Bernie Sanders says Biden’s debate was ‘mmm...not great.’ But he thinks he can win.

The Scene

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders rejected calls for Joe Biden to end his presidential campaign on Friday, telling Semafor that Thursday’s debate had gone poorly but there was time to retool.

“He’s not a great debater, he’s not necessarily a great speaker,” Sanders said. “People are just gonna have to say: Okay, you know what? Yeah, he’s old. Yeah, he’s not as articulate as he should be. But you’re voting for somebody whose policies will impact your life.”

Asked about the New York Times’s editorial board urging Biden to quit, and whether a different nominee could win the election, he refused to speculate. Biden needed to get more specific about how he’d “improve the lives of working people,” not step down.

“Biden is the candidate,” he said. “I suspect he will be the candidate. I’ll do my best to get him elected.”

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Sanders had spent debate night in Wisconsin, part of a four-day swing throughout the state that wasn’t sponsored by the Biden campaign. But his analysis synced up with theirs — that 90 shaky minutes on a CNN stage shouldn’t define the president, or start a scramble to replace him.

In Stevens Point, where hundreds of Wisconsinites gathered in the rain to see Sanders, he said he “had to be very honest” with them: Donald Trump “lied and lied and lied” on Thursday, but “the president was not terribly articulate” when he responded.

“He was not focused. He did not defend a very strong record,” Sanders added. “He should have been loud and clear in telling the American people that he was the first president in American history ever to walk on a picket line.”

In Eau Claire, where he spoke and took questions at a local technical college, Sanders opened with a joke about the debate: “Let’s talk about last night. Mmmm… not great!” The race was still close, he said, and winnable, though. “I know that there is not a lot of enthusiasm for either of these candidates, in some places.”

David’s view

In the last 24 hours, Democrats have undergone a collective near-death experience. Not all of them emerged in the same way. A handful of Biden’s old primary opponents have said that he should have spared the party this crisis, and not run for re-election, including Andrew Yang and Julian Castro.

The others have echoed, by plan or accident, what Biden said in Raleigh: He’s old, he’s not the debater he used to be, deal with it. Sanders, who endorsed Biden as soon as he declared for re-election, is on his third cycle of telling frustrated progressives that they have to settle for a different nominee, a task that got harder on Thursday.

The Times editorial might end up helping with that. Like Biden, Sanders didn’t like the coverage he got from the paper’s news side; both men’s editorial board interviews got a little salty. (“You didn’t take me too seriously,” Sanders reminded the board in 2019, remembering exactly which page it had reserved for his 2016 campaign announcement.) There has never been so much media pressure at this point in a presidential campaign for a Democratic nominee to quit. It’s not likely to convince him.

Notable

• Congressman Jim Clyburn, a top Biden ally, said the debate was only “strike one” for the president. “Everybody remembers Babe Ruth being the home run king,” he told Semafor’s Kadia Goba. “Few people remember how many times he struck out. Who knows? On strike two he may knock it out of the park.”