By Dave Andrusko
No two ways around it, developments in the presidential sweepstakes are coming fast and furious. At the moment, pro-life former President Donald Trump is on a roll while pro-abortion incumbent Joe Biden is fending off a full scale revolt within his own party.
Tonight, Mr. Trump will address the fourth and final day of the Republican National Convention. Republicans and pro-lifers are exuberant [See “Third day of Republican National Convention is ebullient in its acceptance of VP Vance and deeply moved by the stories of Gold Star families.”)
Meanwhile, President Biden has many important figures in his party nipping at his heels.
Writing for the news site Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are reporting that “Several top Democrats privately tell us the rising pressure of party congressional leaders and close friends will persuade President Biden to decide to drop out of the presidential race, as soon as this weekend.”
“Behind the scenes,” VandeHei and Allen write,
The private message, distilled to its bluntest form: The top leaders of his party, his friends and key donors believe he can’t win, can’t change public perceptions of his age and acuity, and can’t deliver congressional majorities.
The president is being told that if he stays in, former President Trump could win in a landslide and wipe away Biden’s legacy and Democrats’ hopes in November.
But as of this morning, they write, “The president told both leaders [House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer] he is the nominee of the party, he plans to win, and looks forward to working with both of them to pass his 100 days agenda to help working families.” In fact
“In recent days the President has become more committed to staying in the race,” a senior Biden aide said.
The Biden-Harris campaign tells us: “If the facts matter — and they should — here is one: President Biden is the Democratic nominee and he is going to win this November.”
At a counterprogramming event outside the GOP convention in Milwaukee, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks told reporters that Biden “is not wavering on anything. The president has made his decision.”
Bottom Line. “Biden can’t be forced out,” VandeHei and Allen write. “He has the delegates. No one can physically pry them away. He needs to do it by choice and on his terms.”
Meanwhile, the wildly pro-abortion media continues to ratchet up the pressure.
Dan Balz, writing in the Washington Post, tells us that Biden’s efforts “have had to compete with the steady drip, drip, drip of the saga of whether he should continue his candidacy or bow out gracefully and a messy discussion about whether he should be nominated ahead of next month’s Democratic convention in Chicago.”
And then on Wednesday, the White House announced that the president had tested positive for covid, forcing him off the campaign trail to isolation at his home in Delaware.
As befits convention week, Trump has been the dominant story, and it has been almost uniformly good. Republicans at this convention are as united as anyone can remember — united around Trump’s candidacy, his persona and his policies.
Balz adds
But if Trump has been the obvious big story of the week, Biden has been a story of a different sort. It has now been three weeks since the CNN debate in Atlanta, and the Democrats seem no closer to answering the question of will he stay or will he go.
The calls for him to withdraw began in the hours after that debate and have persisted. But he remains in the race, resistant to all the public and private advice that he threatens to take the party to a defeat that could cost the House and Senate as well as the White House.
However, as Biden continues to swim against the current, Balz writes, “media interviews this week have been more uneven, and he flubbed a number of lines during a speech to the NAACP on Tuesday — misstating a key new proposal about capping rent increases.” Balz continues
Democrats are also increasingly scuffling over a Democratic National Committee plan to nominate Biden virtually weeks before the convention. The stated reason for the virtual vote is a deadline to get his name on the ballot in Ohio, even as Ohio lawmakers appear to have fixed the problem. DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison engaged in a testy back and forth Tuesday with analyst Nate Silver, arguing that the move is necessary to avoid potential Republican shenanigans, with Silver arguing that it wasn’t. But Biden’s Democratic skeptics regard this as a pretext to shove Biden’s nomination down their throats.
(The DNC on Wednesday backed off a more accelerated potential timeline, but still stated that it intended to nominate Biden early.)
Amid Democratic calls for him to be replaced on the 2024 ballot, last week President Biden told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he had a mandate to continue. He said, according to Aaron Blake of the Washington Post,
“All the data shows that the average Democrat out there who voted … still want me to be the nominee,” Biden said. He added: “I wanted to make sure I was right — that the average voter out there still wanted Joe Biden. And I’m confident they do.”
Blake was, to put it mildly, unpersuaded. Under the headline “Democrats’ purgatory grows with ominous poll on Biden:
A new poll significantly undercuts key Biden argument — that ‘the average voter out there ‘still wants him in the race,” Blake writes
It was a dubious statement at the time. And it just became a harder argument to make, with a significant new poll Wednesday showing that, actually, nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden out.
Some reporters argue this tension cannot stand unresolved. Stay tuned for action by the end of the weekend.