Jim VandeHei: Dems Are ‘Furious,’ Almost Nobody Wants Biden To Stay in the Race

BRZEZINSKI: “Your peace with Mike Allen for ‘Axios’ this morning for your behind the curtain column is entitled ‘Democrats rage at Biden rises.’ Explain what you’re hearing.”
VANDEHEI: “Yeah. I — I would say we’ve talked to literally dozens of House members, most of whom aren’t going to go on the record yet, the ones who are going to go on the record already have, they’re furious, like they’re just not buying it. Now, I would say they’re madder about the response to the debate than the debate itself. They can’t believe that he’s deflecting and saying it’s much ado about nothing. They can’t — they can’t believe he’s blaming staff for it. And now this idea that an 11 day jetlag would cause you to have a poor debate performance strikes them as a crazy explanation for it. In all, if you’re a member of Congress, to be honest, all you care about is your voters first and your donors second. Yeah, you like the president, if he helps you, but if he doesn’t, you will turn on him because you care about self-preservation. So they’re talking to donors, donors are furious. Voters are telling them what Lloyd Doggett’s voters are telling him, which is we want him to step aside. That’s why yesterday, we talked several people were on multiple calls with a lot of members and when there was either a show of hands, or hey, should he stay in, almost nobody said that he should stay in. They want Hakeem Jeffries, they want Chuck Schumer, the two Democratic leaders to go in and talk to him and have a very serious conversation about getting out of the race before the convention so they can have a messy but somewhat orderly transition to somebody else. They believe, and I think they’re right, that the Biden family and the Biden staff are trying to keep anybody who might make that case to Biden away from Biden. Now he started to make calls yesterday, you’re correct, but it took him a while. And there’s a lot of people in senior positions who love the man, love the president, they’ve been with them from the beginning, who want to have this gut check with him about whether or not he could not only lose the presidency, but cost them the House and Senate. You toss in that Supreme Court ruling and you have Democrats saying this could be an existential threat to our party, to our majorities, to the country in their own personal views.”