‘Obama Bros’ Vent on Biden’s Internal Polls, Mindset Before He Quit the Race
Former Obama aide: “Joe Biden’s decision to run for president again was a catastrophic mistake. It just was.”
Pod Save America is a daily political podcast co-hosted by former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor. On Friday, the group, better known as the “Obama bros,” provided a glimpse into what was happening behind the scenes in the weeks between President Joe Biden’s devastating debate with President-elect Donald Trump and the day he announced his exit from the race.
The most interesting takeaway came from Favreau, who said the Biden campaign’s internal polls showed him losing to Trump by 400 electoral votes. Despite those brutal numbers and growing pressure from Democratic Party leaders and the legacy media, Biden refused to give up the nomination.
In the clip below, Favreau explained:
He [Biden] and his inner circle, they refused to believe the polls. They refused to believe he was unpopular. They refused to acknowledge until very late that anyone could be upset about inflation. And they just kept telling us that his presidency was historic. It was the greatest economy ever.
Clearly, 70, 80 percent of voters don’t believe that. … And then, after the debate, the Biden people told us that the polls were fine. And Biden was the strongest candidate.
They were privately telling reporters at the time that Kamala Harris couldn’t win. So, they were shivving Kamala Harris to reporters, while they told everyone else, ‘not a time for an open process, and his vice president can’t win, so he’s the strongest candidate.’ Then we find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes.
Dan Pfeiffer said, “The idea that Joe Biden was going to do better in this race than Kamala Harris is, on its face, absurd.”
Favreau told his colleagues, “Joe Biden’s decision to run for president again was a catastrophic mistake. It just was.” He was right, of course. His remarks leave us wondering if former President Barack Obama agreed.
Many Democrats had reservations about Biden’s decision to run for reelection.
You may recall a pivotal article from The New York Times published in early June 2023 that drew attention to Biden’s age and frailties for the first time. The article was based on “months of interviews with dozens of current and former officials and others who have spent time with him.”
Written in a passive-aggressive style, the article alternated between anonymous stories about Biden’s public “senior moments” and on the record assurances that he was as sharp as a tack. The piece served as a green light to the rest of the media that it was okay to acknowledge the president’s condition.
After the Times released a poll in November 2023 that showed Biden trailing Trump in five battleground states, David Axelrod, the chief strategist for both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, urged Biden to drop out of the 2024 race.
It’s very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden’s team says his resolve to run is firm.
He’s defied CW before but this will send tremors of doubt thru the party–not “bed-wetting,” but legitimate concern. https://t.co/g6zeWF0T87— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) November 5, 2023
Politico reported that a “person who has heard Biden use the word,” said Biden began calling Axelrod “a pr***” in private.
But that didn’t stop other Democrats from expressing their own concerns about Biden’s mental fitness.
The Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote an article calling on Biden to “gather the sharpest minds in his party and hear what they have to say.”
Following Biden’s disastrous debate in June, Dowd demanded that he step aside. She wrote, “He’s being selfish. He’s putting himself ahead of the country. He’s surrounded by opportunistic enablers. He has created a reality distortion field where we’re told not to believe what we’ve plainly seen. His hubris is infuriating. He says he’s doing this for us, but he’s really doing it for himself.”
“Joe Biden’s decision to run for president again was a catastrophic mistake.” – @JonFavs
Listen to more Pod Save America wherever you get your podcasts. pic.twitter.com/nhtO9hs4aA— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) November 8, 2024
The Daily Beast reported that the Obama Bros had been horrified by Biden’s June debate performance. They described it as “f—ing awful“ and a ”f—ing disaster” and spent most of July “urging” Biden to leave the race and be replaced by “someone, anyone—though preferably Kamala Harris.”
Recounting the highlights of the Wednesday episode of the podcast, the article noted, “Some of the hosts admit: Maybe no Democrat could have beat Trump this year.”
Lovett said:
I’m sure there are ways in which the campaign could have done slightly better, I have no idea. But ultimately, I don‘t know what you could have said to overcome that weight of incumbency, right? Because part of what we‘re talking about here is: It doesn’t matter what she said. People didn’t trust it. They weren’t going to trust Democrats right now and so what I think we had hoped to see, right, is that ’Could Kamala Harris overcome Joe Biden’s liabilities?’ The answer is, maybe she couldn’t.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
These people are so delusional… they’re acting like Biden’s senility wasn’t glaringly obvious BEFORE the 2020 election.
Really, they should all just STFU and go away.
After Biden was stabbed in the back by Pelosi, he gave her and Obama the ultimate F you by endorsing Kamala. It took three days for Obama to support Kamala. The fix was in, a disastrous candidate. No open convention as they hoped. Picking a more intelligent, and more centrist candidate that could speak and outline policies. Biden caused that path. So, they ran with a seriously deficient person that they put the entire party and subservient media behind. A billion spent on a worthless idiot that had dropped out of the race before the Iowa caucuses. Doomed from the start. Jill wore red on the day of voting -a message sent.
They might have been able to put Michelle Obama in at an open convention but anyone else would have been changing to a white or a man or both. The black women would have stayed home in droves. I don’t believe that Michelle O had any desire to leave her cushy private life and go into the arena. When the failed to have an open primary because they didn’t want RFK jr. They lost.
Big Mike knows her limitations. She could never sit and do what Trump has done with a rainbow of reporters. She has limited intelligence, and her personality is not great when confronted or challenged. She stays angry, and if not for the light bearer, she would have never had a six-figure job in her life.
Biden has NEVER been “sharp as a tack” and always showed bullying signs, especially when he had Secret Service coverage.
Between his frequent gaffes, his poor scholarship AND his frequent stealing of others speeches and writings, he’s a real LOSER.
IMHO, Biden ran because Obama told him to run. My evidence is that the DNC prohibited all potential rivals for the nomination to not enter or withdraw from the race (remember, Kennedy tried to get the nomination, but he was prevented from entering the DNC primaries). After securing the uncontested nomination, Obama had Biden debate Trump in June. This was to show to the world that Biden was not mentally capable of being president, thereby giving the DNC, led by Obama, the excuse to replace Biden with Harris, without having her vetted through the primaries. They wanted Harris because they can control her, effectively giving Obama his 4th term. And they picked Walz as the VP because it would potentially give them another controllable candidate for President in the event Harris needed to be replaced at some point in the future. The democrats have no complaint about Biden, as they were the ones who installed him
CV60
This is an interesting spin. I am not sure that I agree with you but it makes enough sense to be an interesting thing to discuss. I agree that Obama wanted Biden as a puppet (which I don’t think he actually got) and I do believe that he would hope that Harris would actually be one for him. Walz is indeed gullible and stupid enough for that role, but I think he got the nod by being the only one stupid enough to sign on. I think it was apparent to most ambitious Democrats that Kamala was going to lose and I don’t believe I have ever heard of a losing VP candidate ever making a successful run later.
I don’t believe Biden was Obama’s puppet because there was zero coherence in this administration. I suspect Joe only listened to Jill and Jill didn’t like Obama. Instead activists from various interest groups (in return for their silence and support) were given control of whichever departments interested them. So electric cars, gays in the military, a Trans-sexual for Health, oil drilling prohibited, and so on. Ukraine was personal though.
Now, back to Obama – Biden out, certainly, but to choose Harris deliberately would mean that he actually believed that she had a good chance of winning. It’s possible that his internal polling outlook was as wrong as Biden’s, and certainly -somebody- organized the law-fare campaign using the FBI and the state courts. It was impressive. That’s doesn’t sound like something that Jill-Joe would accomplish.
So, I think the Obama might have wanted to choose a good puppet, but I don’t think he planned on Harris being that puppet.
Just my thoughts…
You are absolutely correct. Had the Obama machine wanted their wholly-owned Biden out, they would have had an open primary season, instead of the installation that selected Biden.
They thought they had successfully gaslighted their voters with “sharp as a tack”. When Biden fell right out of the starting gate of the debate, the machine had to quickly move to another wholly-owned candidate, who was Kamala.
They still thought their iron control of the media, plus a 2020 cheat mechanism, would be enough to elect her, and she came frighteningly close.
And if those Tiktok Karen NPCs are any indication, far too many people have be deeply, thoroughly indoctrinated by nothing more than the MSM and their social media “influencers.
I don’t see how we can share a country with them.
I don’t think the June debate was in the original plan. They were still having fairly good results with the drugs to amp Joe up for an hour or two when they push the primary down. Later in 2024 the started to see that Joe might not last. They became afraid of a disaster in a first debate in September with no way to fix it at all. So the proposed a June debate half hoping the Trump would refuse allowing them to blow off all of the debates. Trump jumped on it with both feet. Joe melted down into a puddle. They were more or less trapped by the DEI hire they had made. They put Kamala out and told her don’t say anything. It didn’t work.
Biden ran and was installed as the 2020 candidate to lose gracefully while limiting down ballot losses. Covid and fortification helped get him over the line.
The dem A benchers made the decision to sit this out in fall 23 when Biden wouldn’t leave.
I think they (Newsim, Shapiro, ) knew it was a lost cause and wanted nothing to do with the ticket in any position over the summer.
Mrs Obama really doesn’t appear interested and I bet there was also
Polling suggesting it would be a bad idea to add nepotism to the republicans ammo cache.
Harris was the least bad option.. if Biden had stayed the senate and house would have flipped more seatss
It’s all Biden’s fault to these frauds. No fault for pretending he was fit until it was too late, then continuing the hoax by making Harris, the dumbest of all, into Momala of joy and opportunity. Laughable to see the deflection.
They’re blaming the wrong Biden. It’s Jill to blame – she was controlling him and the one who didn’t want to give it up.
We don’t want to change puppets in mid-stream!
A little JB Weld and a steady drip of Memantine, and he’ll be fine for four more years!
This is all complete BS. The dem party and everyone in it was 100% behind Biden, right up until AFTER the debate when they finally realized that they couldn’t keep a lid on things. But there was no revelation to them. They all knew that Biden was a vegetable (as we have all known for quite some time).
After the debate, Biden was just holding out for the deal from the dem leaders – the money and other payoffs promised to him to drop out of the race.
The really interesting (e.g. despicable and disgusting) part of the whole thing was that right after they finally managed to push Biden out of the race they went right back to lying about the idea that he wasn’t a vegetable in order to justify leaving him in office. Komrade Kamala argued that Traitor Joe was as spry and clever as anyone through her campaign – denying that he had any mental issues, at all. And she was never pressed on that. None of the dem scum were.
Favreau and the rest of the Barky dirtbags are morons and inept liars, aside from being despicable traitors. All the money sloshing around their orbits needs to be examined and investigated. They are all as dirty as Traitor Joe. The whole lot of them.
The man on the street knew Joe Pampers wasn’t fit to hold office in January 2021. Since Hyena Girl certainly couldn’t run a shoebox, she wasn’t making the decisions. The question remains, “Who was running the show? Even three and a half years ago? The deep state was cut loose to make their own decisions. Justice, State, Intel agencies all doing their own thing. And it shows. The Democrats didn’t care. They weren’t getting raided by the FBI and dragged into federal and state courts under false charges. And Biden’s decision to run for a new term was okay with them. After all, the hated USA was on a major decline and a new Biden administration should finish the job. He won his primaries by acclamation. First, the debate debacle, then the Roman senators gathered around him, stabbed him in the back, and cast him out on the trash heap. I’m sure he was given the or/else terms which powered his decision. And now it’s all his fault. AMAZING?
“The question remains, “Who was running the show?”
Far n’ away the most important question.
It must be answered (and not by the MSM) within the next four years or we will have lost our Republic.
Yet these guys don’t account for the six million voters who put Biden over the top in 2020 (but stayed home in 2024 along with five million others?) while at the same time ready to denounce those who say it was ballot fraud.
The only reason he was able to run is because you covered up his dementia and obviously lacking mental capacity.
And you decided to wait until the last minute possible because you wanted to pick the candidate without those pesky unwashed peasant voters having a say in the matter.
You got EXACTLY what you wanted. Enjoy it.
Trump Now Wins 509-18!
Democrats no Longer Love the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
And that is if you don’t throw Virginia on the pile. Virginia is reported by the NPVIC website as pending whatever that means.
With Virginia it is 533-5
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2ZoTHT0YUxg?feature=share
Biden decision my butt. The Obama team wanted to keep him in because he was term 3 for them and they wanted 4.
He has been a mostly empty suit. If Kamala had been doing any part of her duty she would have 25thed him out of office the middle of last year at the latest. She didn’t because she knew she would lose a contested primary. She wanted to stay VP and maybe get this chance at POTUS. They have no one to blame but themselves.
I am stunned that all four of these individuals seem to see Kamala Harris as being an effective candidate. I heard not a single comment about her inarticulateness and basic stupidity. Did I miss something? I also heard nothing about the illegal immigration issue – as if that was irrelevant.
One final point, I found their presumption that somehow their policies are superior and their ability to manage the country superior, i.e., their condescension, nauseating.