WASHINGTON (AP) — While President Joe Biden was out of sight Sunday at Camp David spending time with family, prominent Democrats rallied in a public show of unwavering support for his campaign after his shaky debate performance and growing concerns about whether he will the government should remain. White House race.
“I don’t believe Joe Biden has a problem leading for the next four years,” said a close ally, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina. “Joe Biden must continue to build on his record.”
Biden’s allies blanketed the talk shows on Sunday, admitting that the president’s debate performance against Republican Donald Trump on Thursday night ranged from sub-par to poor. They encouraged voters to look past the moment, look at Biden’s long-term record and focus on Trump’s numerous falsehoods during the 90-minute debate.
Privately, Biden’s campaign has worked to calm concerns about the debate on CNN, where Biden sounded hoarse and at times couldn’t finish his sentences. The campaign has since worked to keep donors and surrogates on board.
After a fundraising event in New York on Saturday, Biden traveled with his family to Camp David, the presidential retreat outside Washington. The previously planned trip was also used to take family photos ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
Even before the debate, the 81-year-old Democratic president’s age was an issue for voters, and the prime-time showdown appeared to reinforce the public’s deep-seated concerns for perhaps the largest audience he will reach in four months. until election day. According to CNN, more than 51 million people watched the debate.
Sen. Rafael Warnock, a Democrat and Baptist minister from Georgia, said there had been “more than a few Sundays where I wished I had preached a better sermon,” and he referred the experience to Biden’s performance during the debate.
“But after the sermon was over, my job was to embody the message, to stand up for the people I serve. And that’s what Joe Biden has done his entire life,” Warnock said, echoing the message from other supporters that Biden had had a bad debate but a lifetime of good governance.
Warnock, like Clyburn and others, pivoted to Trump’s many lies during the debate — lies that Biden and the debate moderators often neglected to check from the stage — including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters , immigration and the outcome of the 2020 election.
“Every time his mouth moved, he lied,” Warnock said of Trump.
Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., dodged questions about Trump’s false claims and praised Trump’s accomplishments while accusing the national news media of covering up a debilitating condition.
Trump “was strong. He was clear. He was coherent,” Graham said.
He called Biden “compromised” and said “the media is covering it up.”
Behind closed doors, there was a sense of concern among some Democrats that Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee were not taking the impact of Biden’s actions seriously enough.
DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez held a call Saturday afternoon with dozens of committee members across the country — a group of some of the party’s most influential members — in which they offered a rosy assessment of the path forward and others on the call were not given an opportunity to respond with questions.
Several committee members on the call, most of whom were granted anonymity to talk about the private conversation, said they felt like they were being asked to ignore a serious situation.
“There were a number of things that could have been said to address the situation. We didn’t get them. We were manipulated,” said Joe Salazar, a DNC member-elect from Colorado who was on the call. Being manipulated or misled is a term for being “gaslit.”
Advocates like Clyburn, whose support was crucial to Biden’s 2020 primary in South Carolina, pointed to the president’s rally in North Carolina on Friday, when he looked energetic and animated, a sharp turn from the evening before.
“I know I’m not a young man anymore, to put it plainly,” Biden said at the meeting. “Folks, I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t talk as fluently as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to.”
“But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth. I know what is right and wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans, that when you get knocked down, you get back up,” he said to loud cheers.
Biden’s team said the campaign had raised more than $33 million since Thursday, $26 million from smaller donations, including about half from first-time donors this cycle. The campaign said Thursday was its best “grassroots” fundraising day, while Friday, the day after the debate, was its second-best.
Michael Tyler, Biden’s campaign communications director, said there had been “no internal conversations” about Biden’s resignation, though he also acknowledged the president had had a “bad night” on stage.
Clyburn and Graham were on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ and Warnock appeared on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’
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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writers Matthew Daly, Zeke Miller and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
