WASHINGTON — In the nearly three weeks since President Joe Biden took the debate stage in Atlanta and plunged his reelection campaign into chaos, his closest consultations have been not with his White House chief of staff, his top communications strategist or even the leader of his campaign.
Instead, he is relying on members of his family — a tight-knit clan that includes his son, Hunter, and the first lady, Jill Biden — along with a tiny group of loyalists to steer him through a self-created crisis and quell a rising rebellion against his candidacy from within his own party.
Biden has not consulted directly with the pollsters on his 500-person campaign team about the state of the race against Donald Trump but has instead relied on Mike Donilon, a longtime friend, former pollster and Biden campaign messaging guru, to summarize the numbers, with regular memos and numerous daily phone calls.
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The ever-buzzing phone of Steve Ricchetti, a close counselor to Biden since his vice presidency, is the main conduit between concerned lawmakers and the president.
Biden speaks frequently to his son, Hunter, who calls and texts the president and first lady multiple times a day to see how they are coping with the onslaught of scrutiny surrounding his father’s health, mental fitness and final presidential campaign.
Recent interviews with more than three dozen people, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations about the campaign, reveal a truth about the state of the president’s campaign: the people steering Biden through the biggest political crisis of his presidency are true believers in the mythology of Joe Biden as the comeback kid, and they discount opinions to the contrary.
The result is a historic standoff between Biden and his small inner circle on the one hand, and broad swaths of voters and elected Democrats fearful of an electoral wipeout in November on the other.
It’s a battle Biden has seemed to embrace in recent days. When asked Monday night about whom he consults on issues like remaining in the race or dropping out, the president offered a terse response: “Me.”
“Look, I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, adding, “My mental acuity’s been pretty damn good.”
Biden has expressed frustration to allies that people do not seem to accept that he is mentally cogent and fit to lead, according to a person familiar with his thinking. And he believes his polling should reflect what he sees as his accomplishments.
The attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday has muted some of the public pressure on Biden to exit the race. But the party remains deeply divided. Leaders of the Democratic National Committee are using the moment to move swiftly to confirm him as his party’s presidential nominee by the end of July, according to four people briefed on the matter, while many other Democrats are in despair about Biden’s prospects.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is running for Senate, warned during a private meeting with donors Saturday that his party was likely to suffer overwhelming losses in November if Biden stayed in the race, according to two people with direct knowledge of Schiff’s remarks at the meeting.
Recent polls show Biden trailing in most or all of the battleground states.
“I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Schiff said at a fundraiser in New York, according to a person with access to a transcription of a recording of the event. “And we may very, very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House.”
Although Biden is taking advice mostly from his closest circle, he has been trying to prove that he is up for reelection by holding a series of meetings with lawmakers intended to hear concerns about his candidacy. He has held private discussions with Democratic governors and lawmakers, including with Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, in Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth, Delaware, on Saturday. But multiple participants said the encounters have been carefully choreographed events that failed to alleviate their worries.
On Friday, Biden abruptly left a call with Hispanic members of the House after one lawmaker, Rep. Mike Levin, D-Calif., called on him to get out of the race. Three participants familiar with that call said questions were preselected by Biden’s staff. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, called that claim “false.”
On Saturday, as Biden prepared to meet with centrist members of the House, several participants said the Biden campaign tried to solicit questions beforehand, which Bates also denied.
“They don’t want to hear my question, which is, ‘Are you cloistered? Have you heard what the polling is, that we no longer have three swing states; we have seven or 10?’” said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., who has called for Biden to step aside. “The numbers are trending to more swing states, and worse numbers, and more congressional seats that are now contested. It’s going the opposite direction.”
During the call, Biden brushed away Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., when she told him he was trailing in her state by 4 to 5 percentage points, according to two people who participated in the call.
During an earlier call Saturday, with progressive members of the House, Biden appeared to read from a note passed to him by a staff member: “Stay positive, you are sounding defensive.” According to a lawmaker on the call, the president was poking fun at his aides, not accidentally reading the directive. But the lawmaker said it spoke to how stage-managed the calls have seemed.
Other lawmakers say they remain mystified that Biden has not done more to reach out to House members and members of the Senate, including a visit to Capitol Hill, where Biden spent 36 years and that he maintains deep reverence for.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., described the outreach from Biden as “too scripted and too superficial,” saying the “hard conversations” were not happening. And now, after the shooting at Trump’s rally Saturday night, he thought they might never occur.
“I suspect the attempted assassination of Donald Trump will likely crowd out the serious reckoning that should happen around the Democratic nomination,” Torres, who has not called on Biden to step aside, said in an interview.
As he has for much of his career, Biden is relying most heavily on input from his small group of aides, which also includes Bruce Reed, who advises the president on policy and writes many of his speeches. Reed and Anita Dunn, the president’s senior communications adviser, have crafted the 100-days agenda Biden debuted at a rally Friday.
Close allies, including Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., are also on speed dial. Biden is choosing their counsel over soliciting a broad range of views within a party that remains fiercely divided over his continued candidacy. And they all are betting that, at age 81, he will pull off the biggest upset of his political career.
Complicating matters for people hoping for Biden to step aside is that he fared far better during a nearly hourlong news conference Thursday than he did at the debate. He also turned in an energetic performance Friday at a rally in Michigan, where he was buoyed by a chanting crowd that booed and pointed at the press when he criticized his media coverage.
And he does have supporters who are encouraged by what they see.
“President Biden met the moment by calling for this country to come together and reject any political violence,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. “In terms of his campaign, what is needed is a bold agenda for 2024 including rent caps, expanding Social Security and ending medical debt. He finally broke through by offering that in Detroit.”
White House aides disputed the claim that Biden has closed himself off to outside voices.
“President Biden is incredibly proud of the well-rounded team he has built, with whom he’s fighting for middle-class families, for our freedoms, and the rule of law,” said Bates, the White House spokesperson. “The president frequently meets with a wide variety of administration officials, ranging from policy experts to team members who engage with all manner of communities, to governors, mayors and members of Congress.”
Bates added, “He has not made changes to the group of advisers he consults, who he trusts because they’ve demonstrated the integrity to tell the truth and keep the well-being of the American people front of mind.”
Still, there have been concerns among Democrats about who is advising the president in such a high-stakes moment. Hunter Biden, who is based in Los Angeles, was recently in a White House meeting preparing his father for a speech and is known to informally advise him on other political matters. If he cannot reach either the president or first lady, he calls on Anthony Bernal, Jill Biden’s senior adviser, who is in most senior-level meetings involving the president — an unusual status for an East Wing aide.
Bernal, who has been with the Bidens since the 2008 campaign, is known as an enforcer within the White House. The tight-knit Biden family prizes loyalty, and Bernal delivers: “The guy would walk in front of a speeding train for her,” a close friend of Jill Biden said.
Bernal works closely with Annie Tomasini, the White House deputy chief of staff, who is almost always at the president’s side. A senior White House official, describing her value to the Bidens and to the administration, referred to Tomasini’s background as a three-time captain of her college basketball team at Boston University: “She wants to help the team, and wants to help the team win.”
The small group’s value to Biden and his family, in large part, is that they place a high value on loyalty to him and his family. It was a sentiment that came through to some Democratic senators who attended a briefing with Ricchetti, Donilon and Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, this past week, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
People familiar with the dynamic say there is a larger group of senior aides who meet each day to plan for the hours ahead. Since the debate, there have been two daily meetings: one at 9 a.m. and the other at 9 p.m.
That group includes Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, who meets with the president multiple times a day on topics ranging from foreign policy to natural disasters. Zients, who has been a main point of contact for Schumer, has been involved in several recent meetings to shore up support, including one between Biden and Democratic governors. He has joined calls with Democratic donors and with business leaders and Dillon, who speaks with Biden regularly, has held private conversations and joined several meetings with outside stakeholders, including with donors, lawmakers and party officials.
Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, also attends the larger meetings. So does Dunn, who runs communications strategy for the White House and who has prepared Biden for his recent interviews.
Dunn and Donilon composed the letter Biden sent to congressional Democrats on Monday of last week, relaying his decision to stay in the race. Sending the letter was Donilon’s idea, according to a person familiar with the process.
When Biden delivered an Oval Office address Sunday evening, Donilon and Dunn were in the room with him reading along.
Biden family members and allies have accused Dunn and others, publicly and privately, of setting Biden up for failure in the debate and for curbing his public appearances — a charge her defenders in the White House say is unfair. Biden has told members of his debate preparation team, which was led by Klain and a cast of other aides including Reed and Donilon, that he is not upset with them, two people familiar with those discussions said.
Hunter Biden, who was recently convicted on felony gun charges, has also been frustrated by the approach taken by Dunn and her husband, Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal attorney, to put some distance between the president and his son’s legal troubles. The president’s son disputed accounts that there were tensions.
“I have nothing but gratitude for Bob and Anita who have tirelessly supported my entire family personally and professionally for years, and continue to do so today and going forward,” Hunter Biden said in a statement.
Still, the tension between Dunn and some in Biden’s inner circle has risen since the debate, according to people familiar with the dynamic, and Dunn has expressed her frustrations to allies.
Some Biden aides were relieved Thursday evening when the president seemingly opened the door to a data-based argument that he could not win the election, saying he would leave the race if his advisers told him “there’s no way you can win.”
But Biden swiftly shot down that possibility, adding, “No one is saying that. No poll says that.” His denial stoked questions among some aides about what information the president has been shown.
To be sure, Biden has access to external polling. He is a longtime reader of newspapers that do high-quality surveys, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, according to people familiar with his media diet. He is particularly sensitive to front-page headlines. He also uses Apple News on his iPhone and is a regular watcher of cable television, particularly MSNBC. He watches his favorite show, “Morning Joe,” while working out in the mornings.
But he has repeatedly and publicly questioned the reliability of polling data, wondering aloud at his news conference and to George Stephanopoulos in an ABC interview earlier this month whether polling was “as accurate as it used to be.”
The Biden campaign had not conducted an extensive survey since the debate until Monday of last week, when it began fielding a poll in seven swing states, according to three people familiar with the campaign operations.
Even so, Biden invokes polling in nearly every one of his public appearances, saying surveys show him winning the contest. Nearly every national poll released publicly since the debate shows Trump leading or an effectively tied contest.
“Recent polls show us winning,” he said at a rally in Michigan on Friday evening, pointing to a Marist poll, a rare example of a recent survey showing Biden slightly ahead of Trump, though within the margin of error.
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