Biden’s strategy to turn the race around Trump is suddenly in question

From the beginning of President Biden’s re-election campaign, the plan was to make former President Donald J. Trump so unattractive that voters who were uncomfortable with the incumbent president would vote for him anyway.

But now Mr. Biden is stuck in a political tailspin, with a dismal debate performance underscoring his inability to make a case against Mr. Trump and prompting a collective national hand-wringing over his ability to do the job, while a growing number of Democrats in the House of Representatives say he should drop out of the race. To focus voters on the threats posed by a second Trump administration, Mr. Biden’s own allies say he must first escape his current doomsday scenario and convince voters — even, and especially, fellow Democrats — that he is up to the task himself.

“The focus has to shift back to Trump and what rights we lose if he is president,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, who ran against Biden for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. “The last three elections have shown us that if you are the focus, you lose.”

Biden’s campaign has long tried to put Trump front and center.

That’s why Biden kicked off this year with a blistering speech about Trump’s attempt to overturn the last election, why his allies spent millions to block the No Labels campaign, and why the president has put a spotlight on commemorations of abortion rights news.

And that’s why Biden’s top advisers thought it was a good idea to move the first debate from September to June — to give voters a one-on-one look at Biden and Trump that the president’s team thought would recalibrate the race, boost Biden’s flagging poll numbers and remind voters what would change if Trump were returned to power in January.

A memo prior to the debate by Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, mentioned Trump 18 times and Biden only five times. Of Trump’s record, Ms. O’Malley Dillon wrote that the president “will hold Donald Trump accountable for everything on the debate stage — and he’s raring to go.”

That did not happen.

Before that can happen, Mr. Biden must first dispel doubts about himself, a task his team waited more than a week after the debate to make a full-throated attempt at. When it did, during Friday’s interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Biden drew a television audience one-sixth the size of the debate and spent nearly the entire 22 minutes parrying questions about his fitness for office.

“Trump is a deeply flawed candidate,” said David Axelrod, a longtime skeptic of Biden’s ability to run a presidential campaign at age 81. “It’s going to be very difficult for the Biden campaign to focus on him now.”

There is no doubt in Democratic circles that Biden must make the election about Trump, as he did in 2020, when his winning coalition consisted of progressive Democrats and moderate Republicans.

As Mr. Biden gained support from Republicans and other voters seeking a return to normalcy in Washington, he ran as a transition candidate. He said he saw himself “as a bridge, not as anything else” as he stood alongside Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, giving the clear impression that he was a vessel to move the country forward after the Trump era.

Four years later, polls show that 74 percent of voters believe Biden is too old to be president again.

“People are convinced this isn’t going to work for him, and I don’t see any way back,” said John R. Kasich, the former Ohio governor who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and crossed party lines to endorse Biden in 2020. “To run a campaign against Trump, people think, ‘We’ve got to move on.’”

Democrats who turned to Sunday’s political talk shows were confronted with a flood of questions about Biden’s fitness for office.

Rep. Debbie Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who sounded a warning about Hillary Clinton’s weakness among working-class voters in her state not noticed in 2016appeared irritated on CNN.

“We need to stop talking about this,” Ms. Dingell said. “We need to start talking about Donald Trump again.”

Senator Chris Murphy indicated during his own appearance on CNN that Biden was running out of time.

“They need to see more from the president,” he said. “I hope we see that this week.”

There is some evidence that the black voters who propelled Biden to his 2020 primary victory have not yet abandoned him. Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, said her group’s post-debate polls showed support for Biden increased among black voters who watched the debate. But among black voters who didn’t watch the debate and weren’t covered, support dropped.

Biden visited one of Philadelphia’s largest black churches on Sunday to convince voters there that he can do the job.

“The joy comes in the morning,” Mr. Biden told churchgoers. “You have never given up. In my life, and as your president, I have tried to walk my faith.”

Even Biden’s most loyal supporters say Democrats will lose the election if it remains a referendum on Biden’s ability to serve.

“My goal is to defeat Trump,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, who was one of the Biden campaign’s surrogates, said after the debate. “Those calling for him to resign and those calling for him to stay are united in the fear of MAGA.”

As questions have surfaced about Biden’s acumen and elected Democrats have begun calling for him to step aside, the president’s campaign has focused attention on Trump’s own debate comment about “black jobs” and the Supreme Court’s decision to grant him some immunity from prosecution for his actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

On Friday, Biden’s campaign sought to bolster Trump’s effort to distance itself from Project 2025, the effort by Trump allies and the Heritage Foundation to write policies to be implemented if Trump takes office again.

“Trump wants to take away more fundamental freedoms, ban abortion, rule like a dictator, round up and deport Latinos, and use his new Supreme Court powers to punish, harm, and potentially imprison his enemies,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “Joe Biden doesn’t want that. This election is about Donald Trump and the threat he poses to the United States of America.”

To get voters to focus on the dangers of a Trump victory, however, Biden and his team will need to go a step further than what is a low hurdle for most candidates: demonstrating that they have the basic fitness to hold office.

“It’s been clear from the beginning that Biden and the Democrats need to make this election a choice, not a referendum on the president,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, the Democratic think tank that has led efforts to prevent independent and third-party candidates from trying to steal votes from Biden. “That means focusing voters’ attention on Trump’s criminality, chaos and cruelty. Once we emerge from this period of uncertainty, the party needs to pursue that cause full-time.”