Democrat donors threaten to drag plug if Biden does not resign

Growing Democratic uproar over President Joe Biden‘s shockingly feeble debate performance on Thursday night appears to be turning into a full-blown party revolt.

‘For Biden’s own good and the good of the country, he should step aside immediately,’ major Democratic donor and former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson told DailyMail.com. ‘The fact that it has now been three days and Biden has done nothing to reassure us confirms my worst fears.’

Tilson has given the party more than $300,000 in recent years.

Days after the President struggled to hold his train of thought and tailed off mid-answer into incomprehensible gibberish during the CNN debate, left-wing benefactors are still up in arms.

On Saturday, Biden appeared at a New York fundraiser — in a glitzy Long Island beach town — and, according to one attendee, read a simple 15-minute speech off a teleprompter, before leaving without taking any questions.

‘Doing that for the next five months is not going to be enough,’ the fundraiser guest said, stressing that Biden’s understandably anxious supporters deserve reassurance that he is capable of defeating Donald Trump in November.

But later on Saturday night, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison and Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez only further stoked concerns on a conference call with wavering DNC members.

‘The call was akin to a rah-rah speech,’ said John Verdejo, a party member from North Carolina who told the Mail he was surprised when call organizers failed to address the ‘elephant in the room’, namely Biden’s inability to speak clearly.

Other DNC members went even further than Verdejo in their criticisms. Some said that they felt ‘gaslighted’ by campaign officials on the call who seemed to deny that there was anything to be concerned about. The official Team Biden line appears to be: Nothing to see here.

‘On every metric that matters, data shows [the debate] did nothing to change the American people’s perception,’ Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, insisted in a memo released this weekend.

Hardly anyone believes that spin.

‘The data!?’ tweeted Mike LaRosa, former Press Secretary to First Lady Jill Biden. ‘If there is data that counters the impact of what we all saw then WHERE THE HELL IS IT???’

Democrat donor Whitney Tilson similarly didn’t his mince words.

‘They’re p***ing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. It’s insulting. How stupid do they think we are?’

In fact, a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted over the two days following the CNN debate found that 72 percent of registered voters now do not believe that Biden has the ‘mental and cognitive health to serve as president’. That number is up from 65 percent in early June.

On Monday morning, Biden was still holed up in Camp David with his family, who had collected for a post-debate photoshoot with famed celebrity snapper Annie Leibovitz. 

He didn’t return to the White House until late Monday evening, when he made brief remarks about the day’s Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, before leaving the podium without taking questions.

One reporter could be heard shouting: ‘Are you going to drop out?’

Biden’s apparent lack of urgency in addressing the party panic’s is even now raising alarm among Democratic lawmakers, who fear Biden’s stumbles may end up hurting their own electoral prospects.

‘Everyone is waiting to see what the president is going to do and say,’ one House member said. ‘I think the president himself needs to be doing some major reach-out to Congressional leaders.’

An aide to a House Democrat who faces a competitive Republican challenger in November re-iterated those concerns and told the Mail that there are real worries that dissatisfaction with Biden will depress voter turnout overall.

According to Brett Bruen, a former Obama White House adviser, this widening Democrat dread is entirely predictable. 

‘The donors are the canaries in the political coal mine,’ he said. ‘As polls in the last day have indicated, there are reverberations from Biden’s performance up and down the ticket.’

‘The notion that it gets messy if Biden steps aside overlooks the fact that it’s already a big freaking mess,’ he added.

Perhaps, the biggest challenge facing the party is that even if the President stepped aside, there would be no obvious replacement candidate or clear path forward.

Whitney Tilson’s prescription for Biden, then, is to ditch the notecards, teleprompters and vetted questions, and demonstrate that he is up to the job by holding weekly news conferences, or sitting down with the New York Times editorial board to persuade them that it was wrong to call for him to quit the race.

‘It’s absolutely a sensible strategy,’ said former Obama adviser Bruen. That is, he added, if Biden doesn’t suffer another major public misstep.

‘There is a significant amount of anxiety among Biden’s advisers that one more senior moment could ratchet up the already significant pressure amongst Democrats for the president to drop out,’ he said.

That’s to say nothing of the unprecedented challenge of swapping out a presumptive major party candidate seven weeks away from a nominating convention and four months from a general election.

The most discouraging news for those who want Biden to bow out came from Chavez Rodriguez on Saturday. She claimed that if Biden were to step aside then only Vice President Kamala Harris would be able to use the funds raised by his campaign.

The $91.2 million collected by the Biden-Harris ticket as of May 31 is not transferrable to any other candidate, according to Federal Election Commission rules. So perhaps the party would find it’s hands tied.

A distressing thought, indeed, for party officials who well know that Harris has routinely polled as the most unpopular VP in history.

As one exasperated senior figure observed: ‘The irony is that anybody but Kamala Harris would have a better-than-even chance of beating Donald Trump!’