Advisors in the 81-year-old Joe Biden‘s inner circle and on his 2024 presidential re-election campaign acknowledge that he cannot win and needs to drop out of the race. “He needs to drop out,” an anonymous Biden campaign official said in a recent interview. They added: “He will never recover from this.”
This dissident within the Biden campaign is not alone. A second campaign advisor says, “No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path.” According to these sources, donor concern over Biden’s cognitive impairment has caused campaign fundraising to almost entirely dry up—leaving the re-election effort unsure about how to move forward.
Pushing back against their internal revolt, Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon issued a memo to campaign staff insisting that the 81-year-old incumbent has a path to victory. “Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: this remains a margin-of-error race in key battleground states,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.
“The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race — while some of this movement was from undecided voters to Trump, much of the movement was driven by historically Democratic constituencies moving to undecided,” she added.
Meanwhile, Biden aides in the White House are beginning to pressure the octogenarian Democrat to exit the presidential race as well. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that senior aides have begun strategizing on how best to convince their boss that his disastrous June 27 debate performance was a fatal blow to his re-election hopes.
The most convincing indication that the Biden White House and re-election campaign may be reaching a late-Roman Empire style ‘Praetorian moment’ is a report that the campaign has begun quietly polling Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Trump.
