President Biden’s top campaign official is expected to hold a crucial conference call with donors on Monday to try to convince them that Mr. Biden can still win the race against former President Donald J. Trump.
The call with the House Finance Committee, hastily scheduled for Sunday, is the Biden campaign’s most formal attempt to quell panic among major donors since Thursday’s debate.
Some individual donors have received direct communications from campaign officials, and Biden fundraisers say the communication intensified over the weekend, according to people familiar with the conversations. Monday’s call will be hosted by Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair.
Preserving the donor base will be essential for the president to stay in the race, many of Mr. Biden’s allies acknowledged.
Mr. Biden holed up at Camp David Monday morning as his team remained determined to stay in the race despite last week’s debacle. He plans to return to the White House Monday night.
Biden’s family and friends spent the weekend urging Biden to keep fighting, even as some Democrats and others called on him to step aside. At the White House and within the campaign, advisers tried to keep things moving as usual, issuing press releases about student loans and the president’s overtime policy.
But the week promised to be anything but ordinary.
Mr. Biden and his campaign aides are bracing for poll results this week that could show whether the choppy, disjointed debate performance has caused his support to plummet less than five months before Election Day.
Biden and his advisers discussed over the weekend whether the president could find a forum to address the fallout from the debate in person, either by holding a news conference or giving interviews. But both options carry political risks, and no decision had been made as of Monday morning.
His campaign on Monday aired its first television ad since the debate, in which Mr. Biden focuses on his rival and claims that Mr. Trump lied repeatedly during the debate.
“Did you see Trump last night?” the president was seen saying during his speech in North Carolina the day after the debate. “I mean it sincerely: That’s the most lies I’ve ever told in a single debate. He lied about the great economy that he created. He lied about the pandemic that he ruined.”
The ad ends with the president saying, “I know, as millions of Americans know, that when you fall down, you get back up.”
In his speech Friday, Mr. Biden delivered a more forceful and disciplined speech at the rally in North Carolina. Some of his political allies said they hoped to see more such protests to show that the president still has the stamina to serve as president for the next five years.
“He has to be extremely aggressive, much more aggressive than he has been in public,” Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way, a Democratic think tank, told CNN. “He has to hold town hall meetings with voters. He has to talk to reporters. He has to do television interviews. He has to do press conferences. He has to prove that this was just a bad night and not a pattern.”
But the president’s schedule for the coming week suggests he won’t follow that advice. Instead, he’ll work three days a week at the White House, with few events and no campaign rallies.
On Tuesday, he is scheduled to attend a briefing on extreme weather and a private campaign fundraiser. On Wednesday, he will host a Medal of Honor ceremony. And on Thursday, he will celebrate the Fourth of July with members of the military.
He has no events scheduled at the White House on Friday, when he is scheduled to return home to Wilmington, Delaware.
