President Biden is beset by challenges.
Former President Trump is ahead in many polls following Biden’s widely panned June 27 debate performance in Atlanta.
Biden’s hold on the Democratic nomination has at times looked shockingly fragile amid criticism from within his own party.
Saturday’s assassination attempt of Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., appears likely to solidify support for the former president among conservatives.
To be sure, Biden allies argue that it’s a time for cool heads and staying the course. They contend the race remains close, and the president will prevail.
Not all Democrats buy that theory. According to a Tuesday New York Times report, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told donors at a private meeting Saturday that Democratic losses in November could be enormous if Biden remained at the top of the ticket.
Here are the four big challenges Biden faces — and why his team believes they can be overcome.
The age issue
The debate was damaging because it played so powerfully into the chief negative perception of Biden — that, at 81, he is just too old and increasingly infirm.
An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released last week found 85 percent of adults believe the president to be too old for a second term.
Biden’s postdebate performances have been neither catastrophic nor triumphant. TV interviews with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos and NBC News’s Lester Holt have been adequate but uninspiring.
A high-stakes solo news conference at the NATO summit in Washington last week showed Biden’s familiarity with the nuts and bolts of foreign policy but also his propensity to misspeak: He referred to “Vice President Trump” when he clearly meant to refer to his own vice president, Kamala Harris.
The pro-Biden take: Biden allies argue that his age has been baked into the race from the beginning. Trump, they note, is less than four years younger than the incumbent, having turned 78 in June.
The Biden campaign also insists the debate’s effect on the race has been exaggerated.
In a July 11 internal memo, Biden campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told their team, “While there is no question there is increased anxiety following the debate, we are not seeing this translate into a drastic shift in vote share.”
To be fair to Team Biden, national polling does indeed indicate a close race.
The polling average maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) shows Trump up by 1.7 points nationally.
FiveThirtyEight, the data and polling site, contends Biden is narrowly favored to win in November, giving the president a 53 percent chance of victory.
The battleground-state picture
Democratic gloom deepens when the focus moves to the small number of battleground states that will determine the election’s outcome.
In the DDHQ averages, Trump is ahead in all six key battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Biden won all those states in 2020.
Democratic nerves are further jangled by polls showing previously safe states to be newly competitive.
On Tuesday, a Virginia Commonwealth University poll put Trump up 3 points in Virginia, which Biden won by 10 points in 2020.
The pro-Biden take: The president’s supporters note that many of the polls remain within the margin of error, even in the battlegrounds.
The DDHQ polling average, for example, has Biden down by just a single point in Wisconsin and by a mere three-tenths of a point in Michigan.
But it also has Biden losing by more than 4 points in Pennsylvania and in the two Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada.
The July 11 Biden campaign memo acknowledged that winning the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was the “clearest pathway” to victory for Biden, but insisted the Sun Belt states are “not out of reach.”
The ramifications of the assassination attempt against Trump
Trump was accorded a hero’s welcome when he made his first appearance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday.
The Saturday shooting, in which one rallygoer was killed and two injured, complicates Democratic jabs against Trump, at least for the moment.
Attacks that are perceived as over the top could spark backlash amid broader fears about deepening polarization.
The pro-Biden take: Biden told Holt it was a “mistake” to argue for putting Trump “in the bull’s-eye” recently.
But Biden also suggested he would not tread too lightly.
“How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like [Trump] says? Do you just not say anything, ’cause it may incite somebody?” the president asked rhetorically.
Discontent among the Democratic base over Gaza
Israel’s war on Gaza has been supplanted in U.S. headlines recently, first by Biden’s debate flub and latterly by the attempted assassination of Trump.
But the bloodshed is continuing. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Israeli airstrikes overnight Monday and into Tuesday killed more than 60 Palestinians. Authorities in Gaza estimate the total death toll at around 38,600.
In this year’s Democratic primaries, an “Uncommitted” line — generally viewed as a protest vote against the president’s policies on Gaza — drew 13 percent support in Michigan and 19 percent support in Minnesota.
The political temperature around the issue is sure to rise when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Washington to address a joint session of Congress on July 24.
The pro-Biden take: Team Biden acknowledges real frustration among some voters over Gaza. But it also contends the electoral ramifications tend to be overstated.
Gaza tends to be well down most voters’ lists of concerns, they say.
They also argue that parallel fractures within the GOP base get less coverage than they deserve.
Biden loyalists note that, even after former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley suspended her presidential bid, her “zombie” campaign often racked up a bigger share of the GOP vote than did the “Uncommitted” line on the Democratic side.