The Final Week of Joe Must Go: Here is What Will Happen and Why It Will Fail.
Senators, Pelosi and Schumer...
The staring contest between Joe Biden and a faction within his party bent on deposing him is entering its end game. This will be the final week of the Joe Must Go movement.
Seventeen days from today, the Democratic Party will hold a virtual roll call, officially confirming Biden.
This will happen. The pressure campaign will fail. Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee.
But still, we can play out what the next few days look like. Let’s start with the end in mind.
The virtual roll call is absurd but fitting for this neurotic mess of a party. Using the fig leaf of the GOP-controlled Ohio legislature, the concept of removing the official reason why a convention exists to a Zoom meeting was initially a mechanism to protect the pageantry of Biden’s coronation. If you do an online roll call, the thinking went, you will prevent a live mic moment from uncommitted delegates protesting Gaza during the convention. Now it will serve to rubber-stamp the most controversial re-election nominee of my lifetime, ostensibly to prevent more chaos at the convention. Predictably, it has and will continue to do the opposite.
With the date set, those seeking to depose Biden know they have little time to achieve their goal. Sources are telling CBS that this will escalate within 3-5 days.
To succeed, Biden’s blue critics need to stop being polite and start getting real.
I wrote a few weeks ago that the only way out of this would be to accelerate scandals around the Biden family. I still believe this is inevitable, either now or after Biden loses. But there is only so much you can dump into the A-Block of Morning Joe within three to five days.
Here are the realistic dominos yet to fall—steps you could see in this last week of Democrats doing their best to damage their sitting president in hopes that he quits.
More Potential Senate Electoral Victims Come Forward
Fate has left Senate Democrats to play defense this cycle. West Virginia will assuredly go red after Joe Manchin’s retirement. That leaves Montana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania as possible GOP pickups. At the RNC, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told delegates that New Jersey, Virginia, and New Mexico are now in play as well and all three have Democratic Senators up for re-election. While Democratic candidates have outrun Republican challengers in polling so far, there is no guarantee that will continue on election day, where Biden’s lack of support could crater turnout up and down the ballot.
The solution for these candidates? Run away from Biden. To this point, John Tester of Montana, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico have all called for Biden to stand down.
But what about the rest of the Senate candidates on the front lines?
Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada hasn’t made a call, nor has Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. Ditto for Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Wisconsin. Add Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota to the list of inactivity, although she did say two weeks ago that Biden’s performance would be “critical” but hasn’t updated us since then to tell us how she thinks he did.
Rep. Reuben Gallego, the Democratic nominee in Arizona, has expressed concern but stopped short of calling for a removal. Presumptive Michigan nominee Rep. Elissa Slotkin said Biden is trailing but has not made a formal call. Rep. Andy Kim of New Jersey has only gone so far as to say he has “concerns.”
The fate of these Democrats is not trivial to the Biden campaign. His most popular issue is support for abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Biden is calling for a new law that would “restore Roe.” This is an incredibly poor decision for Biden 2024, relying on a 60-vote Senate majority they are nowhere close to achieving. Even in a Biden victory, it’s likely Chuck Schumer’s days as Senate Majority Leader are numbered because of the map alone.
But let’s indulge here.
To make progress on his most popular issue, Biden needs to not only spur a heroic defense of the Senate but possibly pick up seats where Democrats shouldn’t: namely Texas and Florida.
All available metrics point to the opposite happening—a bad map becoming a nightmare.
But nothing spurs politicians to action like a threat to their jobs. Do we see all the names listed above make statements?
And if they do, are they joined by Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania?
Casey, along with fellow PA Senator John Fetterman, has been very supportive of the president since the debate. I don’t believe he will turn on Scranton Joe without the polling in his race taking a steep turn, and so far that doesn’t look to be the case. But if you are looking for a wake-up call, Casey would be as impactful as they come.
Pelosi and Schumer
Word leaked during the RNC that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer each had private conversations with President Biden where they suggested he not seek the nomination. This was almost assuredly leaked by Pelosi and Schumer as part of the pressure campaign.
It happened shrewdly as the entire political press was gathered in Milwaukee to cover the tumescent Republican convention. It led to rampant speculation that a dropout was imminent.
It failed.
Bidenworld immediately pushed back and is now publishing events leading up to the virtual roll call.
As I said in my first piece on this, there is no evidence Joe Biden is going to cave to indirect pressure.
Will Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi take the step to call for him to step down publicly? If they want to turn up the heat to an intolerable degree, they will have to.
Of course, this comes at an insane cost. A press conference or statement will immediately be spun into ads for the Trump campaign. And crucially, there is no guarantee it will work.
But why drag this out as far as you have and not go all the way?
Obama not attending the DNC in Chicago
President Barack Obama, the man who rescued Joe Biden from the Senate in 2008, who pushed him off the 2016 ticket, and who helped engineer the Stop Bernie movement in 2020 that put Joe in the White House, could end Joe Biden’s presidency tomorrow if he called for him to resign.
He won’t. The presidential fraternity is too strong.
But that doesn’t mean he can’t play in the margins.
Biden believes he is behind this current push to deny him the nomination. Obama’s Pod Save America podcast mouthpieces have been the most vocal Joe Must Go Dems.
But what if there were a headline: "Obama will not attend Democratic National Convention in Chicago." There is no confirmation that it’s because of the Biden mess, but it would be very easy to read between the lines.
Candidates announce for convention
Journalists and political nerds thirst for a contested convention. The political excitement of yesteryear rebooted with a modern cast! As I type this, we are closer than ever to it happening.
We even have insane fan fiction theories as to how it could happen.
But you want to know what could really kick it off? Declaring yourself eligible right now.
What’s more? If you resigned your post in Biden’s cabinet to do so.
Will it happen? No. But it’s just as plausible as those asinine plans are, so screw it.
Some of these might happen. None of these might happen.
Here is the reality, Jack: Joe Biden is the sitting president. Joe Biden is the nominee.
If you wanted to take the keys away from Grandpa, you shouldn’t have let him alter the primary calendar. You should have encouraged a high-profile Democrat to run against him in the primary contests that did happen. You should have raised questions about his health when it was clearly an issue instead of denying it.
We are past those points now. Biden holds the keys and he will never, ever let them go.
He does not believe the polls.
He does not believe anyone else has a better shot.
He cannot fathom the level of disrespect he is tolerating.
He is “the greatest president since FDR.”
He hired The Black Man.
He has enough of the 13 Keys to the White House to win.
He is President Joe Biden and you can’t stop him from running the worst presidential campaign in modern history, no matter what. Period. Period. Period.
Px3 This Week
The first night of coverage from the RNC. We covered Trump’s speech later in the week but I still remain struck at how united and joyful the GOP was in Milwaukee. This is not normal. The Cleveland convention in 2016 was dour in comparison. The MAGA insurgents were elated but unfamiliar with what power felt like. The establishment were going through the motions of what they assumed was a gold-plated suicide of their party for the next eight years. The nerds did their best to unbind delegates.
Not in Wisconsin. One of the booziest states in America was drunk on Trump.
The great Howard Mortman of C-SPAN who has covered conventions for 40 years told me the last convention he remembered being so united was Reagan in 1984. The video in this episode is the best representation of the energy in the room.
Email
On Monday, MSNBC pulled all of their regular programming like Morning Joe for basic NBC news coverage. According to Fox and CNN, the move was made because NBC was concerned about potentially insensitive, or inappropriate, comments being made by hosts and panelists about the attempt on POTUS 45. What does this say about MSNBC and journalism, when NBC cannot trust their news coverage? - Rodney
NBC’s news division is a tire fire. They greased the chute for Jen Psaki to slide directly from the White House to pundit yet rejected former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel like an off-market kidney. While Morning Joe has become ground zero for Bidenwatch there is no sign that it has helped with MSNBC’s ratings nor it’s affect on NBC News’ reputation. If you can’t trust your staff to not say they are upset Trump didn’t get shot in the face on television, then you have deeper problems.
So, you had to post a "lol, nevermind" in record time. So you owe Jen a steak. This was still a hell of a read.