Attention to the Unseen

NBC News reports: Several of President Joe Biden’s closest allies, including three people who are directly involved in efforts to re-elect him, told NBC News they now see his chances of winning as zero — and the likelihood of him taking down fellow Democratic candidates growing. “He needs to drop out,” one Biden campaign official said. “He will never recover from this.” For two weeks, Biden has struggled to stabilize his campaign following a late-June debate debacle. His ongoing clean-up…

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Politico reports: President Joe Biden is quickly losing access to the money he will need to stay in the presidential race as a growing number of prominent Democratic officials and donors call for him to drop out. Money has started to dry up following his disastrous debate with former President Donald Trump, when the president struggled to respond to his opponent’s barrage of verbal attacks and gave incoherent answers, said six Democratic advisers and operatives who work with major donors….

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Jonathan Martin writes: Fearing a floor revolt against his nomination, President Biden’s aides are telephoning individual delegates to next month’s Democratic convention to gauge their loyalty to the president, according to three delegates who received a call this week. After a round of introductory questions confirming each delegate was still planning on going to Chicago and asking if they had served as delegate before, the Biden aide making the calls got to the point, the Democratic activists recalled to me…

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CNN reports: Donald Trump has lately made clear he wants little to do with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican president that has attracted considerable blowback in his race for the White House. “I have no idea who is behind it,” the former president recently claimed on social media. Many people Trump knows quite well are behind it. Six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term…

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: Next week, for the third time in eight years, Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president of the United States. A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much…

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Tim Alberta writes: The outcome of the presidential campaign, Republicans believed, was a fait accompli. “Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win,” Chris LaCivita told me this past Sunday as Democrats questioned, ever more frantically, whether President Joe Biden should remain the party’s nominee in November. “That’s pre-debate.” LaCivita paused to repeat himself: “Pre-debate.” This could be interpreted as trash talk coming from a cocky campaign: If you thought Biden was in trouble before he bombed…

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  Anand Giridharadas writes: Today Congressional Democrats met for a caucus meeting, and it was…complicated. One lawmaker, interviewed while walking out, was asked if the caucus was on the same page about whether President Biden should remain the party’s standard-bearer in 2024. He responded that they weren’t even reading from the same book. A small but growing number of Democratic lawmakers, along with many in the commentariat (and many voters who have registered their concerns about Biden’s age and health…

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The New York Times reports: Senator Christopher S. Murphy, an ambitious young Democrat from Connecticut, went on television on Sunday with a carefully worded warning to President Biden about the viability of his campaign. “This week is going to be absolutely critical; I think the president needs to do more,” Mr. Murphy said, arguing that Mr. Biden needed to hold a town hall and participate in unscripted events because “the clock is ticking” for him to put to rest the…

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Politico reports: President Joe Biden has a new problem: a competitive race in deep blue New York. Elected officials, union leaders and political consultants are panicking over polls showing a steady erosion of Biden’s support in a state he won by 23 points four years ago. They’re so worried they’ve been trying to convince the Biden team to pour resources into New York to shore up his campaign and boost Democrats running in a half-dozen swing districts that could determine…

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Politico reports: Voters and local candidates in Wisconsin have a message for President Joe Biden: It’s not just Democratic elites who are freaking out about your mental acuity. Biden on Monday suggested it was simply the “the elites in the party” raising doubts about his political viability after a halting, incoherent debate performance last month. In fact, questions about his age are dominating the political conversation in and around Milwaukee and Madison, crucial turf for Democrats in November, according to…

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George Clooney writes: I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced. But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at…

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Axios reports: Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon has been internally stoic about the fallout from Biden’s disastrous debate on June 27, aides said. As part of her own motivational speech, she told staffers that the 81-year-old president had been personally looking over the stats of what campaign workers are doing in key states and urged them to keep at it. “We have to bypass the narrative out there,” she said on the call. Principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks acknowledged to…

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