President Biden’s top campaign manager will hold a key conference call with donors on Monday to convince them that Biden can still win the race against former President Donald J. Trump.
The call with the National Finance Commission, hastily scheduled for Sunday, is the Biden campaign’s most formal attempt yet to curb panic within the ranks of major donors since Thursday’s debate.
Some individual donors have received direct communications from campaign officials, and Biden fundraisers say communications increased over the weekend, according to people close to the conversations. Monday’s call will be hosted by Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair.
Maintaining the donor base will be crucial to the president’s case for staying in the race, many of Biden’s allies have acknowledged.
Mr. Biden huddled out of sight at Camp David on Monday morning, while his team remained dogged, vowing to stay in the race despite last week’s debacle. He plans to return to the White House on Monday night.
Family members and friends throughout the weekend urged Biden to keep fighting, even as some Democrats and others called on him to step aside. At the White House and during the campaign, aides tried to continue as usual with press releases about student loans and the president’s overtime policies.
But the week promised to be anything but ‘business as usual’.
Mr Biden and his campaign staff are bracing for opinion polls this week that could show whether the shaky and inconsistent debate performance has eroded his support, with less than five months to go before Election Day.
Mr. Biden and his advisers discussed this weekend whether the president should find a forum to personally respond to the fallout from the debate, by holding a news conference or conducting interviews. But both options carry political risks and no decision had been made as of Monday morning.
His campaign on Monday released its first television ad since the debate, in which Biden takes aim at his rival and says Trump repeatedly lied during the debate.
“Did you see Trump last night?” the president says during his speech in North Carolina the day after the debate. “I honestly mean this — the most lies told in one debate. He lied about the great economy he created. He lied about the pandemic that he botched.”
The commercial ends with the president saying, “I know, like millions of Americans, that when you get knocked down, you get back up.”
During those remarks on Friday, Mr. Biden delivered a speak more forcefully and in a more disciplined manner at the North Carolina meeting. Some of his political allies have said they hope for more such demonstrations to show that the president still has the strength to serve as president for the next five years.
“He’s got to be extraordinarily aggressive — much more aggressive than he’s been in speaking out publicly,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way, a Democratic think tank. “Doing town hall meetings with voters. Doing sit-downs with reporters. Doing television interviews. Doing press conferences. He’s got to prove that this was a bad night and not a pattern.”
But the president’s schedule for the coming week suggests he won’t be following that advice. Instead, he’ll be working a three-day week in the White House, with few events and no campaign rallies.
On Tuesday, he is scheduled to receive a briefing on extreme weather events and participate in a private campaign fundraiser. On Wednesday, he will hold a Medal of Honor ceremony. And on Thursday, he will celebrate the Fourth of July with members of the military.
He has no events planned at the White House on Friday, when he returns to his home in Wilmington, Del.
