On a day filled with bad news for President Joe Biden — including collapsing poll numbers and a report that he tested positive for COVID — not a single prominent New Hampshire Democrat publicly expressed support for their party’s nominee.
Biden’s bad day began with a new University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll showing 59 percent of Granite State voters think Biden should drop out of the race for the White House. That includes a majority (56 percent) of local Democrats.
And while Biden won New Hampshire by about eight points in 2020, the UNH Survey found a mere 31 percent of the state’s voters believe he is “mentally and physically capable of fulfilling his duties as president.” A slim 55 percent of New Hampshire Democrats believe he is up for the job.
Their top choice if Biden gets bumped? Vice President Kamala Harris (45 percent), followed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (11 percent) and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (10 percent).
About an hour later, the Associated Press released a national AP-NORC poll showing that a whopping 70 percent of Americans—and 65 percent of Democrats—want Biden to withdraw and allow Democrats to pick a new nominee. And 70 percent also said they aren’t confident Biden has the mental capacity to serve as an effective president.
Around the same time, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a close ally of power broker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), publicly said Biden should step down.
“While the choice to withdraw from the campaign is President Biden’s alone, I believe it is time for him to pass the torch,” said Schiff, who’s running for U.S. Senate. “And in doing so, secure his legacy of leadership by allowing us to defeat Donald Trump in the upcoming election.”
D.C. insiders in both parties believe it is extremely unlikely Schiff would have gone public without Pelosi’s tacit support.
“When you see Adam Schiff doing this, it’s not Schiff — it’s Nancy Pelosi,” former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told Fox News Wednesday night.
The news was so bad for Biden, even Republican Gov. Chris Sununu was expressing his sympathy.
“I feel bad for Joe Biden, I really do,” Sununu told radio host Jack Heath. “We’ve all seen people in decline. Whoever is advising this poor old guy, it’s terrible. This is going to be his legacy: Driving the Democratic Party into the ground.”
But while the Republican governor was willing to speak out about Biden’s candidacy, New Hampshire Democrats went completely silent. NHJournal made dozens of requests for comment from prominent elected New Hampshire Democrats and political activists, but not one would say on the record that they supported Biden’s continued candidacy. Among the “no comments” were both Democrats running for governor (Joyce Craig and Cinde Warmington) and all three Democrats running for Congress (Maggie Goodlander, Colin Van Ostern and Rep. Chris Pappas).
There is also no mention of Biden’s candidacy in the social media feeds of any of the state’s top elected officials or candidates.
This silence is particularly notable from Goodlander and Van Ostern, the two Democrats running in the Second Congressional District. Van Ostern was a leader in the Write in Biden effort, urging his fellow Granite Staters to back an 81-year-old Biden he refuses to publicly support today. And Goodlander’s husband is Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, who meets with Biden on an almost daily basis. As a result, she has almost certainly been aware of the president’s mental and physical infirmity for some time.
The last time a Granite State Democrat made a public statement of support for Biden’s candidacy was a week ago when Sen. Maggie Hassan told reporters, “I have continued to support the president. This is a really strong campaign. Here’s President Biden, one of the most successful presidents — perhaps the most successful president — in my lifetime.”
Hassan would not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday, and her social media feed has no mention of Biden since his disastrous June 27 debate. The same with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, though she did give a shoutout to “National Ice Cream Day” in her social media on Tuesday.
But while Granite State Democrats have remained silent, national Democrats continue to speak. Late Wednesday came a report from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “had a blunt one-on-one conversation with Biden Saturday afternoon in Rehoboth. Schumer forcefully made the case that it would be best if Biden bowed out of the race.”
And, Karl added, the top Democrat in the House, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) “has expressed a similar view to Biden, according to a source familiar.”
If that wasn’t enough, top donor and Biden advisor Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul, warned the president Wednesday that big dollar donors were ready to bolt.
“Katzenberg told the president that major donors, doubtful of his ability to win in November, have all but stopped writing the kind of big checks that sustain campaigns in the home stretch,” Semafor reported.
New Hampshire Democrats have played an outsized role in the Biden story. When the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee stripped New Hampshire of its First in the Nation presidential primary status, state party leaders like Chairman Ray Buckley and Shaheen didn’t fight back. Instead, they supported an effort to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to mount a “Write in Biden” campaign. That campaign allowed Biden to stay off the campaign trail and avoid scrutiny of his stamina and acuity. It also ensured he would avoid the embarrassment of a poor showing in a primary he refused to acknowledge.
It has been 310 days since Biden last held a lead over Trump in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
