--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- [Discussion begins]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I'm here with Vox's senior politics reporter, Christian Paz. Christian, the last time we had you on the show, it was after Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance. What has the president been up to since?
--:-- Christian Paz: Since the debate, we've kind of seen the president both retreat into an inner sanctum to talk to family, close advisors about the proper way to go about the campaign now, how to respond to some of those calls for him to step down, and what he has to do to convince the American people, and more specifically, Democrats, that he's up for this job.
--:-- Christian Paz: Every one of them, they all said I should stay in the race. Stay in the race. And then at the same time, we've also seen him out in public a little bit more. We've seen him do interviews. We've seen him do rallies.
--:-- Christian Paz: I don't walk as easy as I used to. I don't speak as smoothly as I used to. I don't debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth.
--:-- Christian Paz: He did have some moments of slippage when he was talking, moments when it seemed like he was confusing some thoughts and stumbling over his words a bit. I'll beat Donald Trump. I will beat him again in 2020. And by the way, we're going to do it again in 2024.
--:-- Christian Paz: And we've kind of seen a mix of reporting and Democratic officials talking about, well, this is more frequently occurring, especially over the last few months, where it seems like the president is not necessarily at full capacity.
--:-- Christian Paz: And then we've also seen moments of Democratic allies coming out and saying, well, he's the nominee. He's the person who we should be rallying behind. And every time that we're talking about whether or not he should be the nominee, we're giving Donald Trump a pass to continue kind of cruising to victory at the moment.
--:-- Christian Paz: Joe Biden sort of had to shift his central argument from Donald Trump bad to like Joe Biden good. How is he making Joe Biden good? How is he making that argument?
--:-- Christian Paz: It's really interesting because we see the same lines come up when he's making that argument now. It's, don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative. I convinced myself of two things. I'm the most qualified person to beat him, and I know how to get things done.
--:-- Christian Paz: There's also another line about, you know, we've done good work already. Look at everything that we've accomplished over the last three and a half years. Why not continue on this path? I am promising that we will continue to do more on a range of social and economic programs and initiatives that we have as Democrats that we kind of got started during this first term.
--:-- Christian Paz: I want to finish that. And so he's essentially making a pitch to the past. Similarly to how he kind of framed things in 2020. In that case, it was about restoring decency and normalcy in 2024. And now his argument is, I beat Trump once and I can do it again and look at all the work that we've done. Why don't you give me another chance to do some more?
--:-- Christian Paz: What do we know about what's going on with the president, with the White House behind the scenes? Why is he staying in this race?
--:-- Christian Paz: We kind of have a mixed picture here. Part of it is personal. Part of it is that Joe Biden really does see himself as the only person who can beat Donald Trump.
--:-- Christian Paz: I'm a nominee in this party because millions of Democrats like you just voted for me in primaries all across America. You voted for me to be your nominee. No one else.
--:-- Christian Paz: He's also apparently, the picture we're getting out of the White House, is a little more stubborn now and kind of closed off a bit from criticism or from any possible kind of negative, essentially, feedback.
--:-- Christian Paz: And despite, despite that some folks don't seem to care who you voted for, well, guess what? They're trying to push me out on the race. Well, let me say this as clear as I can. I'm staying in the race.
--:-- Christian Paz: One other aspect to this is also just that we haven't heard a lot from Donald Trump at the same time. So we're getting a lot of focus on what is the president thinking? How are people around him, you know, feeding him information? Is he really that closed off in the White House?
--:-- Christian Paz: And it all kind of feels a bit muddy now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And while Americans were enjoying their 4th of July, the president went and did something he rarely does. He gave a TV interview over the weekend to George Stephanopoulos.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mr. President, thank you for doing this. Thank you for having me.
--:-- George Stephanopoulos: Let's start with the debate. How'd it go?
--:-- George Stephanopoulos: It was an interesting experience. You know, the heart of your case against Donald Trump is that he's only out for himself, putting his personal interests ahead of the national interest.
--:-- George Stephanopoulos: How do you respond to critics who say that by staying in the race you doing the same thing?
--:-- George Stephanopoulos: Oh come on. Well I don't think those critics know what they talking about.
--:-- George Stephanopoulos: Going into the specifics of the interview he seemed to have a few moments of essentially having two trains of thought kind of clash into each other and kind of derail the answer that he was giving.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So one of the clear examples of that in that interview was when he was essentially talking about what was happening on the debate stage. When did he realize that maybe he wasn't giving his best performance since he kept saying that it was just a bad night, it was just a bad night.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I prepared what I usually would do sitting down as I did come back with foreign leaders or the National Security Council for explicit detail. And I realized part way through that, although I get The quote of the New York Times had me down at 10 points before the debate, nine now or whatever the hell it is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The fact of the matter is that what I looked at is that he also lied 28 times. I mean, the way the debate ran, not my fault, no one else's fault.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then at the same time, he had other lines, other moments when he was pretty clear talking about why he's in the race, even though that also inspired some concerns and some worrying from other Democrats over the weekend when he says that what would it take for him to drop out of the race? It depends if the Lord Almighty comes out and tells me that, I might do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that was a little bit worrisome, especially as there's so much talk behind the scenes to try to figure out how you do convince a sitting president to back out at this stage in the race.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one of the things that he said toward the end of it was, you know, he gets asked what would happen if the worst comes to happen, where he loses the election, Donald Trump wins.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now Donald Trump, if you buy the arguments the Democrats are making, has all this authority and power. And as Biden has argued, he would become a dictator on day one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How would you feel if you do lose and didn't drop out? And he says something along the lines of. I feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest jobs I know I can do. That's what this is about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the response from Democrats around the country over the weekend was, well, that's not what this is about. This is about winning the election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In this interview, it feels like Joe Biden is making this all about Joe Biden. You know, I'm going to try my hardest. Only the Lord can stop me. And that feels, for this anti-Trump candidate, kind of Trumpy in a way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's definitely not something I'm used to, even as somebody who's been covering Biden for some time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was also looking at moments over the weekend. He did some appearances in rallies in Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin Friday. And even in those speeches, it felt like there was a bit of a tonal shift in how he was talking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He would talk about, you know, his now other go-to line is when you get knocked down, you get back up. Talking about himself. It's funny because nobody knocked him down. He knocked himself down. He was on stage and did a really bad job.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And even the responses that he gets from the audience now, it's so much more Joe-centric in a way that maybe we expected a Democratic politician to campaign earlier on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So let me ask you, what do you think? You think I'm too old to restore Roe v. Wade to law the land? No! You think I'm too old to ban assault weapons again? No! To protect Social Security and Medicare? No! To get child care, elder care for working families who need a nation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And when you are making it all about yourself again, then there is again no one else to blame.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he admits this in the ABC News interview, too. He kind of falls back on this defense that it was a bad night. Nobody's fault, mine. Nobody's fault, mine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it just seems like when he gives those answers, he's maybe not in the same ecosystem or environment that the rest of us are in, where we're all looking at this, we're all watching this campaign play out and are thinking, yeah, it is about you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And maybe there is somebody else who could do a better job at this than you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that is one of the questions that a lot of Democrats have been asking over the last few days in public.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's about five people who've said this in public, congressional Democrats. In private, we have a few more folks who've said maybe that it's time for him to drop out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have one governor, Maura Healy out of Massachusetts who said that Biden should reconsider whether he is the strongest candidate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then we have a bunch of reporting about congressional both House and Senate Democrats going into this week now that they're back from their recess having these conversations talking about whether or not to be more forceful in public because what we have right now is a bit of a slow boil revolt not necessarily like a full-blown party coup.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as long as he can get closer and closer to the nomination itself, to the convention, you kind of are running up the clock on alternatives, being able to step up or to push him out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Christian Paz, Vox.com, The Coup, when we return on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: R. Come on, man. What are we talking about? Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My name's Amy Walter, and I am the publisher and editor of the Koch Political Report.
--:-- Amy Walter: And I imagine you spent your holiday weekend thinking a lot about what's going on in the Democratic Party right now.
--:-- Amy Walter: I did spend a lot of my time thinking about that and talking to folks and reading stuff and looking at polls.
--:-- Amy Walter: And thankfully, it was so super hot here in D.C. It was OK being stuck inside.
--:-- Amy Walter: From all of your thinking and talking and avoiding the heat, what have you gleaned? Where do we stand? What is the status of this race right now, at least on the Democratic side?
--:-- Amy Walter: You have polling that's come out that has shown, you know, a slight drop for Biden.
--:-- Amy Walter: I mean, in some places, you know, I looked at all the different polls and the change that they've had since their last poll.
--:-- Amy Walter: So, you know, CNN, Biden's down by six, but he was down by six before debate.
--:-- Amy Walter: The Wall Street Journal, Biden's also down by six.
--:-- Amy Walter: But again, they hadn't polled since February.
--:-- Amy Walter: So we don't have like an apples to apples. Like, what did he look like the week before? What does he look like now?
--:-- Amy Walter: The New York Times, he dropped about a couple of points since their earlier June primary.
--:-- Amy Walter: So I think it's fair to say he's lost some ground.
--:-- Amy Walter: Maybe the best way to think about this is he went into that debate trailing. He's come out of the debate still trailing with a harder path now to get ahead.
--:-- Amy Walter: This election, of course, isn't just about President Biden and former President Trump.
--:-- Amy Walter: What do we know about how this limbo situation on the Democratic ticket is affecting down-ballot races or even the perception of down-ballot races?
--:-- Amy Walter: And I think that is something that does need a little bit of time to shake out.
--:-- Amy Walter: But if you're a down-ballot Democrat in a swing state or a swing district, what you know is what's happening at the top of the ticket has a tremendous impact on you.
--:-- Amy Walter: If Democratic voters are less enthusiastic about showing up to vote because they feel pretty down in the dumps about Biden, then they're probably not going to show up for you either.
--:-- Amy Walter: Voters do have questions.
--:-- Amy Walter: And personally, I love Joe Biden.
--:-- Amy Walter: I don't know that the interview on Friday night did enough to answer those questions.
--:-- Amy Walter: You know, one way to think about it is you've got a bunch of members who sit in districts that Biden carried, but by a narrow margin in 2020.
--:-- Amy Walter: If that margin is erased, that puts them in a really precarious position.
--:-- Amy Walter: I think this week is going to be really critically important because members have been out on Fourth of July recess.
--:-- Amy Walter: They've been texting and calling each other, of course.
--:-- Amy Walter: But it's really different when you're sitting in the room with everybody.
--:-- Amy Walter: You know, the reality is unless Joe Biden decides that he's dropping out of this race, I don't know how individual members of Congress are not going to be enough.
--:-- Amy Walter: Right? Yeah.
--:-- Amy Walter: A member of Congress saying, I want you to drop out. There's no legal or political reason why he has to do that.
--:-- Amy Walter: The question going forward is, you know, how much weight does he put on the fact that some of the most vulnerable members of his party are asking him to step aside if that is weighing on him at all?
--:-- Amy Walter: We've discussed on the show several times now that the only path here, if there is to be some replacement candidate, is for Joe Biden to step aside.
--:-- Amy Walter: But we haven't actually gone much further than that in the thought experiment.
--:-- Amy Walter: So what would happen, let's say, if that were to happen, I don't know, before the convention?
--:-- Amy Walter: What happens to all the delegates who have pledged their support to Joe Biden already?
--:-- Amy Walter: So if this were to work out in the ideal fashion for Democrats, Biden would say, hey, delegates who are pledged to me, it's all cool. You don't have to stick with me anymore. You can vote for whomever you'd like.
--:-- Amy Walter: or he says, it's all cool. You don't need, you don't, I'm releasing you. I also want to let you know I'm endorsing my vice president.
--:-- Amy Walter: Those are the options.
--:-- Amy Walter: We don't really know how delegates are feeling, right?
--:-- Amy Walter: You know, no one has gone out and actually pulled all of those many, many, many delegates about what they would like to see and how concerned they are about this and how they think it would work.
--:-- Amy Walter: We really are in uncharted territory.
--:-- Amy Walter: And the, you know, all the sort of Aaron Sorkin-esque theories of how this would work.
--:-- Amy Walter: Well, that's it then. We'd say people with trouble voting. What's next?
--:-- Amy Walter: Again, they sound great if you're making this a screenplay, But doing it in real life with things like the internet which wasn really as much of a factor even in the West Wing times.
--:-- Amy Walter: And it certainly wasn't a factor back in the days when conventions really were conventions, right?
--:-- Amy Walter: Where people actually came in uncommitted and you spent hours and hours and hours and sometimes days until you got to consensus on a nominee.
--:-- Amy Walter: This is brand new for all of us.
--:-- Amy Walter: You know, you brought up Aaron Sorkin.
--:-- Amy Walter: I saw Benji Sarlin from Semaphore writing that there's a plan circulating among Democratic donors for something called a blitz primary that would involve weekly forums with each candidate moderated by cultural icons like Michelle Obama, Oprah and Taylor Swift, maybe.
--:-- Amy Walter: Who knows?
--:-- Amy Walter: Yeah. I mean, Taylor Swift, you know, I'd go to that. I would totally go to that.
--:-- Amy Walter: And someone wrote, not even Aaron Sorkin could have dreamed this up.
--:-- Amy Walter: Is this stuff all just theory? Is there any sense of what a Biden replacement primary could actually look like at this point in the race?
--:-- Amy Walter: At this point. I mean, Sean, that's the key.
--:-- Amy Walter: There was an opportunity to have a blitz primary. It was called the primary, right? It was called January, February, March. Of 2024. Right. That was an actual primary on the books where those very people who are being mentioned as potential candidates could have actually come out and said, hey, my name is Governor fill in the blank and I would like to run for president.
--:-- Amy Walter: OK, great. But nobody did that.
--:-- Amy Walter: Everyone fell in line in this party.
--:-- Amy Walter: Everybody fell in line.
--:-- Amy Walter: You don't see Gretchen Whitmer saying, yeah, I'm thinking about it.
--:-- Amy Walter: You saw the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, campaigning with Biden in Pennsylvania.
--:-- Amy Walter: So the very people who are mentioned as the most likely replacement to him are also the people who are least likely to run.
--:-- Amy Walter: So it seems to me Democrats have a choice. You stick with Biden or you go with the vice president.
--:-- Amy Walter: There are risks in both.
--:-- Amy Walter: I've read many times now, it feels like that, you know, Democratic operatives think that a Kamala Harris ticket is doomed. There's no way. It's an impossibility. Joe Biden's the only person who can beat Donald Trump.
--:-- Amy Walter: I'm just confused, Amy. Why do people think they know what will happen in November if there's someone else running against Donald Trump?
--:-- Amy Walter: Exactly.
--:-- Amy Walter: I think, you know, for a lot of people, this is just about, you know, who's the best candidate? Who's going to beat X? You know, can X beat Y?
--:-- Amy Walter: But a lot of the behind the scenes talk seems to be about fundraising.
--:-- Amy Walter: Does a Kamala Harris ticket help with the fundraising question?
--:-- Amy Walter: I'm of the belief that, you know, money in politics is very, very important. The lifeblood to a campaign in politics, the lifeblood is money.
--:-- Amy Walter: I talked to a bunch of big donors and they're moving all their money to Congress and the Senate.
--:-- Amy Walter: I mean, I cannot believe we're in this situation.
--:-- Amy Walter: But I do think that donors, as you said, just want to win. The folks who want to beat Donald Trump want to beat Donald Trump.
--:-- Amy Walter: And whatever money, wherever they have to give their money, they will give their money.
--:-- Amy Walter: So I don't know that money is going to be the bigger problem.
--:-- Amy Walter: To me, the bigger challenge is, you know, if you are not the vice president, where does your campaign staff come from?
--:-- Amy Walter: I mean, I guess you assume that all those Biden staffers are like, OK, cool, sure, I'll come work for you.
--:-- Amy Walter: Also, what's your campaign message? What's your plan?
--:-- Amy Walter: A presidential campaign is like putting together a Fortune 500 company.
--:-- Amy Walter: You have thousands of employees. You literally have, you know, a billion dollars or more.
--:-- Amy Walter: You have so many moving parts. And it takes a while to build that up.
--:-- Amy Walter: You can't just do it overnight.
--:-- Amy Walter: Now, again, theoretically, if I'm working for the Biden campaign, I'm working for the Biden campaign because I want to beat Donald Trump.
--:-- Amy Walter: And whether that's Joe Biden or whether that is somebody else, I'm on board.
--:-- Amy Walter: But also, you know, you may decide, well, wait a minute. I didn't sign up for this person. I didn't sign up for this to be the focus of the campaign. I don't want this person to be the face of the Democratic Party.
--:-- Amy Walter: So, you know, that is a little complicated.
--:-- Amy Walter: What makes this different to me from previous politicians is that they had a political problem they had to fix.
--:-- Amy Walter: This is a physical problem. And that cannot be fixed, which is you can fix your political challenges. You can't get younger.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Amy Walter is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, cookpolitical.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This one was produced by Hari Mawagdi and Denise Guerra.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Llewellyn, and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. Thank you.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Visit mercury.com to join over 200,000 entrepreneurs who use Mercury to do more for their business.
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