After debate debacle, Biden’s team says Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are the “clearest” path to victory

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s The president’s ability to run for re-election faced crucial tests on Thursday as he faced questions at a Highly anticipated press conference and his team met privately with skeptical senators on Capitol Hill. The contact was made despite the fact that more and more Democrats in the House of Representatives were calling for his resignation the race.

The Biden team laid out how it plans to keep the White House in a new memo. It said winning the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan was the “clearest path” to victory. And it declared that no other Democrat would do better against the Republicans. Donald Trump. Biden will travel to Detroit on Friday.

It all comes as The Democrats are facing a persistent problem. Top donors, supporters and key politicians are doubting Biden’s ability to win re-election after his recent debate performance, but the combative 81-year-old president is refusing to give up and is preparing for a rematch against Trump.

“There is also no indication that anyone else would outperform the President over Trump,” said the memo from campaign chairman Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The memo attempted to dismiss “hypothetical polls of alternative candidates” as unreliable, saying such polls “do not take into account the negative media environment that any Democratic candidate will face.”

Meanwhile, the campaign has been quietly conducting exit polls on Vice President Kamala Harris to gauge how she is perceived by voters, according to two people familiar with the campaign who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

Respondents said the poll did not necessarily show that she could be the candidate to replace Biden, but rather to better understand how she is viewed. The survey came after Trump stepped up his attacks on Harris after the debate, according to another person familiar with the poll. The poll was first reported by the New York Times.

Thursday is crucial. Biden must show skeptics that he is running for another four years during his whirlwind day with world leaders at NATO and the evening press conference. Voters are watching him and elected officials are deciding whether to push for another election.

Later in the day, Representative Hillary Scholten, whose district is in the swing state of Michigan, and Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, the eleventh and twelfth Democrats in Congress, called on Biden to drop out of the race.

Scholten, a first-term Democrat, told The Detroit News that people could not “forget” Biden’s terrible performance in the debate and said in a statement that it was “time to pass the torch.”

Congressional leaders have largely remained quiet in their private meetings with other lawmakers. But House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi opened the door to further discussion about Biden’s political future this week when she publicly declared it was “up to the president” to decide what to do – even though Biden had already firmly told Congress he would stay in the race.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said lawmakers’ discussions on how to proceed were “open, comprehensive and clear-sighted.”

Jeffries, who supports Biden and the Democrats, said Democrats in the House and Senate are united on the agenda going forward, which includes strengthening the middle class, fighting for reproductive rights and opposing Trump and the far-right Project 2025 agenda.

Although Biden was confident about his chances, his campaign team admitted on Thursday that he was behind. In addition, more and more of the president’s aides in the White House and on the campaign team are privately expressing doubts that the president can turn things around.

But they are taking their cues from Biden, saying he is 100% in as long as he doesn’t resign. And there doesn’t seem to be any organized internal effort to get the president to resign. His allies were well aware going into the week that there would be more calls for his resignation, and they were prepared for it.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer invited Biden’s team to meet privately with senators during the lunch break to discuss their concerns and how to proceed, but some senators grumbled that they would rather hear from the president himself.

A Democrat, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, said afterward: “My feeling is still the same. And that is not a criticism of this meeting. I am convinced that the president can win, but he must be able to go out and answer the concerns of the voters. He must be able to speak directly to the voters in the next few days.”

The renewed emphasis on the “Blue Wall” states by the campaign, which has already invested heavily in other battleground states such as Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia, shows that the path to defeating Trump in November is becoming increasingly narrow. At the same time, the team stresses that the Sun Belt states are “not out of reach.”

Although senior campaign aides write in the memo that Biden could win 270 electoral votes In many ways, it also means that these three states are crucial and that is why Biden has prioritized these areas in his recent travels. This includes the upcoming trip to Michigan. Over the weekend, he visited Madison (Wisconsin), Philadelphia and Harrisburg (Pennsylvania).

While acknowledging that there are “real” movements in the race, it is argued that this does not represent a “fundamental change”.

Campaign officials say they plan to continue touting Biden’s accomplishments in office, draw a contrast with Trump and his policies, and redouble their grassroots efforts to reach voters – which was their goal even before the disastrous June 27 debate called into question Biden’s cognitive abilities and fitness for office. Their internal research suggests voters will make decisions based on policies and issues rather than Biden’s age, O’Malley Dillon and Rodriguez contend.

“What has changed since the debate is that the urgency and discipline with which we must pursue it has gone into overdrive,” O’Malley Dillon and Rodriguez wrote. “We believe that if we follow the roadmap below, we will win.”

All this is part of a growing effort by the president – who insists he will not resign – and his allies to stop a potential flood of defections and put an end to the unrest tearing the party apart.

Polls conducted after the debate largely concluded that Democrats across the country have doubts about Biden’s ability to take the lead in November.

More than half of Democrats (56%) said in a recent Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos poll that Biden should step aside and let someone else take the lead given his debate performance. But the Biden team points to the same poll to argue that despite “mounting nervousness” after the debate, his performance did not lead to a “drastic shift in vote shares.”

More than half of Democratic voters in a CNN/SSRS poll said the party would have a better chance of winning the presidency in November with another candidate. And about 6 in 10 voters, including about a quarter of Democrats, said a New York Times/Siena College poll said Biden’s reelection as president in November would be a risky rather than a safe decision for the country.