Over the course of his long career, President Joe Biden has overcome personal tragedy and political odds, and he has used his resilience to power his ambition. But now that he is in the fight of his political life, his irrepressible pursuit of the comeback risks looking like blind defiance in the face of a rising tide.

“You’ve been wrong about everything so far,” Biden told a group of reporters who asked him on Friday why he still felt he was the best person to defeat former President Donald Trump, after a dismal debate performance in Atlanta plunged his campaign into crisis.

“You were wrong about 2020. You were wrong about 2022. We were going to get wiped out — remember the red wave,” he said, referring to an expected wave of Republican gains that never materialised in the midterm elections. Instead, Democrats did far better than expected, a decisive factor in Biden’s decision to run for a second term.

He took that spirit with him into a 22-minute ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday, in which he was asked about his approval rating of 36 per cent. “Well, I don’t believe that’s my approval rating,” Biden said. “That’s not what our polls show.”

In an effort to turn out his supporters, the President is scheduled to attend several campaign events in Pennsylvania with the First Lady on Sunday.

The comeback-kid mythology that Biden has built over a half century in politics is colliding with a new reality, where he is not being held up as a fighter who overcomes obstacles but is accused by his critics of putting his own ego ahead of the country. His denial of polls, voter concerns and growing calls among Democrats for him to leave the race have left some in his party with a quandary about how aggressively to try to persuade him to change course, with time running short to make a change.

For Biden, the phrase “when you get knocked down, you get back up” is not simply a campaign ad. It is a key to understanding how he views himself. He sees himself as the scrappy, average-Joe politician who has been constantly overlooked, underestimated and counted out. To him, the naysayers are as necessary to his story as the supporters.

And he does have supporters who say they still believe in him, including governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat of California who visited a Biden campaign office in Pittsburgh on Friday to boost morale among volunteers in a crucial state. But even Newsom, who has been full-throated with his support since the moment Biden exited the debate stage 10 days ago, was clear about the stakes: “This is a really important week and weekend. None of us are naive about the pivot after that debate.”

Campaign officials said before the debate that Biden’s performance, good or bad, would not cause polls to crater.

“This was always going to be a close race,” said Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesperson, “and the dynamics at play are the ones we’ve long anticipated: Voters continue to be deeply concerned by Donald Trump and his harmful agenda, and the more we engage and reach out to voters, the more they support President Biden.”

New York Times News Service