The highly anticipated presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden has proven to be one of the biggest crises for the Biden-Harris campaign. In the wake of the incumbent’s poor performance, Democrats across the media have initiated conversations about potentially replacing President Biden with another candidate to take on former President Trump.
Up until this point, many liberal figures within the media were going out of their way to defend Biden from incessant conservative criticism that has called out the president’s signs of deteriorating mental and physical health. However, after Thursday night’s showing on the debate stage, it appears left-wing media pundits are giving up on this narrative.
MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace said, “I was on the phones for some of it after that became clear and there is a conversation happening inside Biden’s circle, and certainly a much more frank conversation happening inside the Democratic coalition.” She added, “And I think there will be stories of a lot of concern about the performance tonight.”
Politico reported on an advisor to major donors to the Democratic Party, who illustrated how having Biden on the ballot is political suicide. “Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or dies,” the donor adviser stressed. “Otherwise we are f**king dead.”
Reportedly, Democrats running for more localized positions around the country are concerned about the ramifications of Biden’s debate performance on their own election prospects. “I mean it’s not great all around,” a Democratic politician running for state office told Politico. “Our president has a speech impediment, a cold, and is 81.”
Furthermore, other Democratic aides and strategists have admitted that expectations were already not set too high. Still, no one within the party anticipated the disaster that unfolded on the debate stage. “No one expected a master class in debating from Joe Biden, but no one expected this nose dive,” according to a senior Democratic aide. “He was bad on message, bad on substance, bad on counter punching, bad on presentation, bad on non-verbals. There was no bright spot in this debate for him. The only bright spot is that this happened in June and not October.”
Following the debate, CNN hosted a panel discussion evaluating Biden’s performance. According to CNN host John King, Democrats have descended into an “aggressive panic” where they are weighing options to possibly replace President Biden.
“This was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the debate, and it continues right now,” King said, according to a prior report from The American Tribune.
King said, “It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. And they‘re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket, and they‘re having conversations about what they should do about it.” Watch King’s commentary below:
Moreover, CNN commentator Van Jones offered a somber assessment of Biden’s display on the debate stage, suggesting that the Democratic Party requires a different candidate. “I love that guy as a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can. But he had a test to meet tonight, to restore confidence of the country and of the base, and he failed to do that. And I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now. We’re still far from our convention and there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that. But that was not what we needed from Joe Biden. And it’s personally painful for a lot of people. It’s not just panic. It’s pain of what we saw tonight.”
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