WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Some of President Joe Biden’s close campaign aides met with Senate Democrats on Thursday to try to ease growing opposition from within his party to Biden’s reelection bid, ahead of his first solo news conference in almost eight months.
Biden’s campaign has been on the ropes for two weeks, since the 81-year-old incumbent’s stumbling debate performance against Donald Trump, his 78-year-old Republican rival, raised fresh questions about his age and mental acuity – concerns that voters had long raised in public opinion polls.
In a memo, Biden’s campaign argued that the debate has not dramatically shifted the race and aimed to win undecided voters by shifting the focus to Trump, a convicted felon who faces two more criminal prosecutions for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss.
“No one is denying that the debate was a setback. But Joe Biden and this campaign have made it through setbacks before,” the memo said.
The New York Times reported that some longtime Biden advisers were considering ways to convince him to drop his reelection bid.
The past week has brought a steady drip of elected Democrats calling on Biden to end his campaign, citing concerns that he could not only lose the White House but cost the party control of both chambers of Congress.
Representative Hillary Scholten from Michigan joined that chorus on Thursday.
“This is not about the past, it’s about the future. It’s time to pass the torch,” she wrote on social media. “It is essential that we have the strongest possible candidate leading the top of the ticket.”
She became the tenth House of Representatives Democrat to appealed to the president to withdraw from the race. One Senate Democrat, Peter Welch, extended the same call Wednesday night.
Several high-profile lawmakers have said Biden should stay in the race. Many others, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have declined to say definitively whether he should step aside or remain as the party’s standard bearer.
Several top aides, including Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, were meeting with Democratic senators in an effort to shore up support in the chamber where he served from 1973 to 2009.
‘ONLY’ BIDEN CAN SOOTHE WORRIES
Asked if they would be able to allay their concerns about the election, Senator Joe Manchin responded: “Only the president can do that.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters that Democrats in the chamber were still trying to decide how to respond. He said he was not worried that Biden would make it harder to win control of the House, which Republicans now control by a narrow 220-213 margin.
They will all likely be watching closely at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time (2230 GMT), when Biden is due to field questions from the White House press corps.
At his first formal solo news conference since November 2023, Biden will have to speak on a wide range of topics – including likely questions on whether his doctors have found evidence of mental decline.
It will be Biden’s most unscripted appearance since the June 27 debate, where he appeared to lose his train of thought several times and stumbled over several answers.
An interview with ABC News last week raised further alarms when Biden said he would be satisfied if he lost the election as long as he tried his best.
Previous interactions with White House reporters have also backfired. In February, Biden mixed up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico at an impromptu news conference he called to rebut a prosecutor’s assessment that he had a poor memory.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week found Biden and Trump tied at 40% each. Other opinion polls have found Trump widening his lead over Biden, and some strategists have warned that Trump stood a chance of winning reliably Democratic states like Virginia and Minnesota.
In their strategy memo, the campaign argued that it has always expected a close election and could win by focusing on three battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. That seemed to indicate they were prioritizing those states over others that Biden won in 2020, such as Nevada, Georgia and Arizona.
Nonpartisan analysts at the Cook Political Report earlier this week changed their ratings on those latter three states to leaning Republican, from toss-up.
Biden has seen his fundraising advantage over Trump disappear in recent months, and some high-profile Democratic donors, including actor George Clooney, are calling on him to step aside.
Biden has insisted that he is not dropping out, and party rules make it all but impossible for anyone else to win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in August unless he steps aside.
Democrats would also have to figure out how to hand the nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris or give others like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a chance to make their case.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Andy Sullivan, additional reporting by Allende Miglietta, Jasper Ward, Makini Brice, Andrea Shalal, Susan Heavey and Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Scott Malone, Deepa Babington and Alistair Bell)
