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.
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.”
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.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY