(Headline USA) President Joe Biden’s team is reportedly warning top donors and establishment allies that there is no back-up plan to his reelection bid, even as he loses ground to former President Donald Trump in the polls.
“The bad news is that everybody is wetting the bed inside of Biden world,” one fundraiser told the Washington Post. “It’s really an unhappy confluence of Biden world donors’ cocktail party friends saying ‘Can’t you get him not to run,’ which is stupid and absurd if you know Joe Biden.”
The news of creeping panic within the Democratic establishment comes after several polls show Biden losing to Trump in a hypothetical general election.
The latest poll from NBC News shows Biden losing to Trump for the first time in NBC’s polling history, according to the Western Journal.
It shows Trump edging out a slim lead over Biden—46% to 44%—even beating him among younger voters.
At a private conference in late September hosted by Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel (brother of former Obama chief of staff and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel), one attendee reportedly asked if there were other candidates Democrats should consider.
Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain quickly fired back, arguing that there was no Plan B and that the party had no choice but to support the incumbent.
Six weeks later, at another private event featuring Biden’s campaign, attendees complained that former President Barack Obama wasn’t doing enough to boost Biden.
“The takeaway of the weekend was not, ‘Hey team, we’ve got to get the band back together to help Biden out,’” one attendee said. “If this a supposedly existential threat and democracy is so challenged, then why aren’t you being more overt about it?”
Several high-profile Democratic figures have already come out against Biden’s reelection bid. Strategist David Axelrod, who helped pioneer Obama’s 2008 victory, has warned that Biden has a “50–50 shot” at beating Trump, but “no better than that, maybe a little worse.”
Some, however, speculate that Biden may already know he’s functioning as a placeholder and that the Democratic National Committee plans a bait-and-switch during or after their convention next August that will disarm Republican opponents at the last minute, giving them and the public at large little time to vet the new candidate.
According to DNC rules, if Biden were to drop out after he has received the nomination, the committee elites would be empowered to bypass voters altogether and select a nominee of their own choosing.
