in unscripted situations to show what he can do. “Come on, pick up the phone,” said Rep. Nanette Barragan of California, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a Biden supporter. Yet the session played into public perceptions of Biden as stretched thin, as he acknowledged he needs to get more sleep and limit evening events so he can go to bed earlier. The president joked that his health was fine and it was his brain that was the problem. The crack fell flat.on July 5, Biden avoided another debacle like his debate — a matchup that had been proposed by his campaign and accepted by Trump’s. But the ABC interview left few Democrats reassured.
Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker who forecast Trump’s 2016 victory when most others on the left figured he would lose, appealed to Biden to not “let your enablers hound you into doing what your body is begging you not to do.”