
Several close allies of President Biden, including three involved in his reelection campaign, said the president’s chances of reelection are at zero and suggested that his presence at the top of the ticket could drag down the other Democrat candidates in down-ticket races.
According to the sources, the prevailing belief, even within the Biden campaign, is that the president should withdraw from the race and allow the Democrats to nominate someone else, most like Vice President Harris, during next month’s convention.
One source told NBC News last week that between the president’s disastrous debate performance highlighting concerns about his health and the withholding of campaign donations by deep-pocketed donors, the president’s reelection campaign had become “unsustainable.”
The concern that Biden had no chance of defeating Trump in November only grew after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday.
One longtime Democrat source told NBC News that the party was “beyond f*cked.” The source described the iconic photo of a bloodstained Trump defiantly holding his fist in the air as “indelible.”
A veteran Democrat consultant told NBC News that the presidential race “ended” at that Butler rally.
He said that Democrats should turn their focus on holding the majority in the Senate and picking up seats in the House.
The consultant added that the “only positive thing” to come out of the assassination attempt was that the media stopped talking about Joe Biden’s age.
The sources who spoke to NBC News said most Democrats are divided into two camps – one believes that surviving an assassination attempt would help Trump while the other believes it won’t have any impact on the race. Very few Democrats are suggesting that the failed assassination would improve Biden’s chances in November.
Meanwhile, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo told NBC News that the Biden campaign continued to stand with the president.
Campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez last Thursday sent a memo to campaign staff citing internal polling that showed Biden well within the margin of error in “key battleground states.”