Joe Biden continues to fight.

With his party in turmoil due to questions about his age and political effectiveness, Biden emphasized in a press conference on Thursday evening that he will not resign.

If I slow down [and] can no longer get my work done – that is a sign I shouldn't be doing it," he said at the end of this week's NATO summit. "But so far there is no indication of that. None.

However, there was a significant slip-up when he referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as "Vice President Trump" and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as "President Putin".

Nevertheless, the 81-year-old president hopes that his performance will be sufficient to prevent a full-scale revolt within the Democrats against his candidacy, which has been simmering since his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump last month.

Even if he gains a temporary reprieve, the Democratic Party is in a crisis that splits its members between Biden supporters and critics, threatening party unity less than four months before the November election.

The Democrats had hoped to turn the election into a referendum on Trump's character – and even on the future of democracy in America. Instead, the chaos within the party regarding Biden's future is likely to further benefit Trump, who is already leading in the polls in the battleground states.

A party that has become accustomed to watching the Republicans' internal chaos over Trump's leadership now finds itself facing a mix of division and desperation over whether it should try to oust Biden.

Every single Democrat I spoke to, and I spoke to about 1,000 in the past week, thinks the same: We are totally, totally finished," says a person from the White House environment.

There is no way that [Biden] can win this election, there is no way that he can handle the case against Trump. If it became a referendum on Biden, we would always lose. And that's exactly what's happening," the person adds.

For many Democrats, the isolation of the White House and Biden's close circle of advisors keeping him in the race and holding onto power are overwhelmingly to blame.

I feel like I'm screaming into the void. We are willingly walking into a bear's den," says a party strategist. "We have a team in the presidential room that has looked at all the options and decided that murder-suicide is the way to go. And that's pretty terrifying.

A big problem for the Democrats regarding the crisis around their candidate is that it distracts attention from Trump's weaknesses.

The opportunity costs of every minute the Democrats do not take action against Trump are enormous," says Paul Begala, the experienced party strategist.

When Biden launched his re-election campaign in April 2023, Democrats on Capitol Hill overwhelmingly gave him the benefit of the doubt regarding his ability to defeat Trump. Although they had some reservations about his age, these were overshadowed by his record in office, including his transformative economic policies and his foreign policy, particularly the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

But Biden's miserable performance in the TV debate – which the Democrats had hoped would highlight Trump's mistakes – dealt a devastating blow to the party's confidence in his ability to win the campaign and serve four more years in the Oval Office.

When NATO allies met in Washington midweek, dissatisfaction with Biden reached a peak. By Friday morning, the number of dissenters had increased to at least 18 Democratic representatives in the House and one in the Senate, who were demanding a new candidate.

Some of the criticism was as sharp as it was sobering. "Joe Biden's record of public service is unparalleled. His achievements are immense. His legacy as a great president is secure. He must not risk this legacy, these achievements, and American democracy to continue in the face of the horrors promised by Donald Trump," said Jim Himes, the Congressman from Connecticut and Chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

But Biden still has determined defenders, especially among Black and Hispanic lawmakers.

What you see is a circular firing squad – the dumbest thing I've ever seen," says Juan Vargas, a Democratic Representative from California, to the Financial Times. "We have a candidate who has done a fantastic job as president – and another who has become a criminal. And we're taking down the one who has done a fantastic job. I mean, how stupid can we be? It's literally like playing a football game and tackling your own quarterback.

Brad Sherman, another Californian Democrat, says that the representatives are divided between those who chant "Go with Joe" and those who say "Joe must go" – but most will be watching Biden's public comments very closely in the coming days. Biden will travel to Michigan for a rally on Friday and to Texas on Monday, where he will be interviewed by NBC.

There are very few of us who could not be swayed by an extremely good or extremely bad series of performances next week," says Sherman.

What is crucial is that the leaders of the Democratic Party – including Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House of Representatives – have supported Biden less than unequivocally in the past week. Barack Obama, the former President, has been silent in recent days.

Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House and one of the most influential veteran members of the party, said on MSNBC on Wednesday that Biden needs to make a "decision" and subtly suggested that he might reconsider his candidacy. "She didn't exert pressure. She created permission. Very clever," says Begala. "You don't tell an Irishman to move along, because then he'll just dig in his heels.

At the core of Democratic anxiety about Biden are poll data showing that the president's path to victory is becoming increasingly narrow. Since the debate, Trump has gained a 1.9 percentage point lead over Biden on the national level, according to the average from Fivethirtyeight.com, and is ahead in all swing states.

This is the lowest point imaginable for the Biden campaign," says David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, a nonpartisan political analysis group in Washington.

The danger for many Democrats in the House and Senate races is that if Democratic voters feel their party has no chance of winning the presidency, they will stay home on Election Day.

If a sense of fatalism sets in over the election results and Democratic voter turnout is poor, it could be catastrophic for the Democrats," added Wasserman. "We could see Trump winning some states that were still safe for Biden in 2020," such as Maine, New Hampshire, and New Mexico.

The Biden campaign is pushing back against such bleak assessments. "We have multiple paths to 270 electoral votes," wrote Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign manager, in a fundraising email on Thursday. "Currently, winning the Blue Wall states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – is the clearest route to this goal, but we also believe that the Sun Belt states [Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia] are not out of reach.

During his press conference, Biden said he would only reconsider his candidacy if he was told he couldn't win. "They don't say that. No poll says that," the President said.

However, this comment was immediately challenged by David Axelrod, Obama's former political strategist who has often been critical of Biden, as illusory. "It sounds like Biden's team hasn't been very open with him about what the data shows: The age issue is a big and potentially insurmountable problem and his chances of winning are very, very slim," Axelrod said on social media.

Either [Biden] is delusional about his political standing, or his team is delusional, or they are selectively showing him things," said a Democratic strategist. "The great frustration is how little the White House political team seems to know about the president's standing at the moment.

Even if Biden continues his candidacy, the viability of his campaign could suffer if Democratic donors withdraw their support. Biden suffered a setback this week when George Clooney, the actor who hosted a fundraiser in California for the president last month, urged him to drop out of the race.

Ning Mosberger-Tang, the leader of a donor collective focused on climate change, says Biden's age is "a fundamental problem that cannot be talked away." She summarizes the bleak mood among the donors: "If the Democrats lose the White House, they are likely to also lose the House and the Senate, which have the power to confirm Supreme Court justices.

I am very worried," says Mosberger-Tang. "We may disagree with the strategy on who should be running as the presidential candidate. But I think we all agree that we are at a very, very critical point, which could lead to an irreversible outcome – the loss of democracy for a very long time.

One of the biggest questions surrounding Biden's decision is whether a replacement would fare better against Trump. The president would most likely hand the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris, but her poll numbers have also been weak, raising doubts about her own chances of winning.

We know that she would be subjected to racism and misogyny, which would not be the case for him [Biden]. [But] we know that she would advance the case against Trump more effectively, because she is simply good at it and he has really gotten bad at it," says the person from the White House circle. "What we don't know is what is worse or better.

Sherman, the California representative, says, "if you want to change horses in midstream, it is easier to switch to the adjacent horse" – suggesting that Harris would be the standard choice over other Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, or Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. But regardless of what happens, he warns: "Any process that deviates from Biden is chaotic and bloody.