A top advisor to former President Joe Biden said the Democratic Party “melted down” after his poor performance in the June 2024 debate against President Donald Trump and insisted Biden should have remained the party’s candidate.
Biden’s rough performance and weak voice at the CNN Presidential Debate sparked immense fear about his re-election odds, and the left’s top leaders called on him to withdraw from the race.
Biden was replaced as the Democratic candidate by Vice President Kamala Harris less than a month later on July 21. She lost to Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
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“Now, lots of people have terrible debates,” former Biden senior advisor Mike Donilon said during a discussion at Harvard University. “Lots of people have terrible debates. Usually the party doesn’t lose its mind, but that’s what happened here. It melted down.”
CNN and the BBC ran headlines calling the performance “disastrous” and “incoherent.”
“If Joe Biden loses November’s election, history will record that it took just 10 minutes to destroy a presidency,” CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson wrote in an article. “It was clear a political disaster was about to unfold as soon as the 81-year-old commander in chief stiffly shuffled on stage in Atlanta.”
Collinson went on to describe Biden giving the weakest performance in televised debate history.
New York Times columnist and Biden supporter Thomas Friedman wrote the debate made him “weep” and called on Biden to step aside.
“I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime — precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election,” Friedman wrote.
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Donilon, who has known Biden for more than four decades, described the Democratic Party’s reaction as “insane.”
“I think the party lost its mind,” he said. “If you ask people about this period of time, they’ll tell you Biden was losing the polls, he was going to lose. … They were saying this in a margin-of-error race.”
He added he had never seen a situation where a candidate was down three points nationally in the summer of a general election and his party decided he could not win.
“But that’s what happened, right?” Donilon said. “If you actually go and look at the polling in the first couple of days after the debate, the margin between Trump and Biden got closer. It didn’t get bigger.”
He discussed focus groups that convened on the night of the debate, noting while they believed Trump won overall, they voiced concerns about both candidates.
“They will say they’re worried about Biden’s age, but they’ll also say something else,” Donilon said. “They were really worried about Trump. They were worried about the fact he said he wouldn’t accept the results of the election. They were worried that he said, ‘I had nothing to do with Jan. 6.’ The sense from him was that he was not on the side of people.”
What really happened, according to Donilon, was not as devastating as the conventional wisdom became.
“I said this to Biden the morning after the debate: Sometimes you can lose the campaign about the campaign,” he said. “And that’s what happened to us.”
He insisted the former president was not mentally impaired but acknowledged the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 and inflation contributed to Biden’s downfall.
Fox News Digital’s Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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