Washington.- Under siege from fellow Democrats, President Biden’s campaign is quietly testing Vice President Kamala Harris’s strength against former President Donald J. Trump in a head-to-head poll of voters, as Mr. Biden fights for his political future with a high-stakes news conference on Thursday.
The poll, which is being conducted this week and was commissioned by the Biden campaign’s analytics team, is believed to be the first time since the debate that Mr. Biden’s aides have tried to gauge how the vice president would fare as the front-runner, according to three people briefed on the matter who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.
They did not specify why the poll was being conducted or what the campaign planned to do with the results. It could be interpreted as the team gathering information to make the case to the president that his path forward is slim, or to argue that Biden remains his party’s strongest standard-bearer.
The effort comes as some former Biden aides and advisers are increasingly convinced that he will have to step away from the campaign, and in recent days have been trying to find ways to persuade him that he should, The New York Times reported Thursday. A growing number of prominent lawmakers have called on Biden to leave the campaign or suggested he reconsider his plans to run.
While some of Biden’s top advisers have quietly argued that Harris could not win the election, donors and other outside supporters of the vice president believe she could be in a stronger position after the debate — and could be a more forceful communicator of the party’s message.
In a memo sent to campaign staff Thursday, Biden campaign chairwoman Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and his campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, wrote of a “path forward.”
“Aside from what we believe to be a clear path forward for us, there is also no indication that anyone else would outperform the president against Trump,” they wrote. “Hypothetical polls about alternative candidates will always be unreliable, and polls do not take into account the negative media environment that any Democratic candidate will encounter. The only Democratic candidate for whom this is already cooked up is President Biden.”
The memo also appeared to acknowledge an erosion of Biden’s support.
“The movement we have seen, while real, is not a radical change in the state of the race,” the note says.
As the White House and Biden’s campaign try to project a unified front, some of his supporters are engaged in a stark assessment of who should lead the ticket.
Biden’s political future will hinge in part on his performance during Thursday’s news conference at the NATO summit in Washington at 6:30 p.m., which lawmakers, party officials and donors have said they will watch closely. It will be his longest unscripted appearance since his halting performance in the debate two weeks ago.
Ahead of the news conference, Biden is sending some of his top aides — Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon and O’Malley Dillon are expected to go — to Capitol Hill to calm nervous Democratic senators who have begun to break ranks. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado has predicted that Biden will lose and hurt Democrats deeply in the last election. And Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont on Wednesday night became the first senator to explicitly call on Biden to drop out.
Much of the focus is on Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who has said publicly that he is “with Joe” but has privately signaled, as Axios reported on Wednesday, that he is open to a non-Biden-led ticket. In a statement provided after that article was published, Mr. Schumer said: “As I have repeatedly made clear publicly and privately, I support President Biden and remain committed to ensuring that Donald Trump is defeated in November.”
A person who spoke directly to Mr. Schumer last weekend, who discussed the conversation on condition of anonymity to protect the relationship, said the majority leader was looking for a way to find a different nominee while still keeping Mr. Biden in mind.
So far, much of the discontent has been expressed in similarly private and vague ways. On Thursday morning, the Democracy Alliance, a powerful network of big liberal donors, released a memo to its members stressing its commitment to funding House elections in what Pamela Shifman, the group’s president, called a “difficult time.” The memo did not mention Biden directly, but alluded to the fact that he could lose.
“The House is a bulwark against authoritarianism and our insurance policy against Project 2025,” Ms. Shifman wrote, referring to far-reaching policy plans by Mr. Trump’s allies. “We cannot be caught flat-footed as we were eight years ago. After 2016, it would be malpractice for us not to have a plan in place for the worst to happen.”
The president’s team had been feeling upbeat earlier in the week, after a strong push on Monday to silence his Democratic critics, which included an open letter to Congress, a cable news call, a presidential appearance on a call of major donors and a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.
But any progress in moving past the debate was wiped out early Wednesday when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Biden had yet to make a decision on whether to run, nearly a week after he told Democratic governors and ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos that he was still in the race.
Ms. Pelosi delivered her message — hinting that Mr. Biden might reconsider his candidacy — on “Morning Joe,” the MSNBC show that Mr. Biden typically watches while awake. It was the same show the president had called into for an interview on Monday to declare he was committed to running.
Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, are seen as three of the most influential figures in the debate over whether Mr. Biden should step aside.
The question of what might come next if she drops out has convulsed the Democratic Party and shaped the conversation about what to do. Many in the party have doubted Ms. Harris’s ability to unite a broad enough coalition to defeat Mr. Trump in November.
While the Biden campaign is plagued by aides terrified of Biden’s policy standing, the president has struck an upbeat tone in his conversations with Democratic donors and elected officials, blaming “elites” in the party and the media for the anxiety.
Since the debate, Biden’s inner circle has been reduced to his family and a very small group of his closest aides, who have surrounded the president. It is unclear to what extent Biden has been informed of his falling standing among Democrats.
Harris has been careful to demonstrate her total loyalty to Biden’s candidacy. But outside supporters of her candidacy have been quietly and carefully floating the idea that she could be a stronger contender against Mr. Trump, with some even going so far as to suggest possible running mates for the vice president.
This week, strategists and donors supporting Harris released a polling presentation assessing her strength among younger voters and showing that two in three Democratic voters in battleground states supported Harris as the nominee if Biden dropped out.
Some of Biden’s aides have privately expressed skepticism about Harris’ ability to win the election.
Shortly after the debate, Biden campaign chairwoman O’Malley Dillon and his White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients, met with a group of anti-Trump Republicans at a hotel near the White House. The meeting had been planned weeks before the debate, but the two Biden advisers were met with pleas from some in the room for Mr. Biden to leave after his poor performance on stage. Mr. Biden’s advisers said the conversation was unsuccessful.
When some Republicans suggested that Democrats had other options among the party’s governors, Ms. O’Malley Dillon said the choices were Mr. Biden or, if he dropped out, Ms. Harris, and indicated that the discussion was a waste of time, according to a person briefed on what was said.
“Jen was clear: the 2024 nominee is President Biden and Vice President Harris,” said Kevin Muñoz, a spokesman for Biden’s campaign.
Another person who was briefed on the meeting, and who recounted the discussion about Ms. Harris, said the implication some took was that Mr. Biden’s advisers did not think she would do better than the president.
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