Democrats Offer Desperate Defenses of Biden’s Category 5 Debate Fiasco

As many politicians and pundits who watched Thursday’s presidential debate descended into a nervous frenzy over President Joe Biden’s supremely underwhelming performance, several Democratic lawmakers and media figures are choosing to stand by their man—even as that feels increasingly untenable.

In the spin room immediately after the debate, California Governor Gavin Newsom was already hard at work backing Biden, and wouldn’t entertain the topic on nearly everyone else’s mind—namely that it may be time to seriously consider switching candidates.

“I would never turn my back on President Biden’s record,” he said, according to The New York Times. “I would never turn my back on President Biden, and I don’t know a Democrat in my party who would do so, especially after tonight.”

Ever the Democratic Party’s contrarian, Senator John Fetterman likewise leaped to set himself apart from the scores of Democrats criticizing Biden’s debate performance.

“I refuse to join the Democratic vultures on Biden’s shoulder after the debate,” wrote the Pennsylvania Democrat on X. “No one knows more than me that a rough debate is not the sum total of the person and their record.”

Fetterman himself struggled to communicate clearly during a key televised debate against his opponent Mehmet Oz in 2022. Both Biden and Fetterman attempted to articulate their strong support for Roe v. Wade but were caught up in their own halting, awkward performances.

“Morning-after thermonuclear beat downs from my race from the debate and polling geniuses like 538 predicted l’d lose by 2. And what happened? The only seat to flip and won by a historic margin (+5),” Fetterman wrote Thursday night. “Chill the fuck out,” he advised.

Although some lawmakers and lobbyists have suggested that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries should, with other party leaders, attempt to reason with Biden to abandon the race, he responded succinctly when asked whether the president should drop out: “No.”

These Democrats weren’t the only ones to defend Biden; several journalists and campaign members voiced their support for the president, in sharp contrast to the wave of panic that overtook on-screen personalities on CNN.

Rachel Maddow noted that the Biden who appeared at a watch party minutes after the debate ended was clearer and more energized—a “world away from what we just heard on the debate stage.”

“That Joe Biden would’ve killed in the debate, but the Joe Biden that we saw on the debate stage was about 90 percent more soft spoken than that. And in a monotone when you could discern him,” she said, adding that he seemed to “warm up” over the course of the debate.

Across the board, nobody could say anything positive about Biden’s debate chops, instead drawing on other examples to argue that the president could still be a contender. In the early hours of the morning, Harry J. Sisson, one of several social media content creators who have been courted by the Biden campaign, tried to compliment the president for still being awake.

“Look at this. At 2 am in the morning, President Biden was greeting his supporters at RDU airport in North Carolina. This is just hours after debating Trump. This man does not stop working & moving. He’s fit to lead and I can’t wait to vote for him,” wrote Sisson in a post on X, formerly Twitter, with a picture of Biden on the tarmac. While influencers’ social media posts are meant to come off more organically, it’s hard to forget that Sisson has been posting unpaid pro-Biden content since the 2020 election.

In another post, Sisson lauded Biden for slamming Trump during a speech to his campaign’s watch party after the debate had ended—although the president conspicuously failed to effectively attack his opponent at any point during the 90-minute run time. “Biden has a cold,” Sisson wrote. “Trump has 34 felony convictions. This is the easiest choice we’ll ever have to make as a country.”

Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College and an expert on American political and economic history, wrote in the Friday morning edition of her newsletter that Biden’s bad performance could be explained by Trump’s “Gish gallop,” which she said was “a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them.”

Richardson argued that Trump had been “gaslighting” Biden, and took aim at media pundits who fell for the former president’s chicanery. “Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots,” she wrote, urging readers to take a longer view.

As of yet, it’s unclear which is the more shortsighted: backing a candidate whose chance of winning is slipping away before the world’s eyes, or rushing to replace him and sending the American politician landscape into chaos.