Biden campaign tests ‘head-to-head matchups’ of Harris against Trump

The Biden campaign is reportedly test-polling head-to-head matchups between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump as the president struggles to shore up support for his re-election bid.

The survey comes as President Joe Biden is under increasing pressure to step aside as the party’s nominee following his dismal debate performance on June 27 in Atlanta, where he repeatedly lost his train of thought and stumbled over words. Biden is set to hold a highly anticipated press conference at the end of the NATO summit in Washington on Thursday night, a critical appearance as he hopes to quell concerns about his health and show that the debate was nothing more than one bad night.

The poll is being quietly conducted this week and was commissioned by the campaign’s analytics team, according toThe New York Times. The Independent has contacted the Biden campaign for comment.

It’s thought to be the first time after the debate that aides to Biden have attempted to see how Harris would perform atop the ticket. The poll could be used to argue to the president that he should step aside or that he’s still the strongest candidate to take on Trump.

The polling comes amid the increasing conviction among some aides that Biden will have to step aside as the party’s nominee. More than a dozen Democratic lawmakers have already publicly called on Biden to leave the race, while others — including congressional leadership — have revealed their concerns privately.

The Independent reported on Thursday that some aides from the campaign and the White House have been engaging in active discussions about the best way to go about convincing the president that he needs to step aside. Not since Lyndon Johnson in 1968, amid the chaos of the Vietnam War, has a president declined to seek a second term. But there’s a growing consensus within the group that Biden has no path to defeat Trump.

A Biden campaign spokesperson, senior adviser TJ Ducklo, rejected the notion that such talks have occurred, saying it’s “patently false.”

“This team stands with the president,” he added.

Some of Biden’s aides have argued that Harris would be unable to win the election, but donors and other outside backers believe she may be better suited to run against Trump after the debate, according to The Times.

Biden campaign chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in a memo to staff on Thursday that there “is a clear pathway ahead” and claimed that “there is also no indication that anyone else would outperform the president vs. Trump.”

They added that “Hypothetical polling of alternative nominees will always be unreliable, and surveys do not take into account the negative media environment that any Democratic nominee will encounter. The only Democratic candidate for whom this is already baked in is President Biden.”

But the memo also seemed to recognize that there has been a decline in support for Biden since the debate, saying that “The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race.”