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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
Joe Biden is looking to formally lock up the Democratic nomination with a virtual vote well before the party convention next month, in a bid to quash the internal critics of his candidacy as he shifts his attacks on Donald Trump.
The assassination attempt against Trump over the weekend has frozen much of the public debate among Democrats over whether Biden should quit the race in favour of a younger and more energetic nominee.
It has also forced Biden to tone down one of his most frequent lines of attack labelling his Republican rival a threat to American democracy, for fear that it would be criticised at a sensitive time as fuelling the type of political violence that nearly killed his rival.
But Biden and his campaign have signalled they would keep attacking Trump and his running mate JD Vance on policy, as they dig in against internal critics of the president’s candidacy.
“Donald Trump’s Republican Party will always choose big, greedy, anti-union extremists over the working men and women of America,” Quentin Fulks, a senior Biden campaign official, told reporters on the sidelines of the Republican convention in Milwaukee on Tuesday.
Democrats’ dismay with Biden after his disastrous debate performance against Trump last month is still simmering beneath the surface and could rear its head again once the Republican convention ends.
Party officials backing Biden and his campaign are pushing to hold a virtual vote later this month in order to formally nominate him for president, which would help silence the critics and prevent a fight during the mid-August convention in Chicago.
But the plans are facing a backlash from some Democrats on Capitol Hill.
“Stifling debate and prematurely shutting down any possible change in the Democratic ticket through an unnecessary and unprecedented ‘virtual roll call’ in the days ahead is a terrible idea,” House Democrats have written in a draft letter to members of the Democratic National Committee that is being circulated but has not been released publicly.
“It could deeply undermine the morale and unity of Democrats — from delegates, volunteers, grassroots organisers and donors to ordinary voters — at the worst possible time,” said the letter, which was obtained by the Financial Times.
Biden has repeatedly said he does not intend to bow out of the race, despite trailing Trump by 2 percentage points nationally, according to the average by pollster Fivethirtyeight.com.
The 81-year-old president has instead ramped up his campaigning and his public appearances, including television interviews and a news conference, in an effort to counter doubts about his physical and mental fitness to campaign for the White House and serve for another four years.
“I’m only three years older than [Donald] Trump, number one. And number two, my mental acuity has been pretty damn good,” he told NBC during a testy interview on Monday night.
Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist, said that although there was still some “chirping out there” about Biden’s ability to lead the Democratic ticket against Trump, the opposition to the president was now on the back foot.
“The coup d’état has fizzled at the reality that the base of the Democratic party is not with them,” he said.
During the interview with NBC, Biden acknowledged that he had made a “mistake” when he had privately told allies to put Trump in the “bullseye” last week ahead of the assassination attempt — a comment that was widely seized on the right as fomenting violence against the former president.
But campaign officials that say that even though Biden has called for a cooling of the political rhetoric, he will not completely abandon the argument that Trump represents a danger for democratic institutions and freedoms in the US.
“Democrats up and down the ballot have been gracious,” Belcher said, but the “overarching” theme of Trump as a danger to key American freedoms and rights was “not going to be kept in a box”.
On Tuesday Biden was in the western battleground state of Nevada, where Trump has opened a significant polling lead, to speak to members of the NAACP, an African-American civil rights organisation.
The president has been trying to consolidate his support among black voters, a traditional bastion of strength for Democrats that has shown signs of slipping this year.
“It’s important for the American people to hear directly from him what he has done in the last three and a half years and how he sees the future of this country. That will not change,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday.