Can Joe Biden survive his poor debate? Even his friends aren't sure.

Can Joe Biden survive?

Three days after a disastrous performance by the president in the first 2024 campaign debate, many Democratic strategists, officeholders, donors, pundits, potential rivals and long-time friends still aren't sure.

A drumbeat of concern about Biden as the party's nominee expressed in public and private began minutes after the CNN debate in Atlanta came on the air, showing a hoarse and sometimes stumbling Biden facing a bombastic Donald Trump hurling insults and untruths. Since then, efforts by Team Biden to shore up his support and move on haven't quieted alarm about his prospects in November and the damaging impact it could have on Democratic candidates down the ballot.

"The fact is people are nervous; there's a lot of anxiety," former Democratic national chair Donna Brazile acknowledged on ABC's "This Week," saying she had fielded so many frantic calls from fellow Democrats that she considered "dropping my phone into the Potomac."

She also made the case for Biden: "He also is a good man, a strong president and Democrats still believe that this race is winnable."

That said, a CBS News/YouGov poll taken Friday and Saturday showed how the debate had exacerbated the 81-year-old Biden's biggest vulnerability, his age. Seventy-two percent of registered voters said he did not have the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. The same percentage said he shouldn't be running for president, including more than a third of Democrats, 36%.

What has become clear is how much that decision is up to Biden himself, given party rules that make it nearly inconceivable that he could be replaced on the ticket without his assent − and how little time is left to make that call. A virtual roll call for the nomination is planned by Aug. 7, even before the convention opens, to address a deadline in Ohio that had threatened to keep Biden off the ballot there.

And this: All of the options for Democrats carry risks of infighting that could undermine the odds of victory by any nominee.

The lessons of 'Access Hollywood'

If he stays in the race for the White House, Biden may be applying a lesson learned from Trump.

A month before the 2016 election, the Washington Post revealed a recording of Trump from 2005 bragging that he could grab women's genitals without consequences because "when you're a star, they let you do it."

There were consequences then, with some leading Republicans calling their nominee unfit for the presidency. But Trump bulldozed through their objections, dismissing or ignoring his critics. He won the White House and solidified his hold on the GOP.

About four years later, after the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by rioters trying to overturn Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, Congress impeached him, though the Senate didn't convict him. But the firestorm that would have sabotaged most political careers in time didn't notably erode his political base.

Little surprise then that Trump's conviction on 34 criminal counts in a New York courtroom in May didn't unnerve his supporters. He has made his status as the first felon to run for president on a major-party ticket a fundraising boon and a rallying cry.

Trump has demonstrated the power of plowing ahead, regardless of what the party elites and the newspaper editorial writers may say.

Chaos at the convention: Not a political asset

Biden has insisted that he will continue his campaign.

"When you get knocked down, you get back up," he declared to cheers at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, the day after the debate.

But holding the nomination is easier than winning the election.

Previous presidents have faced primary challenges in their bids for second terms, including Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Republican George H.W. Bush in 1992. After messy conventions that underscored party divisions, both won the nominations but lost the elections.

This year, Biden had no serious primary challenger in a party united by its opposition to Trump. That means almost all of the 4,672 delegates expected at the convention in Chicago are pledged to him, although that commitment is not a binding one.

It also means there is no ready alternative, raising the possibility of a brutal floor fight.

Vice President Kamala Harris would be a leading alternative, although her position as Biden's running mate gives her no special standing to claim the nomination. There are also rising Democrats who might have run for the nomination this time if Biden hadn't, among them Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and J.D. Pritzker of Illinois.

None of those governors are well known nationally, though, nor have they gone through the rigors and the scrutiny of a presidential campaign.

In a sign of how seriously the Biden campaign is taking the threat, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty blasted out a memo Saturday arguing that changing the top of the ticket would nominate "candidates who would, according to polls, be less likely to win than Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump."

However, the findings he attached didn't prove that point. In a survey by a progressive think tank called Data For Progress, there was no meaningful difference between how Biden and eight potential alternatives fared against Trump.

Biden trailed Trump by three percentage points, 45% to 48%. Six of the other candidates tested also trailed Trump by three points, including Harris (45%-48%), Newsom (44%-47%), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (44%-47%), Pritzker (43%-46%), Shapiro (43%-46%) and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (43%-46%).

Two of the candidates trailed Trump by only two points, 44%-46% − Whitmer and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker.

Flaherty also warned that Biden withdrawing would create its own problems.

It "would lead to weeks of chaos, internal food fighting, and a bunch of candidates who limp into a brutal floor fight at the convention, all while Donald Trump has time to speak to American voters uncontested," he said. He called it "a highway to losing."

It is true that chaos at conventions has never been a political asset. Witness a previous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 when protests over the Vietnam War created complications for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the nominee.

He lost in November.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Can Joe Biden survive debate fiasco? Even his friends aren't sure.