Short timer: Half of Democrats don’t think Biden will serve all four years
A majority of voters, including half of Democrats, do not think that 77-year-old Democrat Joe Biden will serve all four years as president, putting added pressure on who he plans to choose as vice president, and potential successor, according to a new survey.
According to the latest Rasmussen Reports poll, 59% of likely voters believe Biden’s vice president will take over in his first term if he's elected in November.
And that includes 49% of Democrats, said the survey, backing up others that have found many in the party don’t care who is elected as long as it’s not President Trump.
“Most voters think it’s likely that person will be president within the next four years if Biden is elected in November,” said the survey analysis.
Just over half of voters continue to say they’re likely to vote against Trump this fall, and a sizable majority of those voters don’t seem to care who runs against him, said Rasmussen.
The survey did not indicate or ask likely voters what they expect to happen that would push a President Biden from office, elevating his vice presidential pick. There have been other surveys, however, suggesting that some voters believe the former vice president has cognitive issues.
Questions about Biden have put a special focus on his pick for a running mate, which he has limited to women only. Black leaders are pressuring Biden to pick an African American woman.
- Biden to stay in hiding as long as possible
Joe Biden isn't leaving his Delaware home for the campaign trail anytime soon.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is gearing up to step into the spotlight when he announces his vice presidential pick and accepts the party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention this month. But don’t expect a dramatic shift from Biden away from what Republicans tease is his “basement bunker” strategy to that of a news-cycle warrior in the months before Election Day.
When the coronavirus pandemic first shut down normal life in March, political observers immediately wondered how Biden would be able to campaign effectively while cooped up in his basement. A few months later, after he secured a new in-home studio, started a steady stream of digital events, and rose in the polls, Democrats warmed to his low-key campaign while letting President Trump deal with negative press. Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said in June that Biden is “fine in the basement.”
There was a sense, though, that eventually, in the heat of the fall campaign season, Biden would assume a higher profile in the daily news cycle.
But there are indications that the low-key style could be here to stay.
“I don’t think that we need to be counterprogramming,” Kate Bedingfield, one of Biden’s deputy campaign managers, told reporters this week about the campaign's plans on how to handle Trump responding to and driving news cycles.
The former vice president will certainly have key moments when the attention is on him, such as in the debates and the convention. But there is little incentive to put Biden on the forefront of daily news when Trump, Democrats believe, regularly makes the case against himself and Biden leads in the polls.
“They're doing the right thing by just sticking to their plan, rolling out their positions, and ignoring a lot of the noise that's going on out there right now,” Democratic strategist Jim Manley told the Washington Examiner. “I don't think they should be listening to the nervous Nellies out there and start chasing Trump all around.”
His style is so understated lately that journalists have started hinting annoyance that Biden is not participating in tough national interviews. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said on-air last month that Biden is due for more press exposure. Following a tense interview Trump did with Axios’s Jonathan Swan, several journalists questioned whether the campaign would allow Swan to interview Biden.
But for Biden, who is prone to long-winded answers and heated responses when challenged by reporters or voters, being unable to hold frequent in-person campaign events has helped him because his campaign is able to control the setting and participants in his “events” with little room for unplanned, unflattering moments.
Two instances of clumsiness from Biden this week prompted news cycles and demonstrated the risks of ridicule when Biden says the wrong thing. In an hourlong news interview with black and Latino journalists, Biden responded to a question about taking a mental acuity test by mock-asking the reporter if he was a “junkie,” and at another point, he stated that the Latino community has diverse attitudes, “unlike the African American community.” He later clarified on Twitter that he did not mean to suggest that black people are “a monolith.”
“Biden wants voters to think about this election as a referendum on Trump, not a choice between the two of them. That's why gaffes can be really damaging — not just because they raise questions about his own candidacy, but because they really distract from the campaign's strategy,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist for Firehouse Strategies.
An exception to the plan to lay low is that as Trump's attacks increase, Biden will have to address them more. This week, Biden issued a strong rebuke to Trump’s attacks on his Catholic faith.
“He needs to give swing voters reasons to vote for him and can't let Trump's attacks go ignored. But beyond that, his strategy seems to be working pretty well for him so far. As the attacks increase and swing voters focus on the election, I expect that we'll be seeing a lot more of him,” Conant said.
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