Calls for Biden to stand aside grow after shaky debate performance against Trump – live | US elections 2024
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Key events
The Associated Press has spoken to US voters who tuned into the debate. There’s one thing that Trump and Biden supporters can agree on, the AP’s Calvin Woodward writes: Biden had a bad night:
“Oh, Joe.”
That gasp, from patrons at a Chicago bar when President Joe Biden first stumbled verbally in his debate with Donald Trump, spoke for a lot of Americans on Thursday night.
In watch parties, bars, a bowling alley and other venues where people across the country gathered to tune in, Trump supporters, happily, and Biden supporters, in their angst if not dread, seemed to largely agree they had witnessed a lopsided showdown.
Biden “just didn’t have the spark that we needed tonight,” Rosemarie DeAngelus, a Democrat from South Portland, Maine, said from her watch party at Broadway Bowl. Trump, she said, showed “more spunk or more vigor” even if, in her view, he was telling a pack of lies.
Fellow Biden supporter and bowling alley attendee Lynn Miller, from nearby Old Orchard Beach, said: “It’s like somebody gave Trump an Adderall and I don’t think they gave Joe one.”
“I’ve never seen Trump seem so coherent,” Miller said. “And I hate to say this, but Joe seemed a little bit off. But I still support him over Trump because Trump lied about every single thing that happened.”
In McAllen, Texas, near the Mexico border, London’s Bar & Grill is normally loud on a day close to the weekend, but many patrons were quiet as they absorbed the debate from TV screens. Here, Biden supporters, Trump supporters and undecided voters mingled.
Virginia Lopez came away still not knowing whom she will support in November. She heard snappy but unsatisfying answers from the Republican. “Trump is just deflecting in all the answers and he’s just lying,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like a real debate.”
Biden? “I just feel like he’s too old,” she said.
Sitting up at the bar, Hector Mercado, 72, a veteran wearing a US military beret, was a distinctive patron as he listened intently to the debate. Although he was a Democrat for several years, he switched parties under Ronald Reagan, a Republican.
Mercado heard Biden accuse Trump of making derogatory comments about veterans, but it didn’t sway his support for Trump. “Yeah, he said a few things bad about veterans at one point back in the early days,” he said of Trump. “But now he’s saying, ‘No, I back up the veterans and I never had any problems with him. I got a raise in my VA disability when Trump was president.”
Biden’s performance left him cold. “I think Trump is stronger,” he said, “and Biden is a little weak.”
Matt Grossmann, a political science professor at Michigan State University, told Reuters after the debate:
“Obviously the biggest factor is that Biden still seemed old and raspy and less coherent than when he ran last time, and that’s going to be the big story, I think, out of the debate. I don’t think Trump really did anything to help himself beyond his existing supporters, but I think it is eclipsed by people’s impressions of Biden on his biggest vulnerability.”
Grossmann said that from the beginning of the debate Biden had trouble getting his points across “and just seemed a lot softer.” He said Biden didn’t really start delivering effective answers until 20 minutes into the debate. “It’s hard to recover from that.”
Grossmann said that debates typically have a small impact on presidential races and that impact dissipates over time.
“Debates do not normally have huge influence on election results. But because we’re at this 50-50 election where the country is divided, any small change can make a difference.”
Grossmann said one problem for Biden is that some of his supporters are expressing their concerns about his performance rather than defending it.
“So there’s not a message in his favor. And to the extent that it has an influence, the influence will be to make people’s concerns about Biden’s age even more salient.”
If you’re just joining us, here is how the debate between Donald Trump and US President Joe Biden went: badly. For Biden.
In a debate that was not fact-checked live, Trump lied repeatedly. But he was energetic, forceful, and fairly clear in the delivery of his responses/lies. Biden was shaky and appeared to struggle to gather his thoughts and, at times, to express them with much clarity. During the debate, aides informed the media that the president had a cold. But this was cold comfort to voters and democrats, who largely seemed to find the debate disastrous for Biden.
Vice President Kamala Harris, appearing on CNN after the debate, acknowledged what she called Biden’s “slow start” but argued that voters should judge him and Trump based on their years in office.
“I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last three-and-a-half years of performance,”
Democrats, the Guardian reports, are “in panic mode”:
Why it would be tough to replace Biden – and who could be in the running (in the tiny chance that opportunity arose)
There is no evidence Biden is willing to end his campaign. And it would be nearly impossible for Democrats to replace him unless he chooses to step aside, AP reports.
Every state has already held its presidential primary. Democratic rules mandate that the delegates Biden won remain bound to support him at the party’s upcoming national convention unless he tells them he’s leaving the race.
If Biden opts to abandon his reelection campaign, Kamala Harris would likely join other top Democratic candidates looking to replace him. But that would probably create a scenario where she and others end up lobbying individual state delegations at the convention for their support.
That hasn’t happened for Democrats since 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson jockeyed for votes during that year’s Democratic convention in Los Angeles.
Other Democrats with their own presidential aspirations include:
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro
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Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker and
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California Rep. Ro Khanna.
Still others who Biden bested during the party’s 2020 presidential primary could also try again, including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, as well as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
What happens if (IF) Biden drops out?
The UK’s Financial Times has this useful explainer about what would happen if (and it is a huge, huge, IF, but a slightly less huge one after tonight), Biden dropped out of the race:
Both [Trump and Biden] easily won their party’s primary vote earlier this year. If they dropped out now, it would be up to delegates at the forthcoming Republican and Democratic conventions to find replacements.
That would make July’s Republican convention in Milwaukee or the Democratic convention in Chicago in August akin to conventions decades ago, when candidates canvassed each state’s delegation for floor votes.
State delegates would be “uncommitted” — no longer beholden to their state’s primary result — and able to vote for any candidate they liked, said Elaine Kamarck at the Brookings Institution think-tank. It might take several rounds of voting to find a nominee.
“Presumably, for Democrats, they would pick [vice-president] Kamala Harris,” said Derek Muller, professor at the University of Notre Dame’s law school.
But Harris’s approval rating is just 39.4%, according to FiveThirtyEight — even lower than Biden’s 39.9%. Other Democrats would almost certainly jump into the race.
Former Obama campaign aide Ravi Gupta on X/Twitter:
“Every Democrat I know is texting that this is bad. Just say it publicly and begin the hard work of creating space in the convention for a selection process. I’ll vote for a corpse over Trump, but this is a suicide mission.”
Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu writes: Half an hour into the worst presidential debate of all time, Jake Tapper finally put a question to the candidates about “the issue of democracy”. As president, Tapper said, Trump had sworn an oath to the constitution that many voters believe he violated by instigating the riot on January 6. What would he say to those voters?
“Well, I don’t think too many believe that,” Trump sniffed. “And let me tell you about January 6th. On January 6th, we had a great border. Nobody coming through. Very few. On January 6th, we were energy independent. On January 6th, we had the lowest taxes ever. We had the lowest regulations ever … We were respected all over the world.” He was asked again and babbled about Nancy Pelosi’s daughter instead.
This was Biden’s golden opportunity. Because as stubbornly pessimistic as Americans might be about the economy or Biden’s age, Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election illustrate that democracy itself is at stake. It’s a simple, clear and potent message. Biden failed to deliver it effectively. “He talked about these people being great patriots of America,” Biden rasped. “In fact, he says he’ll now forgive them for what they’ve done. He’ll … and they’ve been convicted. He says he wants to commute their sentences … and say that … that no, he went to every single court in the nation, I don’t know how many cases, scores of cases, including the supreme court. And they said, they said: ‘No, no, this guy, this guy is responsible for doing what is being that was done.’”
Unfortunately, it’s doubtful that Biden’s capacities will improve by November. Although he does sometimes have a command of facts and figures, Biden has lost his ability to communicate effectively – not something one wants in a political candidate or, for that matter, a president.
Biden’s debate performance sends Democrats into panic
Rachel Leingang
Could there be a contested Democratic convention? How would that even work? Replacing the president may not be an option, they said, but many acknowledged Democrats are talking about it, spurred by Biden’s troubling debate performance.
MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace laid out how a candidate could release their delegates. Joy Reid said someone sent her the rules.
“The rules are circulating,” Wallace laughed.
“No one is saying it’s going to happen, it’s very unlikely,” Reid reiterated.
The fact that a liberal network would broach the idea of whether an incumbent president running for re-election could be replaced after they’ve won the nomination shows how Democrats are scrambling after the debate to affirm Biden’s ability to lead the nation. Many are questioning whether the party should have serious conservations about what else could be done instead.
David Plouffe, a Democratic strategist and former Obama campaign official, called the debate “kind of a Defcon 1 moment”.
“The biggest thing in this election is voters’ concerns – and it’s both swing voters and base voters – with his age, and those were compounded tonight,” Plouffe said.
Read the full story:
Shropshire said one strong moment for Biden was when he pointed out that Trump was a convicted felon and criticized his morality.
She also said that Trump’s reference to migrants taking Black jobs had become “a hilarious meme all across Black Twitter right now”:
I’m black
My job is White Sox podcaster
So Sox podcaster is a black job?!
Are migrants taking my black job?
Godspeed😂— Herb Lawrence (@Ecnerwal23) June 28, 2024
She said it showed how Trump was failing to connect with Black voters.
“That there are specific Black jobs for Black people that immigrants are coming to take. Utter nonsense.”
Adrianne Shropshire, Executive director of Blackpac, an organization that works to mobilize black voters, told Reuters she wrote down two things in her notepad while watching the debate.
“One is that Trump lies,” she said. The other was that Biden “was not as forceful as I thought he needed to be.”
Shropshire criticised the moderators for allowing Trump to make various false claims without any pushback.
Trump was essentially allowed to do what he does at his rallies, which is say whatever he wants, regardless of the relationship it has to the truth. And that was really unfortunate.”
Shropshire said Biden could have pushed back on Trump’s false claims more forcefully.
“I think he tried to take the high road by talking policy. And I think that has its place. But when we think about where our politics are right now, there really is a need to just assert facts and assert them very clearly. And I think that got muddled a bit in his policy responses.”
Shropshire said she was not as worried as others who have said Biden had an unsteady performance that could increase about his age. “He has great performances that people have talked about just in the past few months,” she said.
“I also think that it just doesn’t change the dynamics of the race, because they also saw Trump standing next to Joe Biden, and I don’t think that they saw someone who was stronger necessarily. I think they saw the same unhinged Trump that they see at every rally and in clips when they’re on social media.”
Arwa Mahdawi: ‘This was not a debate so much as a farce’
Arwa Mahdawi
My expectations for this debate weren’t just low, they were dungeon-in-hell levels of low. I still wasn’t prepared for how shocking it would actually be. Trump lied unashamedly, Biden waffled incoherently, and the moderators just said “thank you” a lot and moved on. This was not a “debate” so much as a farce.
If Biden’s team thought this debate would assuage worries about the president’s age and competence, their plans spectacularly backfired. For the first half of the debate, Biden looked dazed and could barely get his words out. He noticeably improved towards the end; still, this was not a man who instills confidence. Trump blustered and lied and dog-whistled his way through the night, but if you were going on optics alone the convicted felon had the upper hand.
For those of us distraught by Gaza, tonight was a gut-wrenching reminder that neither candidate gives a damn about Palestinian lives. Trump used “Palestinian” as a slur and Biden, meanwhile, reiterated his support for Israel no matter how many Palestinian kids are killed. Neither candidate answered the question of whether they support a Palestinian state and the moderators didn’t press them on it.
Responses to questions about abortion were also bleak. Trump advanced inflammatory misinformation about late-term abortion and Biden didn’t seem interested in talking about abortion in detail – he didn’t even mention it in his closing statements. He seemed a lot more interested in talking about golf. Indeed, the only part of the night when both men seemed to really come alive was when they got into a fight about their golf handicaps.
Pelosi: ‘How dare [Trump] place blame for January 6 on anyone but himself”
Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, has taken aim at Trump’s claiming – falsely –during the debate that she was responsible for the January 6 insurrection.
“How dare he place the blame for January 6th on anyone but himself, the inciter of an insurrection?” she wrote on X:
I tore up the former president’s State of the Union address because it was a manifesto of lies. Tonight he presented another pack of lies which along, with his candidacy, must be rejected. How dare he place the blame for January 6th on anyone but himself, the inciter of an…
— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) June 28, 2024
Lloyd Green
Joe Biden’s age and acuity took center stage. He looked lost, and the Democrats are almost certainly panicking. At times, the president could barely stitch two coherent sentences together. Donald Trump won the evening, and it wasn’t even close.
Trump took command from the outset. He appeared energized and engaged. What Trump said mattered less than how he said it; he forcefully responded to whatever question was posed. He repeatedly mocked, taunted and bludgeoned Biden. If this were a boxing match, the referee would have stopped the match in the third round.
Despite Biden’s efforts to nail Trump on his own record as president, Trump was mostly unbowed. He seemingly stood by his picks to the supreme court and the end of Roe v Wade. At one point Trump seemingly mouthed the words “let’s not act like children”, which may be the evening’s most memorable line. He also got away with calling Biden “the Manchurian candidate”.
Trump lied aplenty. He acted as if he never had said there were “good people” on both sides in Charlottesville, and pretended that he hadn’t dissed America’s war dead. But little of that may matter come November. Americans want a president who exudes vigor. And Biden isn’t that.
The debate will supply Trump with a wealth of material for campaign ads. It may be time for an open convention. August could be interesting.
Jill Filipovic
Well, that was a disaster.
The debate was an unmitigated calamity, especially for Biden. The president was often hard to follow and at times incoherent; he struggled to answer questions that should have been easy gimmes on issues favorable to Democrats. It would be nice if substance mattered more than style, because the substance of Biden’s remarks were important, and promised a more prosperous, secure and free future for Americans than Trump’s. But his delivery made it extremely difficult for even the most plugged-in politics addicts to follow, let alone your average viewer at home.
For Trump’s part, what he didn’t say was more telling than what he did. He was unwilling or unable to answer questions on how he would help families with childcare, the costs of which are a drag not only on family budgets, but on the US economy. He was unwilling or unable to answer questions about opioids and the US’s addiction crisis. And, perhaps most importantly, he refused to clearly answer a thrice-asked question about whether he would accept the results of the election – saying only that he would do so if such an election were fair, and then claimed the 2020 one wasn’t. In other words, Trump will accept the results of the election only if he wins – and contest it if he doesn’t.
That’s remarkably dangerous. And his wholesale lack of interest in the issues that matter most to American families is remarkably negligent. But unfortunately, his would-be foil – Biden – proved simply unable to take on even a truly terrible opponent. Neither man came off looking good. But if Americans are counting on Biden to save us, we might want to start making a Plan B.
Here is what Guardian columnist and author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror, Moustafa Bayoumi thought of tonight’s debate:
What a catastrophe. From the moment the debate started, Joe Biden was meandering, confused and charmless. It never improved. Donald Trump, however, was relatively restrained, at least for Trump. Of course, he resorted to lies, insults and exaggerations throughout the 90 minutes. By citing things called “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” and by calling Biden a “bad Palestinian”, Trump managed to hit all his usual racist notes.
Yet the whole thing was simply painful to watch, mostly because it was useless on any practical level. This much ballyhooed confrontation between two political foes for the most important office in the world turned out to be featherlight on substance, policy, interest, intellect, imagination, vision, energy, ideas, humor and hope. It was heavy on one thing (besides cringe), though: ego.
The presidency should not simply be a vanity project, but that’s exactly what it has become. Biden’s performance was so far below acceptable that the Democratic party should be ashamed of itself for allowing him to stand for re-election. With tonight’s performance as evidence, the Democrats will almost certainly lose. Trump’s narcissism is notorious, and it too has destroyed the Republican party from within. The stakes are much too high to allow the inflated egos of these two men to determine the fates of millions of people here and around the world. If the Democrats truly believe that democracy is on the line during this election, they must select someone other than Biden as their candidate. There’s still time.
The Guardian’s panellists have also delivered their verdicts. I’ll bring you those imminently. But to make what has been a fun evening even more fun – first, some clues: “catastrophe”, “disaster”, and lower than “dungeon-in-hell levels of low” are some of the words that appear in their analysis.
Prominent political analyst Amy Walter told Reuters the debate “only served to remind voters of Biden’s weaknesses, especially his health and stamina”.
She continued, “To be sure, Trump did not ‘win’ this debate as much as Biden lost it. Trump lobbed multiple falsehoods and lies. He failed to make a positive case for his second term, spending more time litigating Biden’s failures. But, Trump is leading in the polls and doesn’t need a ‘rest’ in the way Biden does.”
“I don’t think that this debate will sway undecided voters, especially those who say they dislike both candidates. If you came into this debate thinking both men were unsatisfactory choices, their debate performances did not disabuse you of this opinion.”
The reactions from democrats and democratic voters continue to be excoriating.
Julian Castro, Housing and Urban Development secretary under Obama, said on X/Twitter:
“Tonight was completely predictable. Biden had a very low bar going into the debate and failed to clear even that bar…He seemed unprepared, lost, and not strong enough to parry effectively with Trump, who lies constantly.”
Biden had a very low bar going into the debate and failed to clear even that bar. He seemed unprepared, lost, and not strong enough to parry effectively with Trump, who lies constantly.
— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) June 28, 2024
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