“That was painful,” said Van Jones, a Democratic political analyst for CNN. “I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now.”

Andrew Yang, who debated Biden as a presidential primary candidate for the Democrats in 2020, echoed the sentiment.

“What’s Joe Biden’s superpower? That he’s a good guy who will do the right thing for the country,” he said. “In this case, that’s stepping aside and letting the [Democratic National Convention] choose another nominee.”

And David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to former president Barack Obama, was equally blunt.

“There are gonna be discussions about whether he should continue,” he said.

This stoush was always Donald Trump’s to lose.

Indeed, as Biden stepped onto the stage at CNN’s studios in Atlanta, polls showed only 38 per cent of Americans believed he was doing a good job as president, with Trump nudging ahead in key battleground states – despite his newfound status as a convicted criminal.

The president had sought this historically early debate hoping to build fresh momentum to make November’s election less of a referendum on him, and more of a choice about two starkly different visions for the future.

He had even spent a week prepping for the debate with a team of advisers. But by the end of the 90-minute prime-time event, Biden hadn’t allayed concerns about his age at all – he had made his age the central focus for voters.

With only weeks until the Democratic National Convention in August – when the party formally nominates Biden as their candidate – members are now facing a crisis.

Do they continue with the incumbent president, knowing there’s always the risk of Trump returning to power?

Or do they ask him to step aside in favour of a younger candidate? The party has no shortage of new generation options, starting of course with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is theoretically next in line, along with Biden surrogates such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

However, no incumbent president has dropped out this late in the campaign cycle, and it is not quite clear what might happen in such a scenario.

Trump, meanwhile, didn’t exactly put on a stellar performance either. He consistently evaded answering questions directly, repeatedly lied or exaggerated about issues such as the border crisis, abortion and climate change, and got increasingly nasty as the night wore on.

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” he quipped as Biden, who has a stutter, struggled to make a point. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

After the debate, it was left to Harris to clean up the mess, admitting that the president had a “slow start” but ended with a “strong finish”.

“I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last 3½ years,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, when repeatedly pressed about the panic in her party.

The tragedy is that Biden has indeed had many policy achievements over the past 3½ years – but very few of them would have cut through to the millions of viewers watching tonight.

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