Two opposing views of President Joe Biden’s re-election bid have emerged within the Democratic Party: It is either an eighty-one-year-old man’s last-ditch, doomed effort to cling to power, or the best—and only—path to thwart a Trump dictatorship.
Biden wants to make sure you believe the latter.
The Biden campaign, following the President’s disastrous debate performance last week, is desperate to persuade voters that he remains competent. But his “aggressive travel schedule” through battleground states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as a $50 million ad blitz, will likely not be enough to undo the damage done.
At the core of the Biden campaign is a paradox: The more he defies calls to step down, the more his campaign comes across as a dangerous gamble, one that leaves democracy hanging in the balance.
In the days following the debate, Democratic party operatives first tried to explain away Biden’s garbled replies and long pauses by saying he had a cold—and then, once the panic began to set in, a cold and jet lag. Biden later claimed that he’s more coherent before 8 p.m. and that, moving forward, he would, like an inverse vampire, appear only in the daylight.
Of course, this strategy failed to stop a swell of top donors, politicians, and media, including The New York Times, from calling for Biden to step down—or Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, from attempting to build support in Congress to call for his ouster.
The campaign’s rapid reboot effort revolves around holding tightly controlled rallies that showcase Biden as vigorous and engaged. He acknowledges that he fumbled but does not dwell on it; admits his age is a concern, albeit not a debilitating one; and, above all, casts whatever flaws he may have as insignificant when compared to Donald Trump’s rap sheet.
This was the version of Biden who, on Friday, July 5, stood onstage in a crowded middle school gym in Madison, Wisconsin, and declared, resolutely, “They’re trying to push me out of the race. Well, let me say this [as] clearly as I can: I’m staying in the race.”
Biden followed the campaign stop with a twenty-two minute interview with ABC host George Stephanopolis. Once again, Biden dismissed his debate performance as a bad night (“I was exhausted”). When pressed on polls that show him falling further and further behind Trump, he pointed to having held ten events with “large crowds, overwhelming response.”
Stephanopolis challenged him on this, suggesting that Trump’s ability to draw crowds does not make a favorable comparison—and that the Biden campaign could not rely on stump speeches alone to save his candidacy.
While standing in the press pen behind several hundred union members, public school teachers, and other local Democrats in Madison, I watched as Biden’s face swiveled between two teleprompters. The devices, nearly translucent, were strategically placed to give the illusion that his eyes were panning across the crowd.
It was a clever set-up that, along with impassioned warm-up speeches by leading Wisconsin Democrats like Governor Tony Evers, U.S. Representative Mark Pocan, and state Democratic party chair Ben Wikler, could have made a compelling case that voters should ignore what they saw on debate night. (Notably absent was U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, who faces a tight race against billionaire Eric Hovde, amid speculation that she’s been deliberately distancing herself from the Biden campaign).
But the event was hampered by what seemed like magical thinking. Wikler, for example, told a reporter standing next to me that Biden would “usher in a new birth of freedom in this country.”
Wikler’s hyperbolic assertion, and the upbeat tenor of the rally as a whole, belied a more sober reality: Biden’s polling numbers are cratering.
The image of Biden confusing “saving” Medicare with beating it is now forever seared into the collective consciousness. And there may be no coming back from that. After all, much lesser gaffes—like Michael Dukakis’s infamously dorky tank photo-op or Howard Dean’s “scream” in 2004—have left campaigns dead in the water before.
The Biden campaign has pitched the race as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, correctly viewing Trump as a wannabe dictator and his network of allies and donors as willing accomplices. You don’t need to read all 900 pages of the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s presidential playbook, Project 2025, to understand Trump is serious when he says he’ll be a “dictator on day one.” He has already tried, and failed, to overturn one election.
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s guarantee of immunity from prosecution, it is hard to understate how far he could go with a second term in office.
And yet, despite Biden’s evident exhaustion, the increasing resistance to his second campaign from within his own party, and the fact that his own running mate—with whom he shares campaign coffers—polls more strongly against Trump than he does, Biden continues to double down.
Fittingly, at the Wisconsin rally’s end, Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” played as Biden exited the stage. The song encapsulates the President’s strategy of making defiance into a virtue, of standing up to all of the haters as they try to beat you down.
But sometimes the haters are right (or at least worth hearing out). With what’s at stake, in this instance, not backing down, could amount to a grave threat to American democracy.