Last Friday, President Joe Biden gave an interview on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos to address the fallout from the June 27 presidential debate with Donald Trump. In this Q&A, Thomas Gift analyzes the interview, reflects on what it means for Biden’s prospects for staying in the 2024 race, and discusses who could be in line to replace him. 

What did you make of Joe Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos?

There was nothing on its face disqualifying about the interview. But concerns about Biden’s age are so great right now — among Democratic Congress members, donors, and strategists — that it will take more than one short performance to calm Democrats’ nerves. If you wanted to be critical, you could say that Biden still looked looked frail, and seemed worryingly unaware about the dire state of his campaign. Biden is losing to Trump nationally, and he’s down in virtually every swing state. A whopping 72 percent of Americans say that Biden isn’t physically or mentally equipped to be president. The problem for Biden is that Americans can’t unsee what they saw at the debate. Every single element of his campaign will now be scrutinized through the lens of what it says about the president’s mental acuity. One rambling sentence. One incoherent phrase. One lapse of memory. That’s all it’s going to take to further ratchet up calls to step aside. 

Biden has been adamant he’s staying in the 2024 race. Do you think that’s the right strategy?

If he has any intention of seeing the election through to November, Biden needs to dig in his heels for now. He can’t be seen as waffling. However, where I do think Biden has erred strategically is in his post-debate spin. Messaging matters, and my sense is that Biden has turned what was already a bumbling debate performance into an even worse disaster. It’s just been one unconvincing excuse after another. For example, he had a cold. He had jet lag (11 days after he returned to D.C.). He’s okay between the hours of 10am to 4pm, and just needs more sleep. This is not smart political PR. Biden has displayed such a striking degree of tone-deafness, it’s almost to the point where one starts to wonder if the real problem is the president not listening to his communications team. It’s hard to believe that professional political operatives would be giving him such bad advice. Rumors are that Biden’s family members increasingly have his ear. That’s no excuse, but it could be an explanation.

What advice would you give Biden’s campaign?

First thing’s first: Biden needs to rethink his current messaging, which seems to be that he’s a less adept version of his prior self, but that he’s serviceable in his job as president relative to Trump. That’s simply not inspiring. The day after the debate, Biden said at a rally in North Carolina that he doesn’t walk as easily as he used to, speak as smoothly as he used to, or debate as well as he used to. Yet apparently, voters aren’t supposed to ask the obvious: whether Biden can negotiate with foreign leaders as easily as he used to, work with an opposition Congress as smoothly he used to, or make decisions about war and peace as well as he used to. There’s a sense that Biden’s inner circle is protecting him. If Biden wants to dispel concerns about his health, nothing’s stopping him, for example, from taking tough questions on Fox News or holding a press conference at the White House, where no topic is off limits. I just don’t think Biden is confident enough to do that. Which is the problem.

Do you think Vice President Kamala Harris is the natural heir to Biden if he bows out?

With all the recent talk of replacing Biden at the top of the presidential ticket with his current VP, Kamala Harris, it’s worth noting several things, all of which I don’t think bode well for her beating Trump in November. First and most importantly, she’s the least popular vice president since Dan Quayle. According to 538, Harris’s approval rating is just 37 percent. That’s hard to surmount. Second, when Harris ran for president in 2019, she was one of the earliest Democrats to flame out of the primaries because she had so little popular support, and virtually no backing from donors. Third, as VP, Harris has mostly been relegated to a portfolio of low-priority issues that hasn’t allowed her to carve out her own identity. Fourth, she’s often depicted as being gaffe prone. If Biden had stepped down months ago, and there had been an open primary, I’m skeptical she’d have emerged as the nominee. That said, if Biden bows out soon, it would be hard for Democratic delegates to snub her at their convention in August. Not only is she Biden’s #2, but she’s also the first woman of color to hold that position.

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