Wednesday was supposed to be the return to business as usual for Joe Biden’s camp. Instead, it was a return to the new normal for Democrats: the rising din of infighting that threatens to drown out everything else.
“You want to know when this ends?” a House Democrat asked NOTUS on Wednesday. “When the six people Joe Biden has been talking to since the debate stop ignoring everything outside the room they’ve been locked in. When that changes, the dam breaks.”
Wednesday evening, Jonathan Karl of ABC News reported that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had a “blunt one-on-one conversation with Biden” on Saturday, in which Schumer “forcefully made the case” that Biden should step aside.
Schumer’s office wouldn’t comment on the specifics of the conversation, but — ominously — they said Schumer “conveyed the views of his caucus.”
In the afternoon, Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic nominee for Senate in California, became the 20th congressional Democrat to publicly say Biden should leave the race. After years of taking on the Trump administration, Schiff has a national profile with Democrats, and his call for Biden to quit was a loud signal that Democratic worries about their likely presidential nominee aren’t going away.
A Biden campaign official pointed to the president’s numerous statements that he is not dropping out and provided a list of around a dozen lawmakers the Biden campaign considers supportive of that stance. One is California Sen. Alex Padilla, whom Schiff is running to serve with.
But the Schiff statement was just one of the still-burning brush fires the Biden campaign is trying to put out, as it tries to direct attention to the Republican agenda being outlined in Milwaukee. The situation was only complicated further Wednesday night when the White House announced Biden had COVID-19, which will hamper his ability to campaign and the energy he has to combat the flames engulfing his nomination.
And still, earlier Wednesday, Democratic National Committee leaders decided to move ahead with a virtual roll call vote that would solidify Biden as the nominee a couple of weeks before the party’s Aug. 19 convention starts, a source confirmed to NOTUS.
The DNC has not announced a date for the online nomination, but the group signaled it would at least be after Aug. 1.
No date for the roll call vote has actually ever been formally announced, but reporting that suggested it would be as early as next week wreaked havoc on the Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill.
Some Democrats continue to believe the Republican-controlled Ohio Legislature could keep any Democratic nominee off that state’s November ballots if Democrats don’t make their selection by Aug. 7, Ohio’s certification deadline. (The state passed a law moving the date to accommodate the Democratic convention, but DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said this week he doesn’t have faith in it.)
Jeri Shepherd, a DNC member who still supports Biden, sympathized with the frustrations of House Democrats given that, in her opinion, the DNC hasn’t been transparent with the mechanics of the nomination process. “They like to do things and present it to everyone as ‘This is what we’ve done, and all you have to do is ratify it,’” Shepherd said of the DNC.
“I get that some of the people who are working on the stuff, they do the stuff 24/7. But I invite them to realize it’s not working for the particular moment,” she added.
The DNC’s rules and bylaws committee is scheduled to meet on Friday to discuss how a virtual voting process would work. DNC members aren’t expecting a raucous meeting, one person with knowledge said.
“These are serious people,” this person said of the rules committee members. Instead, the meeting will be used, at least in part, to go over the reasons why leadership believes it’s necessary to hold a virtual roll call.
For now, the August vote timeline seems to have quieted some of the growing opposition to the virtual roll call. A letter that was passed around among Democratic lawmakers on the Hill, expressing dismay at the virtual roll call timing, is not being sent.
“This conversation’s not over, but [the DNC] basically said yes to what we were asking,” Rep. Jared Huffman, who was leading the letter, told NOTUS on Wednesday. “That’s why we took it down.”
“For now,” he added.
On Tuesday, Huffman told NOTUS that the letter had “very substantial” support and that the number of signers was growing.
While the letter was simply calling on the DNC not to hold a roll call vote before the convention, some lawmakers on Capitol Hill thought it was about to become a de facto list of Democrats with reservations about Biden being the nominee. The letter was also expected to have many more than the 20 or so Democrats who have publicly called on Biden to step aside — and provide reporters with a playbook on which Democrats to ask about the president.
Huffman holding back the letter was a welcome sight for the White House, though it also allows the Democrats who maintain that Biden privately faces large-scale opposition among congressional Democrats to not reveal exactly how much opposition — and who — he faces.
DNC members also welcomed the vote delay, confident that it allows the party to hash out its issues with the composition of the ticket, end the intraparty fighting once and for all, and, for one member, allow Biden to formally and directly make the case for himself among Democrats.
“Thought is, if we have more time to delay things — since we don’t have to do it next week or anything like that — we’ve got a little bit more time to have full information, to hear from the president, and for us to feel that he is going to be our standard-bearer and be able to basically beat Trump at the ballot box,” Shepherd said of the “organic” conversations that need to happen so as not to “browbeat” the party.
Starting Saturday night, after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, Biden doubters in the Democratic Party largely steered clear of him as he took on the presidential duties of addressing a shocked nation. Some Democrats have speculated — or hoped — that the shooting might be the end of the debate over Biden’s future. But how true that is likely won’t be clear until next week, when lawmakers return to Washington to face more questions about the future of the Democratic ticket.
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is ramping back up too, focusing as much as it can on Trump and his new VP nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
On Wednesday morning, ahead of Vance’s speech to Republican delegates, Democrats hosted a press conference in Milwaukee, trying to put a focus on Vance’s record of strict opposition to abortion rights.
It wasn’t long before the questions and conversation turned to Biden instead.
—
Matt Fuller, who is Capitol Hill bureau chief at NOTUS, contributed to this report.