Axios has a report out this morning that details how veterans of the Obama and Clinton administrations are now at war with Joe Biden to try and get him to withdraw from the race for president.
This group actually calls themselves the unofficial Committee to Unelect the President and they are taking the fight to Biden in a very public way.
Here’s more from Axios:
President Biden beat back the initial public campaign by Democrats to oust him from the party’s presidential ticket, swiftly and decisively. But very-connected Democrats, mostly veterans of the Obama and Clinton administrations, are plotting hourly to get him to withdraw quickly.
- They’re commissioning polls, lobbying former presidents, back-channeling Democratic leaders, organizing donors and taking the fight to Biden in a very public way.
- They’re the unofficial Committee to Unelect the President. The mission: Push Biden out of the presidential race — the sooner, the better.
This loose anti-Biden network is growing by the day — and is circulating polls showing Democrats would shoot from sure losers to big winners with a new ticket. Some donors are talking of a massive financial commitment to any non-Biden presidential ticket.
- These Democrats see the race in stark, black-and-white terms: Just three states matter — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That’s the Blue Wall, all of which Biden won in 2020.
- And they see an obvious solution: Forget the niceties of backing Biden or even Vice President Harris. Be ruthless about finding the two people most likely to win those three states.
The anti-Biden Democrats are trading texts, emails and polling, fighting fellow Democrats on TV and X, and circulating stories and arguments by sympathetic journalists and columnists, including Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias.
- Many are in conversation with lawmakers to push their leaders to squeeze Biden and his inner circle. They know Biden and his family seem unmovable — so they hope for the use of overwhelming force by the Obamas + Clintons + Schumer + Jeffries + Pelosi.
Members of this notional committee tell us there’s no hidden hand — no command and control. Instead, these are all people who’ve worked together on past campaigns.
- “No one is more than one person away from everyone else,” a central player told us. And almost all are one step away from former presidents Obama or Clinton.
No one’s sure the pressure campaign is working. It all depends on Biden, who controls the party’s delegates and cannot be defeated for the nomination if he stays in — no matter how bleak the outlook for November.
A “fatalism” and “sense of resignation” grip the party from coast to coast. “The Clinton diaspora is freaking the hell out,” said one alumnus of Clinton’s White House. “But all these people going on the record aren’t helping. All it seems to have done is cause the Bidens to dig in deeper.”
- In what one operative called a “donor strike,” top party benefactors — who don’t want to be named, because they know a donor-led revolt would backfire — are moving money away from Biden, and into House and Senate campaigns as a hedge against a victory by former President Trump.
They report that not only is this behind-the-scenes war against Biden in full throttle, but his own aides are leaking to try and convince him to drop out:
Biden aides busily leaking: “Some longtime aides and advisers to President Biden,” the N.Y. Times reports, “have become increasingly convinced that he will have to step aside from the campaign, and in recent days they have been trying to come up with ways to persuade him that he should.”
This is a tremendous pressure campaign but will it work? It seems unlikely now but we’ll see what happens before the DNC gets here next month.