Did Dump Biden Democrats give the GOP an RNC free pass?
Rather than focus the party's complete attention on the MAGA madness in Milwaukee, influential Democrats have spent most of their political capital arm-twisting Joe Biden into ending his candidacy.
First Things First
Five nights after surviving an attempted assassination in rural western Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump will stand before thousands of delegates and political allies at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee this evening and accept his party’s nomination to be president for the third time in as many general election cycles.
The speech will bookend a four-day Republican National Convention that served as the backdrop for a muster of MAGA messengers to align itself on the side of union workers and law and order despite opposing pro-worker policies and propping up a convicted felon to the top of the GOP ticket. Speakers reinforced Trump’s isolationist foreign policy that critics say would encourage Chinese and Russian dictators to run roughshod through their respective regions and espoused anti-immigrant falsehoods to justify the former president’s plan to authorize a mass deportation operation if elected to a second term.
But you may not have known any of this from much of the coverage of this week’s news cycle, which has instead been dominated by sensational backroom details of an intensifying pressure campaign from the Democratic Party’s upper echelons to arm-twist President Joe Biden into withdrawing his candidacy for reelection.
With each passing evening of the RNC, congressional Democratic leaders released non-denials of reports of their maneuvers to shame Biden into passing a torch to, well, no one knows. Republicans have offered them gifts in the 900-page Project 2025 conservative policy manifesto and a vice-presidential nominee in Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who is seen as the heir apparent to the MAGA movement. (Project 2025 is so toxic that national Republicans have branded their official party platform as “Agenda 47” to further distance themselves from it.)
But Democrats are content to keep Biden’s feet to the fire instead of Trump and company’s, raising questions about whether they squandered an opportunity to shine a brighter light on the unpopular themes promoted during the RNC and within Project 2025 for which dozens of Democrats I spoke to for this report admit there are no easy answers.
A longtime operative with their ear to the ground told me it’s disingenuous to pretend that Biden’s age and health aren’t suppressing voter enthusiasm.
“But his polling is solid. His policies are popular individually with voters and we have no clear successor to him if he steps down today,” the operative said. “I absolutely believe we should have left him alone and focused on Project 2025, which is wildly unpopular with voters. I can’t imagine how much further ahead we’d be if we all spent the week focusing on that.”
However, DJ Koessler, a Democratic strategist and founder of Koessler Strategies, suggested it’s irresponsible to focus on Republicans without Democrats first getting their house in order.
“Democrats are running aggressive response operations, but the narrative around President Biden’s age has made it difficult to break through,” he told me this morning. “The more quickly we unite behind a winning ticket, the more quickly we can focus the race on Trump’s failed leadership, his criminal record and his dark vision for the country.”
A senior House Democratic aide told me this week was a missed opportunity but was unsure if it would do more damage than the party had already done to Biden after the debate.
A House Democrat agreed but didn’t think Republicans have benefitted that much.
“They haven’t really,” the member said. “We will at some point focus on their shit. And there is a lot of it to air.”
The left’s central theory of the case against a second Trump presidency is the threat he poses to American democracy. But Dump Biden Democrats have yet to persuasively explain how defying the 14 million voters who voted to the president in the primary, the Congressional Black Caucus and the 1,400 Black women who represent the most loyal bloc of Democrats and released a letter this afternoon in support for Biden and condemning the lack of party unity.
The resounding message I’ve heard from hundreds of Black voters since the first presidential debate that kicked off this political reckoning is that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former President Barack Obama should remove Biden at their peril.
“The leader we voted for has always put country before party and party before self,” Koessler said of Biden. “If he passes the torch out of service to his country, we should follow.”
As you can imagine, Biden campaign officials and Biden-aligned Hill Democrats have wanted no part of the palace intrigue and maintained as much message discipline as possible on the substance.
Quentin Fulks, the Biden deputy campaign director, said the upcoming election concerns Biden and Trump’s competing visions for the country, not their ages.
“And Project 2025 is a blueprint that Donald Trump himself has aligned and instructed people to put together for what his agenda would be and we think that the American people deserve to know that ahead of November,” he told reporters in Milwaukee this morning. “The Republican Party has bent the knee to this would-be dictator and will continue to do anything they can to give him what he wants because it benefits them politically. But they’re wrong. And our campaign is going to continue to make that case to the American people.”
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) warned that a second Trump presidency could be more disastrous because his allies would gut checks and balances to give him virtually unlimited power. He also questioned the notion that Republicans are unified around their nominee.
“What you see from Republicans isn’t unity. It's falling in line,” Padilla added. “Donald Trump has bent this political party to his will. They do not allow for dissent and that’s why you haven't heard it at the convention.”
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said it’s instructive for Americans to reflect on their lives four years ago as a reminder of what they were like under a Trump presidency.
“In Donald Trump’s America, he took away our rights, hurt [the] middle class and made life more expensive—all while benefiting his ultra-rich donors and greedy corporations,” she said. “And as he pursues his extreme Project 2025 agenda, we know a second Trump term would be worse. So yes, this November, we’re going to make America great again. And we’re going to do it by defeating Donald Trump at the ballot box in November and sending him back to Mar-a-Lago where he belongs.”
Then there’s Vice President Kamala Harris, who spent the day in Fayetteville, North Carolina, railing against Trump and Vance and what she called their extreme plans and divisive agenda.
“In recent days, they’ve been trying to portray themselves as the party of unity,” Harris said, picking up where Padilla, her Senate successor, left off. “You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are pushing an agenda that deprives whole groups of Americans of basic freedoms, opportunity and dignity. You cannot claim to be for unity if you fought to overturn a free and fair election.”
And with the political class wondering about her and her boss’s future, she outlined the stakes of the race.
“This here is the one. The most existential, consequential and important election of our lifetime,” Harris said to an enthusiastic crowd of 500 supporters. “We are not falling for the okie-doke.”
In the Know
President Biden is self-isolating in Delaware after testing positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday. Physician to the President Kevin O’Connor released an update this afternoon, saying he still had upper respiratory symptoms but did not have a fever. His vital signs are normal, and he continues to receive the antiviral drug Paxlovid. “He will continue to conduct the business of the American people,” O’Connor said.
House Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) released a report featuring insights on artificial intelligence, including concerns and optimism regarding generative AI—the technology that generates text, images, videos or other data using generative models often in response to prompts. The report is the culmination of six roundtables focused on identifying existing and growing AI use cases across the financial services and housing industries, including the range of benefits and potential risks the technology poses, and the hurdles to adopting the technology.
Two senior Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee asked the Labor Department to investigate the potential risk of child labor and workplace safety and health violations in youth workforce programs. Committee Ranking Member Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Workforce Protections Subcommittee Ranking Member Alma Adams (D-N.C.) specifically raised concerns about incidents in Department-approved programs authorized under the Workforce Innovation and Authorization Act and Work Experience and Career Explorations Programs as part of Committee Democrats’ ongoing investigation into the spike in child labor violations across the country.
The Biden administration announced it canceled $1.2 billion in student debt for 35,000 borrowers. The action results from fixes made to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which was created in 2007 to provide student loan debt relief to teachers, nurses, law enforcement officials, first responders and other public service workers. The administration has canceled $168.5 billion for nearly five million Americans since Biden took office, despite the Supreme Court overruling President Biden’s broader student loan cancelation program in 2023 and a recent push from Republican state attorneys general to block his backup program.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield announced $203 million in humanitarian assistance for people affected by the conflict in Sudan, including refugees and others who have fled neighboring countries. The northeastern African nation has seen nearly nine million people displaced in the aftermath of violent clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, with almost 18 million people facing acute food insecurity. In related news, the US Agency for International Development announced $69 million in humanitarian assistance for crisis-affected people in Chad, including more than 600,000 Sudanese refugees and 200,000 Chadians and returnees from Sudan who need protection and life-saving aid, including food, medicine and nutritional support.
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff hosted a roundtable this morning with religious leaders from 15 national faith-based organizations on interfaith coalition building. White House Office of Public Engagement Director Steve Benjamin and US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Rashad Hussain joined the second gentleman at the event, where he spoke about the administration’s work to combat hate and unify the nation. Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of a US president or vice president, has emerged as the administration’s highest-profile voice for religious diversity amid a rise in antisemitism and Christian white nationalism in America.
Make me smarter. Did I miss something in this post? Is there something else I should know? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch.
Friday Happenings
The House and Senate are out.
Second Gentleman Emhoff will travel to Scottsdale, Arizona, for a campaign event and Tempe, Arizona, to speak at a stop on the administration’s Investing in America tour. Emhoff will then tour the Valley Metro Streetcar Line before traveling to Phoenix to speak at another campaign event. In the evening, the second gentleman will attend the WNBA All-Star Weekend Skills Challenge and 3-Point Contest.
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