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ANDREW NEIL speaks to multiple senior Democrats who reveal party's verdict: 'EVERYONE wants Biden to quit'... this is how and when they'll force him out
The Dump Biden movement has regained momentum inside the Democratic Party.
We cannot yet say for sure that it will succeed. Team Biden is still digging in to keep their man in contention.
But the ground is slipping from under the President's feet. It could soon be an unstoppable landslide.
By this time next week, the Democrats could be looking for a new presidential candidate. Or still ripping themselves apart over whether they should be.
I spoke to two senior Democrats today, one an experienced election strategist, the other on Joe Biden's staff when he was vice president.
Both were unequivocal: Biden should withdraw and make way for someone else.
A third Democratic operative was even more blunt: 'Everybody wants him to quit.'
I spoke to two senior Democrats today. Both were unequivocal: Biden should withdraw and make way for someone else.
It is the new mood music of a troubled party, even if only a handful, like Rep Lloyd Doggett (Dem, Texas) and Raul Grijalva (Dem, Arizona), are prepared to say publicly that Biden must pull out.
Of course, these are barely household names, even in their own households. But behind them is a wall of names poised to follow suit.
The moment more do, the dam will burst and Biden's position will be untenable.
Even some senior Democrats Biden met behind closed doors to shore up his position, like Governors Jared Golden (Maine) and Marie Perez (Washington), told him they thought he'd lose to Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, House Democrats are busy exchanging draft letters of varying 'Dump Biden' intensity.
Whatever they're still saying publicly, I have yet to speak to a senior Democratic activist who will argue in private that their party can hold on to the White House with Biden at the top of the ticket.
Indeed, the growing concern now is not the loss of the Presidency. That's becoming almost a given. It is the damage Biden will do to the rest of the ticket.
Last weekend I thought, after initially being forced onto the back foot, that Team Biden's fightback was in the ascendancy.
The President was reeling from the fallout of his car-crash debate with Donald Trump in Atlanta last Thursday.
Voices, especially in the previously loyal left-wing commentariat, were starting to say aloud what they had been saying only in confidence: that there was no way Biden is fit enough to fight for re-election and serve another four-year term.
The White House and the Biden campaign were taken aback but came out fighting with a counter-offensive which dampened down the rebellion by pressuring others not to go public.
I began to think dissident Democrats and their media cheerleaders, never the most robust of people, would retreat with their tails between their legs.
But they didn't.
Instead they double-downed, running news stories further questioning Biden's fitness to run for re-election and more opinion pieces calling on him to make way for someone else.
This caught the White House spin machine, a pretty clunky operation at the best of times, by surprise.
The rebels have been encouraged to keep up the fight by the post-debate polls, none of which have good news for Biden.
The latest New York Times survey gives Donald Trump a nine-point lead among registered voters. A Wall Street Journal poll gave Trump a six-point lead among likely voters. More important, it found that 80 percent of Americans thought Biden unfit to run again. There comes a time when even Democratic elites have to take notice of that strength of popular opinion.
The rebels have been encouraged to keep up the fight by the post-debate polls, none of which have good news for Biden.
The latest New York Times survey gives Donald Trump a nine-point lead among registered voters. A Wall Street Journal poll gave Trump a six-point lead among likely voters.
The 'Save Biden' campaign is doing the Democrats incalculable harm. The White House propaganda machine has become synonymous with lying.
First, we were told he was below par in the debate because he had a cold, something none of his aides had mentioned in advance.
When that failed to pass the smell test, a new line was unveiled: he was jet-lagged from a hectic schedule of international travel.
That was just as incredible as his 'cold'. Biden had stopped his jet-setting a full 10 days before the debate. He'd rested at his house on the beach at Rehoboth, Delaware then spent almost a week holed up at Camp David, Maryland with his aides, prepping for the debate. Both are in the same East Coast time zone.
In the highly improbable event that Jet-Lag Joe was still suffering from what we might call 'long jet-lag' on debate night, that, of course, merely underlines how unfit he is to run again.
International travel is a big part of the job spec of a US President. You can't take almost two weeks to recover from it.
Lying is so much the default position of the Biden White House these days that they resort to it without even thinking about the mess it might get them into.
The Democrats want to campaign against Trump on the basis he's a 'threat to democracy'.
After his behavior on January 6, 2021, it's a credible claim. But for the White House and the Biden campaign to lie to the American people relentlessly by denying the manifest unfitness of the President to run again, never mind his chances of surviving another four years in the Oval Office, is just as big a 'threat to democracy'.
They are trying to impose on the country a man who should be allowed to spend his few remaining years in well-deserved retirement. They expect the voters to believe the Biden spinners rather than the evidence they see on a daily basis.
Who will the American people believe: the Biden propaganda or their own eyes?
Just to ask the question is to answer it — and to reveal the duplicitous arrogance of the Biden White House.
Even the hardiest Democrat rebels accept they cannot force Biden out, given he has the party convention in Chicago in August sown up. They need him to fall on his sword.
There is, as yet, no sign of that.
First Lady Jill Biden is proving no help in encouraging him to do the right thing. 'Dr Jill' — she insists on her academic title despite its unexceptional status — loves her privileged position too much to urge Joe to take a course of action which would end it.
Indeed, in some ways Jill is running harder than Joe, telling her husband what a 'great job' he did in the debate, as a mother would her four-year-old who'd just come last in a school race.
First Lady Jill Biden is proving no help in encouraging him to do the right thing. 'Dr Jill' loves her privileged position too much to urge Joe to take a course of action which would end it.
Indeed, in some ways Jill is running harder than Joe, telling her husband what a 'great job' he did in the debate, as a mother would her four-year-old who'd just come last in a school race.
She peers out from the current cover of Vogue with a steely determination and a generous use of the royal 'we'.
The rebels hope even she will have to bow to the inevitable if the current mumbling of discontent erupts into a cacophony in the days ahead.
Even Kamala Harris is making her dispositions.
The Vice President remains staunchly loyal in public but her people are preparing the ground behind the scenes should Biden decide the game is up.
Friendly media are being briefed that she is Biden's natural successor and that, should he withdraw, the crown should pass to her uncontested.
They even claim she would have sole claim on the war chest already accumulated for the Biden-Harris ticket, though the idea the Democratic Party could not find some way of channeling this money to another contender is risible.
The rebels want an open convention in Chicago with a parade of hopefuls vying to be the candidate. But prominent black and left-wing Democrats are saying it would be unconscionable if Harris was to be passed over for a white man in the event of Biden's withdrawal.
It's an absurd argument but will cut plenty of ice in the Democratic Party.
Harris was chosen by Biden to be his running mate not because she was the best available but because she was black and a woman. If she cannot be passed over for the same reasons — if her gender and race matter more than picking the best candidate most likely to win — then the Democrats will be hoist by their own identity politics petard.
Trump would be a lucky man. He thinks his best chance of winning is for Biden to stay in the race. He fears a younger Democrat could diminish his current lead in the polls. But he doesn't fear Harris: he thinks she'd be even easier to beat than Biden.
Meanwhile, Biden is said to remain 'defiant', at least for now.
He is planning a series of appearances to show he is still vigorous, that he still has his marbles, that he can even complete sentences when not (allegedly) jet-lagged. Great hopes are being placed on an interview to be broadcast during primetime on Friday night to show he's still got it.
But the platform is the friendly ABC network, the interviewer is George Stephanopoulos, a former Bill Clinton aide and a pretty soft-touch inquisitor, and it's not live. It's unlikely to move the dial, either way.
Even Kamala Harris is making her dispositions. The Vice President remains staunchly loyal in public but her people are preparing the ground behind the scenes should Biden decide the game is up.
Biden will be at his most vulnerable when Congress reconvenes on Monday after the July 4th break.
Then all the politicians will be back in the same place. Proximity always lends itself to plotting and coups. Capitol Hill will be even more of a Machiavellian cesspit that usual next week.
The President still has his supporters. Chris Coons, junior Senator for Delaware, the President's home state, is urging Biden to do a two-hour live broadcast town-hall meeting to show the American people his 'engagement, agility and capacity'.
I suppose the writing really is on the wall when even one of your closest allies is proposing you go on a suicide mission.