US presidential debate: Biden has a bad night, spurring talk of new Democrat candidate

WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden’s unsure and halting performance in the first presidential debate of 2024 has stirred speculation that the Democratic Party may have to find a replacement, who will have barely four months to beat Donald Trump in the November election.

It was clear from the outset that Mr Biden, 81, had two adversaries to overcome at the June 27 debate: his Republican rival, and the perception that he is too old for the strenuous job of helming the country.

He failed to overcome either – that was the near-unanimous verdict by the American media at the end of the hour-and-a-half-long debate.

Shuffling onto the debate stage like an aged man who needed a cane, Mr Biden had a rough start of the night, speaking with a hoarse voice – his aides said he had been nursing a cold – and offering lacklustre delivery.

Within the first 10 minutes, he had lost his train of thought while answering a question. To his supporters’ dismay, he could not articulate his position well, even on a topic like abortion, thought to be a winning issue for the Democrats.

Inflation, jobs, immigration, and the Ukraine and Gaza wars dominated the discussion. But neither candidate presented policies that could help sway undecided voters.

When the moderator asked the most predictable question of the night, namely how he would convince voters that his age was not a concern, Mr Biden’s tame response was to point out that Trump, 78, was only a few years younger than him but “a lot less competent”.

Trump, true to form, boasted about acing cognitive tests while challenging Mr Biden to take one.

The quality of discourse dipped as the debate went on, with each candidate calling the other the “worst president in history”. At one point, the two men argued about their golfing skills.

This televised debate was the first of only two in which both candidates have agreed to participate this election cycle.

In a break with past practice going back to 1988, 2024’s debates are not organised by the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates. American TV news network CNN hosted the June 27 debate live, while the second is tentatively scheduled for September, slated to be organised by ABC News.

Most fact-checkers pointed out that Trump’s responses were sweeping and full of inaccuracies. He repeatedly ducked moderators’ questions to regurgitate his criticisms of Mr Biden.

But those lapses are unlikely to hurt Trump, who went into the debate with a lead of at least two points in national opinion polls. After the debate, during which Mr Biden trailed off in the middle of sentences, the former president is likely to widen his lead.

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In the critical swing state polls, too, Trump has a march over Mr Biden, who suffers from a low job approval rating of around 38 per cent.

Trump, the first former US president to be convicted, is also outraising Mr Biden in campaign funds despite being found guilty of 34 criminal charges by a New York jury in May. He is due to face more criminal trials, including two cases relating to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“I don’t think there was an absolutely clear winner,” Mr John Fortier, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on elections, told The Straits Times.

“President Biden had something of a mixed performance. He made some effective points about abortion and democracy, which much of his base wanted to see, but I’m not sure that he made the case why his presidency would do well.

“Trump was not perfect himself, but he was a little more controlled than he had been in past debates,” he said, adding that the rules calling for muting microphones at the end of questioning may have benefited him a bit.

“He was still combative, still Trump. While he had some stumbles, too, he did have a couple of messages – that ‘things aren’t going well on immigration and the economy, that things were better under me’. There was a relative simplicity to his message.”

Mr Biden’s own party men appeared less forgiving. “We’d like to see him win the election. But after tonight, anxieties have soared. Considering that the opponent is a candidate as flawed as Trump, this should have been easier,” a Democratic Party official told ST, though requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

It is not the first time that Mr Biden is facing questions about his candidacy. Even before the start of the party primaries in January, several prominent figures within the party, including Obama strategist David Axelrod, had called for Mr Biden to step aside.

In a live discussion at the conclusion of the debate, Mr Axelrod again raised the ante.

“There are going to be discussions about whether President Biden should continue,” he said.

The prospect of replacing Mr Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee after the state party primaries has no direct contemporary precedence.

However, ahead of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, then President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from the race for a second term ahead of the Wisconsin primary election to avoid the embarrassment of an incumbent losing a party primary.

Vice-President Hubert Humphrey emerged subsequently as the Democratic presidential nominee – despite not running in several state primary elections in that election cycle – and went on to lose the 1968 presidential election to President Richard Nixon of the Republican Party.

That Democratic National Convention, though, was held amid contention over American military involvement in the Vietnam War, along with swirling civil unrest, partly from the assassinations of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in a space of two months earlier that year.

In a banner report in the aftermath of the Biden-Trump debate on June 27, news website Politico quoted an unnamed Democratic donor and Biden supporter as saying it was time for the president to end his campaign.

Mr Fortier disagreed, calling it “a very severe step at a very late time in the process”.

“First of all, the decision is Biden’s, it’s not the party’s,” he said.

“He has the delegates, he has the votes, there’s no way to force him out. It’s all up to him and essentially, he’d have to hand it over to Kamala Harris.

“And I don’t think it would be easy to present the change to the American people very well. So I think for all those reasons it’s not gonna happen.”

In the face of welling criticism, California Governor Gavin Newsom was among those who pushed back. “You don’t turn your back because of one performance,” Mr Newsom said in an MSNBC interview.

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