Dems are freaking out about Biden even in once safely blue states

HOOKSETT, New Hampshire — New Hampshire hasn’t voted to send a Republican to the White House since 2000. Maine hasn’t gone fully red since 1988. New Mexico has picked the GOP nominee only once in the last eight elections. And in Minnesota, voters haven’t done that since 1972.

But President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate — and his subsequent inability to reassure disquieted Democrats — suddenly has members of his party warning that they are now at risk of losing all of those states.

“Our enemies are at the gate, and they are gleeful,” said Jay Surdukowski, an attorney and Democratic activist from New Hampshire who co-chaired former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2016 presidential campaign in the state.

Democrats’ concerns about Biden’s ability to win are expanding beyond this cycle’s predetermined battlegrounds into states that long ago turned blue in presidential elections. In Minnesota, Rep. Angie Craig called on Biden to step aside for a “new generation of leaders.” The governors of Maine and New Mexico told the president in a private meeting at the White House last week they were concerned over whether he could still win their states. Another top Maine Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden — who is running for reelection in a district that Donald Trump won by 6 percentage points in 2020 — went so far as to say he expects voters will return the former president to the White House. Even Democrats in deep-blue New York see Biden slipping.

But perhaps nowhere are these bluer-state blues on such stark display as in New Hampshire, which Trump came within half a percentage point of winning in 2016 — and where a post-debate poll now shows him erasing the double-digit lead Biden held heading into 2024.

Members of the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation have expressed disappointment in Biden’s performance and concerns about how he moves forward from it. And on Tuesday, when the Cook Political Report shifted Electoral College ratings in six swing states toward Republicans, New Hampshire became one of two, along with Minnesota, reclassified as “lean” rather than “likely” Democratic in the presidential race.

New Hampshire presents a unique set of circumstances for Biden. The Democrat has long had a complicated political relationship with the state, which culminated this cycle in his move to strip New Hampshire from its prized perch atop the party’s presidential primary calendar — a snub that continues to reverberate even though Biden easily won a write-in campaign waged on his behalf. Unlike other swing states that trend blue in presidential elections, Republicans fully control the state’s government.

And now Biden’s polling lead is evaporating here. A post-debate St. Anselm poll showed Trump up 2 percentage points over the president — within the margin of error, but a stark reversal from Biden’s 10-point lead in the college’s last survey in December.

Neil Levesque, the director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, which houses the survey center, said the poll should serve as a warning for Biden.

“We’ve all been watching the six or seven key battleground states, and they’ve now pretty much gone for Trump,” Levesque said. “Now if we’re into the second tier, in which New Hampshire definitely lies, that’s a very alarming situation for the White House.”

Biden’s allies in New Hampshire disputed that his debate-stage face-plant — and the resurgence of concerns about his age and abilities that has come from it — could put the state he won by more than 7 percentage points in 2020 back in play. They cited his campaign’s infrastructure in the state — 14 field offices versus one for Trump, a bevy of staffers and a steady stream of surrogates — as signs of strength. They pointed to how Biden won nearly 64 percent of the Democratic primary vote as a write-in candidate. And they dismissed the St. Anselm poll as an outlier.

“New Hampshire is going to be OK,” said Jim Demers, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state who is backing Biden and helped lead the write-in campaign. “I expect the polls are going to bounce around no matter what. But we have such a large voting bloc of undeclared, independent voters, and that crowd tends not to be supporters of Donald Trump.”

Trump has a poor track record in bluer swing states. He lost New Hampshire, Minnesota, Virginia and New Mexico in both 2016 and 2020. And while he picked up one electoral vote in Maine in each of the last two elections by winning the state’s 2nd Congressional District, he lost the state’s vote overall.

But Republicans are emboldened after Biden’s calamitous debate performance. Michael Whatley, the chair of the Republican National Committee, said days after the debate that Republicans had “started to engage” in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia. Trump’s campaign is also opening field offices in Minnesota and Virginia, though those plans were already in motion before the debate, according to an internal memo reviewed by POLITICO.

“President Trump had a dominant debate performance. … Joe Biden, on the other hand, is weak, failed, and dishonest, and Democrats are dumpster fire. This stark contrast is why President Trump [is] dominating in every battleground state, and longtime blue states such as Minnesota, Virginia, New Hampshire, and New Jersey are now in play,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez.

If Trump continues to act as he did in the debate — “being civil and staying on message” — and Biden “continues to perform as he performed in that debate and other public settings, yeah, Minnesota will be in play,” said Mike Erlandson, a former chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

Biden’s campaign has spent months building up infrastructure across safer blue swing states to prevent Republicans from putting them back in play, with more than a dozen field offices in both New Hampshire and Minnesota and 11 in Virginia.

"While Trump has little to no presence in the battlegrounds and spends time holding events in New York City, our campaign has more than 200 offices and 1,000 staffers across the states that make up our path to 270 electoral votes. Now Trump's campaign is trying to shift their attention to states that supported Joe Biden over him by up to double digits in 2020,” said Biden campaign battleground states director Dan Kanninen. “We're keeping our eye on the ball, doing the work everywhere and taking no voter for granted in our campaign to win."

But Biden is no longer simply competing against Trump. He is being forced to wage war against widespread anxiety about his age and electoral chances — concerns he was able to quash when they were raised by Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and others during the primary process but that are now running rampant.

Phillips said Tuesday that “his case is the same” as it was months ago. “Clearly,” he told reporters at the Capitol, “there’s been a shift in others.”

Democratic Party chairs across blue-leaning states have roundly dismissed the notion that Biden’s struggles could put their states back on the battleground map and pledged to keep supporting him as the nominee.

Yet the Biden campaign has been forced to work to shore up support outside of the party apparatus. In New Hampshire, that meant leaning on star power — California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a staunch supporter of the president whose name often comes up alongside other surrogates as potential replacements on the Democratic ticket — to attempt to quell Democratic angst in the state about Biden’s performance.

In front of the press at a highway service plaza and behind closed doors at private fundraisers for Democrats running for New Hampshire’s state Legislature, Newsom delivered impassioned defenses of the president and was steadfast that Biden would be the nominee.

Newsom brushed aside a reporter’s question about whether he’d put his own name forward at a hypothetical brokered convention as “exactly the question Donald Trump is hoping everyone asks as he’s out on the golf course.” And he cast the growing number of Democrats calling on Biden to step aside as a distraction.

But outside of the friendly confines of the closed-door fundraiser, Democratic activists in New Hampshire are looking at November with a sense of dread they haven’t felt in years.

Steve Shurtleff, a former New Hampshire House speaker who was once one of Biden’s biggest backers in the state but supported Phillips in this year’s primary, said he hopes the president will cede the nomination to preserve both his legacy and Democrats’ electoral prospects.

Shurtleff said he’s been “hearing from a lot of Democrats saying they do wish the president would step down” as the party’s nominee. And he, like other activists, faulted Biden for passing on an opportunity to prove his mettle earlier this cycle by skipping the state’s primary.

“New Hampshire is a purple state. In national elections, we tend to vote Democratic. And of course the four members of our congressional delegation are all Democrats. But down the ballot it’s much more mixed,” Shurtleff said in an interview. “And I think now, looking at the Saint Anselm poll, which is usually a good poll, it’s possible this state could go red.”

Democratic activist Kimberly Kirkland was even more despairing. She described feeling “angry” at Biden for “defying the public will” and said it was “demoralizing” that he was staying in the race. And, pointing to how Republicans control the governor’s seat and the Legislature, she warned that Trump could “absolutely” win New Hampshire.

“If Biden stays on the ticket, we’re going to lose turnout,” she said. “There are people who would come out for [Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or [Secretary] Pete Buttigieg or [Vice President] Kamala Harris who will just not come out because they’re just going to be so pissed that Biden hung onto this.”

Nicholas Wu and Jessica Piper contributed to this report.