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Queen Elizabeth II, a monarch bound by duty, dies at 96
By JILL LAWLESS
September 8, 2022 GMT
LONDON (AP) — On her 21st birthday in 1947, Princess Elizabeth went on the radio and made a promise to Britain and its Commonwealth nations: She pledged that “my whole life, whether it be short or long, will be devoted to your service.”
Over her very long life, Queen Elizabeth II fulfilled that vow.
Through 15 prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. Through Britain’s postwar deprivations, crippling labor unrest and Brexit. Through the messy divorces, embarrassments and scandals of her family. She endured through it all — a reassuring anchor in a fast-changing world.
The longest-reigning monarch that Britain has ever known, Elizabeth died Thursday at 96 at Balmoral Castle, her beloved summer home in Scotland, after having steadied and modernized the royal institution through seven decades of huge social change.
Truss pronounced the country “devastated” and called Elizabeth “the rock on which modern Britain was built.”
Her passing ends an era, the modern Elizabethan age. Her 73-year-old son, Charles, automatically became king upon her death. He will be known as King Charles III, although his coronation might not take place for months.
Through countless public events in her 70 years as monarch, Elizabeth likely met more people than anyone in history. Her image — on stamps, coins and bank notes — was among the most reproduced in the world.
But her inner life and opinions remained mostly an enigma. The public saw only glimpses of her personality: her joy watching horse racing at Royal Ascot or being with her beloved Welsh corgi dogs.
Yet Elizabeth had an intuitive bond with many of her subjects that seemed to strengthen over time, keeping a sense of perspective that served her well in most instances, said royal historian Robert Lacey.
“A lot of it comes from her modesty, the fact that she’s very conscious that she’s not important, that she’s there to do a job, that it’s the institution that matters,” he said.
The impact of her loss will be huge and unpredictable, both for the nation and for the monarchy, an institution whose relevance in the 21st century has often been called into question.
World leaders paid tribute to her long reign. U.S. President Joe Biden called her a “stateswoman of unmatched dignity and constancy.”
She strongly felt the burden of her role as queen, though she was not destined for the crown from birth.
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born in London on April 21, 1926, the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York. Her father’s elder brother, Prince Edward, was first in line for the throne, to be followed by any children he had.
But in 1936, when she was 10, King Edward VIII abdicated to marry twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson, and Elizabeth’s father became King George VI.
Her younger sister, Princess Margaret, recalled asking Elizabeth whether this meant that she would one day be queen. “Yes, I suppose it does,” Margaret quoted Elizabeth as saying. “She didn’t mention it again.”
Like many of her generation, Elizabeth was shaped by World War II.
She was barely in her teens when Britain went to war with Germany in 1939. While the king and queen stayed at Buckingham Palace during the Blitz and toured the bombed-out neighborhoods of London, Elizabeth and Margaret stayed for most of the war at Windsor Castle, west of the capital. Even there, 300 bombs fell in an adjacent park, and the princesses spent many nights in an underground shelter.
Her first public broadcast, made in 1940 when she was 14, was a wartime message to children evacuated to the countryside or overseas.
“We children at home are full of cheerfulness and courage,” she said with a blend of stoicism and hope that would echo throughout her reign. “We are trying to do all we can to help out gallant soldiers, sailors and airmen. And we are trying, too, to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well.”
In 1945, after months of urging her parents to let her do something for the war effort, the heir to the throne became Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She enthusiastically learned how to drive and service heavy vehicles.
On the night the war ended in Europe, May 8, 1945, she and Margaret managed to mingle, unrecognized, with celebrating crowds in London — “swept along on a tide of happiness and relief,” as she told the BBC decades later. She described it as “one of the most memorable nights of my life.”
Two years later, at Westminster Abbey in November 1947, she married Royal Navy officer Philip Mountbatten, a prince of Greece and Denmark whom she had first met in 1939 when she was 13 and he 18. Postwar Britain was experiencing austerity and rationing, and so street decorations were limited, and no public holiday was declared. But the bride was allowed 100 extra ration coupons for her trousseau.
The marriage lasted more than 73 years, until Philip’s death in 2021 at age 99.
The first of their four children, Prince Charles, was born on Nov. 14, 1948. He was followed by Princess Anne on Aug. 15, 1950, Prince Andrew on Feb. 19, 1960, and Prince Edward on March 10, 1964. Besides them, the queen is survived by eight grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
Elizabeth and Philip lived for a time in Malta, where he was stationed and Elizabeth enjoyed an almost-normal life as a navy wife.
Then in February 1952, George VI died in his sleep at age 56 after years of ill health. Elizabeth, on a visit to Kenya, was told she was now queen.
“In a way, I didn’t have an apprenticeship,” Elizabeth told a BBC documentary in 1992 that gave a rare view into her emotions. “My father died much too young, and so it was all a very sudden kind of taking on and making the best job you can.”
Her coronation took place more than a year later at Westminster Abbey, a grand spectacle viewed by millions through the new medium of television.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s first reaction to the king’s death was to complain that the new queen was “only a child,” but he was won over within days and became an ardent admirer.
“All the film people in the world, if they had scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part,” Churchill’s biographer, Lord Moran, reported the prime minister gushing about the young monarch.
In Britain’s constitutional monarchy, the queen is head of state but has little direct power; in her official actions, she does what the government orders. However, she was not without influence. She once reportedly commented that there was nothing she could do legally to block the appointment of a bishop, “but I can always say that I should like more information. That is an indication that the prime minister will not miss.”
The extent of the monarch’s political influence sparked occasional speculation, but not much criticism. The views of Charles, who has expressed strong opinions on everything from architecture to the environment, might prove more contentious.
The queen was obliged to meet weekly with the prime minister, and they generally found her well-informed, inquisitive and up to date. The one possible exception was Margaret Thatcher, with whom her relations were said to be cool, if not frosty, though neither ever commented.
The queen’s views in those private meetings became a subject of intense speculation and fertile grounds for dramatists like Peter Morgan, author of the play “The Audience” and hit TV series “The Crown.” Those semi-fictionalized accounts were the product of an era of declining deference and rising celebrity, when the royal troubles became public property.
And there were plenty of troubles in the royal family, an institution known within the palace as “The Firm.” In Elizabeth’s first years on the throne, Princess Margaret provoked a national controversy through her romance with a divorced man.
In what the queen called the “annus horribilis” of 1992, her daughter, Princess Anne, got divorced, Prince Charles and Princess Diana separated, and so did Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah. That was also the year Windsor Castle, a residence she far preferred to Buckingham Palace, was seriously damaged by fire.
The public split of Charles and Diana — “There were three of us in that marriage,” Diana said of her husband’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles — was followed by the shock of Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997. For once, the queen appeared out of step with her people. Amid unprecedented national mourning, Elizabeth’s failure to make a public show of grief appeared to many to be unfeeling. After several days, she made a televised address to the nation.
The dent in her popularity was brief. She was by now a sort of national grandmother, with a stern gaze, a kind smile and an inexhaustible repertoire of brightly colored outfits with matching hats.
She took the monarchy from the black-and-white era to the digital age and was a cautious modernizer: She ended the presentation of debutantes at court and instituted garden parties with a cross section of her subjects; her children were sent to school, rather than being privately tutored as she was; she was the first monarch to give the annual royal Christmas speech on television, and the first to send an email and post a tweet.
Financial pressures led to staff reductions, cutbacks in repairs and maintenance at some of her palaces, and the removal of the royal yacht from active service. In the 1990s, she voluntarily but prudently agreed to pay taxes, and her dignity survived the necessity of topping up her income by opening a souvenir shop at Buckingham Palace.
Despite being one of the world’s wealthiest people, Elizabeth had a reputation for frugality and common sense. She was known as a monarch who took care to turn off lights in empty rooms, a country woman who didn’t flinch from strangling pheasants.
A newspaper reporter who went undercover to work as a palace footman reinforced that down-to-earth image, taking photos of the royal Tupperware on the breakfast table and a rubber duck in the bath.
“Dogs and horses, courtesy, kindliness and community service, count with her,” biographer Giles Brandreth wrote.
Her sangfroid was not dented when a young man aimed a pistol at her and fired six blanks as she rode by on a horse in 1981, nor when she discovered an intruder sitting on her bed in Buckingham Palace in 1982.
The image of the queen as an exemplar of ordinary British decency was satirized by the magazine Private Eye, which called her Brenda. Anti-monarchists dubbed her “Mrs. Windsor.” But the republican cause gained limited traction.
On her Golden Jubilee in 2002, she said the country could “look back with measured pride on the history of the last 50 years.”
“It has been a pretty remarkable 50 years by any standards,” she said in a speech. “There have been ups and downs, but anyone who can remember what things were like after those six long years of war appreciates what immense changes have been achieved since then.”
A reassuring presence at home, she was also an emblem of Britain abroad — a form of soft power, consistently respected whatever the vagaries of the country’s political leaders on the world stage. It felt only fitting that she attended the opening of the 2012 London Olympics alongside another icon, James Bond, as portrayed by Daniel Craig. Through some movie magic, she appeared to parachute into the Olympic Stadium.
Despite Britain’s complex and often fraught ties with its former colonies, Elizabeth was widely respected and remained head of state of more than a dozen countries, from Canada to Tuvalu. She headed the 54-nation Commonwealth, built around the U.K. and its former British colonies.
In 2015, she overtook Queen Victoria, her great-great-grandmother, as the longest-serving monarch in British history, and in 2022 she became the second longest-reigning monarch in world history, behind 17th century French King Louis XIV, who took the throne at age 4.
She kept working well into her 10th decade, though Prince Charles and his elder son, Prince William, took over most of the visits, ribbon-cuttings and investitures that form the bulk of royal duties. The loss of Philip in 2021 was a heavy blow, as she poignantly sat alone at his funeral in the chapel at Windsor Castle.
The family troubles kept coming. Her son, Prince Andrew, was entangled in the sordid tale of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, an American businessman who had been a friend. Andrew denies accusations that he had sex with one of the women who said she was trafficked by Epstein.
The queen’s grandson, Prince Harry, walked away from Britain and his royal duties after marrying American actress Meghan Markle in 2018. He alleged in an interview that some in the family -– but pointedly not the queen -– had been less than welcoming to his wife.
She enjoyed robust health well into her 90s, though frailty eventually caught up with her. In October 2021, she spent a night in a London hospital for tests, and was later said by the palace to be experiencing “episodic mobility issues.”
She kept up virtual meetings with diplomats and politicians from Windsor Castle, but public duties grew rarer, though she made several appearances as the U.K. celebrated her Platinum Jubilee in June 2022.
Pragmatic to the end, she began to prepare the country for the transition to come. She let it be known that she wanted Charles’ wife Camilla to be known as “Queen Consort” when her son became king. It removed a question mark over the future role of the woman some blamed for the breakup of Charles’ marriage to Princess Diana in the 1990s.
In May 2022, she asked Charles to stand in for her and read the Queen’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament, one of the monarch’s most central constitutional duties.
But she remained firmly in control of the monarchy and at the center of national life as Britain marked her Platinum Jubilee with parties and pageants. Just 48 hours before her death, she presided at a ceremony at Balmoral Castle to appoint Truss as the 15th prime minister of her reign.
Seven decades after World War II, Elizabeth was again at the center of the national mood amid the uncertainty and loss of COVID 19 — a disease she came through herself in February 2022.
In April 2020 — with the country in lockdown and Prime Minister Boris Johnson hospitalized with the virus — she made a rare video address, urging people to stick together.
She summoned the spirit of World War II, that vital time in her life, and the nation’s, by echoing Vera Lynn’s wartime anthem “We’ll Meet Again.”
“We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again,” she said.
At Queen Square in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood stands an urn erected to commemorate Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. Etched on the ground around it are the words of poet Philip Larkin, written for that event in 1977, but which remained true decades later:
“In times when nothing stood
But worsened or grew strange,
There was one constant good
She did not change.”
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Associated Press writers Gregory Katz and Robert Barr contributed material before their deaths.
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Follow all AP stories on the British royals at https://apnews.com/hub/queen-elizabeth-ii.
Airlines, banks, hospitals and other risk-averse organizations around the world chose cybersecurity company CrowdStrike to protect their computer systems from hackers and data breaches.
But all it took was one faulty CrowdStrike software update to cause global disruptions Friday that grounded flights, knocked banks and media outlets offline, and disrupted hospitals, retailers and other services.
“This is a function of the very homogenous technology that goes into the backbone of all of our IT infrastructure,” said Gregory Falco, an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University. “What really causes this mess is that we rely on very few companies, and everybody uses the same folks, so everyone goes down at the same time.”
The trouble with the update issued by CrowdStrike and affecting computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system was not a hacking incident or cyberattack, according to CrowdStrike, which apologized and said a fix was on the way.
But it wasn’t an easy fix. It required “boots on the ground” to remediate, said Gartner analyst Eric Grenier.
“The fix is working, it’s just a very manual process and there’s no magic key to unlock it,” Grenier said. “I think that is probably what companies are struggling with the most here.”
While not everyone is a client of CrowdStrike and its platform known as Falcon, it is one of the leading cybersecurity providers, particularly in transportation, healthcare, banking and other sectors that have a lot at stake in keeping their computer systems working.
“They’re usually risk-averse organizations that don’t want something that’s crazy innovative, but that can work and also cover their butts when something goes wrong. That’s what CrowdStrike is,” Falco said. “And they’re looking around at their colleagues in other sectors and saying, ‘Oh, you know, this company also uses that, so I’m gonna need them, too.’”
Worrying about the fragility of a globally connected technology ecosystem is nothing new. It’s what drove fears in the 1990s of a technical glitch that could cause chaos at the turn of the millennium.
“This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time,” wrote Australian cybersecurity consultant Troy Hunt on the social platform X.
Across the world Friday, affected computers were showing the “blue screen of death” — a sign that something went wrong with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
But what’s different now is “that these companies are even more entrenched,” Falco said. “We like to think that we have a lot of players available. But at the end of the day, the biggest companies use all the same stuff.”
Founded in 2011 and publicly traded since 2019, CrowdStrike describes itself in its annual report to financial regulators as having “reinvented cybersecurity for the cloud era and transformed the way cybersecurity is delivered and experienced by customers.” It emphasizes its use of artificial intelligence in helping to keep pace with adversaries. It reported having 29,000 subscribing customers at the start of the year.
The Austin, Texas-based firm is one of the more visible cybersecurity companies in the world and spends heavily on marketing, including Super Bowl ads. At cybersecurity conferences, it’s known for large booths displaying massive action-figure statues representing different state-sponsored hacking groups that CrowdStrike technology promises to defend against.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz is among the most highly compensated in the world, recording more than $230 million in total compensation in the last three years. Kurtz is also a driver for a CrowdStrike-sponsored car racing team.
After his initial statement about the problem was criticized for lack of contrition, Kurtz apologized in a later social media post Friday and on NBC’s “Today Show.”
“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption,” he said on X.
Richard Stiennon, a cybersecurity industry analyst, said this was a historic mistake by CrowdStrike.
“This is easily the worst faux pas, technical faux pas or glitch of any security software provider ever,” said Stiennon, who has tracked the cybersecurity industry for 24 years.
While the problem is an easy technical fix, he said, it’s impact could be long-lasting for some organizations because of the hands-on work needed to fix each affected computer. “It’s really, really difficult to touch millions of machines. And people are on vacation right now, so, you know, the CEO will be coming back from his trip to the Bahamas in a couple of weeks and he won’t be able to use his computers.”
Stiennon said he did not think the outage revealed a bigger problem with the cybersecurity industry or CrowdStrike as a company.
“The markets are going to forgive them, the customers are going to forgive them, and this will blow over,” he said.
Forrester analyst Allie Mellen credited CrowdStrike for clearly telling customers what they need to do to fix the problem. But to restore trust, she said there will need to be a deeper look at what occurred and what changes can be made to prevent it from happening again.
“A lot of this is likely to come down to the testing and software development process and the work that they’ve put into testing these kinds of updates before deployment,” Mellen said. “But until we see the complete retrospective, we won’t know for sure what the failure was.”
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Associated Press writer Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.
Transport providers, businesses and governments on Saturday are rushing to get all their systems back online after long disruptions following a widespread technology outage.
The biggest continuing effect has been on air travel. Carriers canceled thousands of flights on Friday and now have many of their planes and crews in the wrong place, while airports facing continued problems with checking in and security.
At the heart of the massive disruption is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
Here’s the Latest:
Microsoft: 8.5 million devices on its Windows system were affected
Microsoft says 8.5 million devices running its Windows operating system were affected by a faulty cybersecurity update Friday that led to worldwide disruptions.
A Saturday blog post from Microsoft was the first estimate of the scope of the disruptions caused by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s software update.
“We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines,” said the blog post from Microsoft cybersecurity executive David Weston.
“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.”
Weston said such a significant disturbance is rare but “demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem.” Windows is the dominant operating system for personal computers around the world.
Austrian doctors’ group calls for better data protection for patients
In Austria, a leading doctors organization said the global IT outage exposed the vulnerability of health systems reliant on digital systems.
“Yesterday’s incidents underscore how important it is for hospitals to have analogue backups” to safeguard patient care, Harald Mayer, vice president of the Austrian Chamber of Doctors, said in a statement on the organization’s website.
The organization called on governments to impose high standards in patient data protection and security and on health providers to train staff and put systems in place to manage crises.
“Happily, where there were problems, these were kept small and short-lived and many areas of care were unaffected” in Austria, Mayer said.
Germany warns of scams after major IT outage
BERLIN — The German government’s IT security agency says numerous companies are still struggling with the consequences of a far-reaching technology outage.
“Many business processes and procedures have been disturbed by the breakdown of computer systems,” the BSI agency said on its website.
But the agency also said Saturday that many impacted areas have returned to normal.
It warned that cybercriminals were trying to take advantage of the situation through phishing, fake websites and other scams and that “unofficial” software code was in circulation.
The agency said it was not yet clear how faulty code ended up in the CrowdStrike software update blamed for triggering the outage.
European airports appear to be close to normal
LONDON — Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow, said it is busy but operating normally on Saturday. The airport said in a statement that “all systems are back up and running and passengers are getting on with their journeys smoothly.“
Some 167 flights scheduled to depart from U.K. airports on Friday were canceled, while 171 flights due to land were axed.
Meanwhile, flights at Berlin Airport were departing on or close to schedule, German news agency dpa reported, citing an airport spokesman.
Nineteen flights took off in the early hours of Saturday after authorities exempted them from the usual ban on night flights.
On Friday, 150 of the 552 scheduled inbound and outbound flights at the airport were canceled over the IT outage, disrupting the plans of thousands of passengers at the start of the summer vacation season in the German capital.
German hospital slowly restoring its systems after widespread cancellations
BERLIN — The Schleswig-Holstein University Hospital in northern Germany, which on Friday canceled all elective surgery because of the global IT outage, said Saturday that it was gradually restoring its systems.
In a statement on its website, it forecast that operations at its two branches in Kiel and Luebeck would return to normal by Monday and that “elective surgery can take place as planned and our ambulances can return to service.”
Britain’s transport system still trying to get back on track
LONDON — Britain’s travel and transport industries are struggling to get back on schedule after the global security outage with airline passengers facing cancellations and delays on the first day of summer holidays for many school pupils.
Gatwick Airport said “a majority” of scheduled flights were expected to take off. Manchester Airport said passengers were being checked in manually and there could be last-minute cancellations.
The Port of Dover said it was seeing an influx of displaced air passengers, with hourlong waits to enter the port to catch ferries to France.
Meanwhile, Britain’s National Cyber Security Center warned people and businesses to be on the lookout for phishing attempts as “opportunistic malicious actors” try to take advantage of the outage.
The National Cyber Security Center’s former head, Ciaran Martin, said the worst of the crisis was over, “because the nature of the crisis is that it went very wrong very quickly. It was spotted quite quickly and essentially it was turned off.”
He told Sky News that some businesses would be able to get back to normal very quickly, but for sectors such as aviation it would take longer.
“If you’re in aviation, you’ve got people, planes and staffs all stranded in the wrong place… So we are looking at days. I’d be surprised if we’re looking at weeks.”
Germany airline expects most of its flights to run normally
BERLIN — Eurowings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, said it expected to return to “largely scheduled” flight operations on Saturday.
On Friday, the global IT outage had forced the airline to cancel about 20% of its flights, mostly on domestic routes. Passengers were asked to take trains instead.
“Online check-in, check-in at the airport, boarding processes, booking and rebooking flights are all possible again,” the airline said Saturday on X. “However, due to the considerable extent of the global IT disruption there may still be isolated disruptions” for passengers, it said.
Delta Air Lines and its regional affiliates have canceled hundreds of flights
DALLAS — Delta Air Lines and its regional affiliates canceled more than a quarter of their schedule on the East Coast by midafternoon Friday, aviation data provider Cirium said.
More than 1,100 flights for Delta and its affiliates have been canceled.
United and United Express had canceled more than 500 flights, or 12% of their schedule, and American Airlines’ network had canceled 450 flights, 7.5% of its schedule.
Southwest and Alaska do not use the CrowdStrike software that led to the global internet outages and had canceled fewer than a half-dozen flights each.
Portland, Oregon, mayor declares an emergency over the outage
PORTLAND, Ore. — Mayor Ted Wheeler declared an emergency Friday after more than half of the city’s computer systems were affected by the global internet outage.
Wheeler said during a news conference that while emergency services calls weren’t interrupted, dispatchers were having to manually track 911 calls with pen and paper for a few hours. He said 266 of the city’s 487 computer systems were affected.
Border crossings into the US are delayed
SAN DIEGO — People seeking to enter the U.S. from both the north and the south found that the border crossings were delayed by the internet outage.
The San Ysidro Port of Entry was gridlocked Friday morning with pedestrians waiting three hours to cross, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Even cars with people approved for a U.S. Customers and Border Protection “Trusted Traveler” program for low-risk passengers waited up to 90 minutes. The program, known as SENTRI, moves passengers more quickly through customs and passport control if they make an appointment for an interview and submit to a background check to travel through customs and passport control more quickly when they arrive in the U.S.
Meanwhile, at the U.S.-Canada border, Windsor Police reported long delays at the crossings at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A rapidly growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers called Friday for President Joe Biden to drop his reelection bid, even as the president insisted he’s ready to return to the campaign trail next week to counter what he called a “dark vision” laid out by Republican Donald Trump.
As more Democratic members of Congress urged him to drop out — bringing the total since his disastrous debate against Trump to nearly three dozen — Biden remained isolated at his beach house in Delaware after being diagnosed with COVID-19. The president, who has insisted he can beat Trump, was huddling with family and relying on a few longtime aides as he resisted efforts to shove him aside.
Late Friday, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who is in a tough race for reelection, called for Biden to step aside.
Brown said in a statement that he agrees with “the many Ohioans” who have reached out to him. “I think the president should end his campaign,” he said.
And in a statement later Friday, Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Ky., also called on Biden to drop out while saying, “there is no joy in the recognition he should not be our nominee in November. But the stakes of this election are too high.”
Biden said Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showcased a “dark vision for the future.” The president, seeking to move the political conversation away from his fate and onto his rival’s agenda, said Friday he was planning to return to the campaign trail next week and insisted he has a path to victory over Trump, despite the worries of some of his party’s most eminent members.
“Together, as a party and as a country, we can and will defeat him at the ballot box,” Biden said. “The stakes are high, and the choice is clear. Together, we will win.”
Earlier in the day, his campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillion, acknowledged “slippage” in support for the president but insisted he’s “absolutely” remaining in the race and the campaign sees “multiple paths” to beating Trump.
“We have a lot of work to do to reassure the American people that, yes, he’s old, but he can win,” she told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show. She said voters concerned about Biden’s fitness to lead aren’t switching to vote for Trump.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee’s rulemaking arm held a meeting Friday, pressing ahead with plans for a virtual roll call before Aug. 7 to nominate the presidential pick, ahead of the party’s convention later in the month in Chicago.
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“President Biden deserves the respect to have important family conversations with members of the caucus and colleagues in the House and Senate and Democratic leadership and not be battling leaks and press statements,” Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, Biden’s closest friend in Congress and his campaign co-chair, told The Associated Press.
It’s a pivotal few days for the president and his party: Trump has wrapped up an enthusiastic Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday. And Democrats, racing time, are considering the extraordinary possibility of Biden stepping aside for a new presidential nominee before their own convention.
Among the democrats expressing worries to allies about Biden’s chances were former President Barack Obama and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, who has privately told Biden the party could lose the ability to seize control of the House if he doesn’t step aside.
New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich called on Biden to exit the race, making him the third Senate Democrat to do so.
“By passing the torch, he would secure his legacy as one of our nation’s greatest leaders and allow us to unite behind a candidate who can best defeat Donald Trump and safeguard the future of our democracy,” said Heinrich, who’s up for reelection.
And Reps. Jared Huffman, Mark Veasey, Chuy Garcia and Mark Pocan, representing a wide swath of the caucus, together called on Biden to step aside.
“We must defeat Donald Trump to save our democracy,” they wrote.
Separately, Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois wrote in an op-ed that with “a heavy heart and much personal reflection” he, too, was calling on Biden to “pass the torch to a new generation.”
Campaign officials said Biden was even more committed to staying in the race. And senior West Wing aides have had no internal discussions or conversations with the president about dropping out.
On Friday, Biden picked up a key endorsement from the political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. CHC BOLD PAC said the Biden administration has shown “unwavering commitment” to Latinos and “the stakes couldn’t be higher” in this election.
But there is also time to reconsider. Biden has been told the campaign is having trouble raising money, and key Democrats see an opportunity as he is away from the campaign for a few days to encourage his exit. Among his Cabinet, some are resigned to the likelihood of him losing in November.
The reporting in this story is based in part on information from almost a dozen people who insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive private deliberations. The Washington Post first reported on Obama’s involvement.
Biden, 81, tested positive for COVID-19 while traveling in Las Vegas earlier this week and experienced “mild symptoms” including “general malaise” from the infection, the White House said.
White House doctor Kevin O’Connor said Friday that the president still had a dry cough and hoarseness, but that his COVID symptoms had improved.
Biden noted his illness while making a joke about Trump on social media Friday night, posting: “I’m stuck at home with COVID, so I had the distinct misfortune of watching Donald Trump’s speech to the RNC. What the hell was he talking about?”
In Congress, Democratic lawmakers have begun having private conversations about lining up behind Harris as an alternative. One lawmaker said Biden’s own advisers are unable to reach a unanimous recommendation about what he should do. More in Congress are considering joining the others who have called for Biden to drop out. Some prefer an open process for choosing a new presidential nominee.
“It’s clear the issue won’t go away,” said Vermont Sen. Peter Welch, the other Senate Democrat who has publicly said Biden should exit the race. Welch said the current state of party angst — with lawmakers panicking and donors revolting — was “not sustainable.”
However, influential Democrats including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries are sending signals of concern.
“There is of course work to be done, and that in fact is the case because we are an evenly divided country,” Jeffries said in an interview on WNYC radio Friday.
But he also said, “The ticket that exists right now is the ticket that we can win on. … It’s his decision to make.”
To be sure, many want Biden to stay in the race. But among Democrats nationwide, nearly two-thirds say Biden should step aside and let his party nominate a different candidate, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. That sharply undercuts Biden’s post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still with him.
Amid the turmoil, a majority of Democrats think Vice President Kamala Harris would make a good president herself.
A poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 6 in 10 Democrats believe Harris would do a good job in the top slot. About 2 in 10 Democrats don’t believe she would, and another 2 in 10 say they don’t know enough to say.
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Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, Ellen Knickmeyer in Aspen, Colorado, Steve Peoples in Milwaukee, and Josh Boak, Will Weissert, Mary Clare Jalonick, Seung Min Kim and Stephen Groves in Washington contributed to this report.
