(The Guardian) Biden campaign holds 'difficult' calls with donors after disastrous debate
Joe Biden’s reelection team held difficult phone calls on Sunday and Monday with top campaign funders in an attempt to reassure them that the 81-year-old president should stay in the race following his car crash debate performance last week.
Senior campaign officials held a call on Monday evening with hundreds of top Democratic donors and fundraisers to tamp down the panic that has gripped the party since the CNN debate, multiple outlets reported. “Can the president make it through a campaign and another term?” One donor asked during the call, according to Reuters.
The Biden campaign has been engaged in full-on damage control, while many Democratic officials and strategists are privately mulling whether Biden should remain on the ticket of step aside in favor of a younger candidate who might stand a better chance of defeating Donald Trump.
Amid calls for the campaign to make Biden more visible, the president added public remarks to his schedule on Monday evening where he issued a full-throated denunciation of the supreme court’s decision to grant Trump broad immunity from criminal charges of trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
In a Monday evening conference call, the Biden campaign sought to reassure top Democratic donors and fundraisers who questioned whether the president should stay in the race and why they should keep donating.
Senior Biden officials, including campaign senior adviser Jen O’Malley Dillon, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks and pollster Molly Murphy, conceded that Biden had blown an opportunity to improve his chances but that early polls showed little damage from the debate. “The message was, ‘We are not seeing any change in polling,’” a source told Reuters. The “campaign will not win if the focus remains on his age.”
Joe Biden is “probably in better health than most of us,” Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, told top fundraisers during the Monday conference call, according to NBC News.
“He’s also 81,” O’Malley Dillon added. “He knows that he has to prove that he can do this job from a stamina standpoint, but also from substance.”
During the call, she made reference to Barack Obama’s lackluster performance in his first debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, telling donors “every incumbent president that I can remember in my lifetime has had a shit first debate.”
“Obviously, the stakes are higher for us because we are up against Donald Trump,” she continued. --
Obviously, we have more work to do because the president is 81, but it was also a terrible debate in 2012. I was there. I remember it clearly.
But one donor told the outlet that they were not convinced by the campaign’s reassurances, and that if Biden stays in the race, they will redirect their money to outside get-out-the-vote groups. The donor said:
I won’t sit on the sidelines, but it’s hard and getting a lot harder to donate directly to the campaign given their judgement.
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