“Oookey dokey,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer opened his weekly press conference on Tuesday, showing no signs that he’d just emerged from a multihour lunch with the members of his caucus, spinning their wheels about a plausible path forward for the presidential election.
You know Democrats have a problem when Schumer has studiously avoided saying much about the leading topic in the news, in this case for nearly the past two weeks. At this press conference, after Schumer and other Democratic senators did their best to push across their message about Republicans’ hostility to abortion rights, the leader was ready to field questions. (“I want to call on a woman first,” Schumer said, since Democrats had been “talking about abortion.”)
The first question was about whether he was confident President Joe Biden had what it takes to win in November and serve the next four years.
“As I’ve said before, I’m with Joe,” Schumer said. Next.
Thoughts on a challenge at the convention?
“As I’ve said before, I’m with Joe.”
Two questions later, thoughts on a statement the previous night from Sen. Patty Murray—who had conveniently left the press conference by that point—suggesting that Biden consider dropping out?
“As I’ve said before, I’m with Joe.”
The Senate Democrats’ meeting, from which senators emerged with tight lips and pabulum about a “productive meeting” but no answers on whom Democrats should run for president, wasn’t the Hill’s only such gathering of the day. House Democrats held a similarly downcast chat at their morning caucus, with one member telling Punchbowl News that it felt like a “funeral.” Plenty of members and senators seem to think that Biden is destined to lose. Not a whole lot are willing to walk the plank publicly on telling him to drop out, given that there is still zero indication that Biden will—and they don’t want to say something they can’t take back.
Biden, indeed, was still the presumptive Democratic nominee for president as of Tuesday night. And so long as there’s a lack of consensus about what to do—and consensus does not appear to be just around the corner—Biden will remain the nominee.
House Democrats, especially, seemed a long ways away from dumping Biden after their Tuesday meeting, despite chatter that a deluge of defections was coming.
Biden got the House fire under control not by pure dumb luck. For a president who has such trouble communicating clearly, Biden and his team have done an expert job constructing a wall of support in the chamber. In the fight for his survival, Biden has no bigger ally among House Democrats than the Congressional Black Caucus, the most powerful Democratic faction in the body, with whom Biden spoke on Monday night. Biden’s work to save his candidacy in 2024 resembles the way he did it in 2020 after punishing losses in the first few Democratic primaries: by leaning on his core support among Black members and railing against the “elites” who’ve written him off. Biden has also protected his left flank by reaching out over the weekend to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and earning her support. He has also earned that of fellow Squad members Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley.
“The matter is closed,” Ocasio-Cortez said Monday night.
Is it, though? While Biden has stayed an open revolt in the House for now, that could all change after more private polling and analytics come back—along with some lawyering around complications that could accompany the choice to switch the ticket—or should Biden have another well-publicized setback. And should there be a move against Biden, it would look much different from the current trickle of a member here or there. The dam would break at the instruction of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi.
And Pelosi pointedly left that door open in a television interview Wednesday morning. When asked on MSNBC whether Biden had her support to remain atop the head of the ticket, Pelosi didn’t give a straight answer.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Pelosi said. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short.”
Biden has not quite the anchor in the Senate that he has in the House. That doesn’t mean, however, that Senate Democrats are any closer to moving against him. A plan from Virginia Sen. Mark Warner to organize a group of senators to urge Biden to reconsider his run was scuttled, with Biden campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond issuing a sharp warning to those like Warner that they risked alienating their Black base.
Such threats from the Biden campaign, though, haven’t suppressed the angst. In their caucus meeting Tuesday, Sens. Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, and Michael Bennet reportedly stated that they believed that Biden couldn’t win in November. Bennet confirmed that he had said that in a television interview Tuesday night, during which he unloaded.
“Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House,” Bennet told CNN, adding, “The White House, in the time since that disastrous debate, I think, has done nothing to really demonstrate that they have a plan to win this election.”
Not all Senate Democrats were on the same page, though. Trusty Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, Biden’s loyal home-state defender, made the case for Biden. And Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has argued that Biden has a path to victory by making a sharper economic contrast with Trump.
So what consensus was there from the Senate meeting?
“There was certainly consensus on this critical point,” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said, “that we need to defeat Donald Trump.” It is indeed the organizing purpose of the Democratic Party to win elections, so it’s good that they have consensus on that.
It is easy to mock congressional Democrats for their indecisiveness. I came right up to it at the end of that last paragraph and decided that it was time to wrap things up. Because the indecisiveness here does seem proportional to the weight of the decision that needs to be made. Some Democrats think that the stakes are too high to venture into the unknown mess that could arrive if Biden, who has beaten Trump once, were to drop out. The idea that a last-minute swap can be executed and solve the problem has a tinge of fantasy to it. The counter to that would be that, well, it’s looking as if Trump will beat Biden, so why not try anything else? If you think about this and come down firmly on one side, you’re probably not thinking hard enough.
But the upshot of this indecisiveness is that each day that congressional Democrats aren’t in agreement about what to do is another day that Biden survives. And if you’re the White House, you’re counting five more days until the Republican National Convention could, potentially, steal the media’s glare away from what has been the only politics story since the presidential debate on June 27.