Democratic strategist David Axelrod said Sunday he doesn’t think President Biden understands he is “not winning this race” against former President Trump.
“There are certain immutable facts of life, and those were painfully obvious on that debate stage, and the president just doesn’t seem to come to — he hasn’t come to grips with it. He’s not winning this race,” Axelrod, a senior adviser in the Obama administration, said on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”
“If you just look at the data and talk to people around the country, political people around the country, it’s more likely that he’ll lose by a landslide than win narrowly this race,” Axelrod continued. “And if the stakes are as large as he says, and I believe they are, then he really needs to consider what the right thing to do here is.”
The interview Sunday comes after Axelrod responded to Biden’s prime-time interview on Friday by calling the president “dangerously out of touch” with voters’ concerns.
“Listening to the interview, he seemed to deny where he is in the race. He seems not to grasp what is the big concern that people have,” Axelrod said Sunday about Biden’s performance in the interview.
Axelrod noted the “tremendous loss and tremendous odds” Biden has faced in his life and how he has always “fought his way back from that.”
“He’s fought his way back from political defeats and against the odds. And so, his psyche is that he can beat anybody and any long odds. What he can’t beat his Father Time. And that’s really the concern here. It’s not about his record,” Axelrod said, later noting that “history will be much kinder to him than voters are being right now.”
The president has remained defiant as some in the party have raised concerns about whether he should stay in the race following his difficult debate performance. Five House Democrats have called on him explicitly to step aside.
In The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s national polling average, the two candidates remain in a close race, with Trump leading by 1.1 percentage points, 44.2 percent support to 43.1 percent.