Katie Glueck and Alexander Burns

Altogether, it has added up to the most assertive attempt by Biden and his camp to extinguish questions about his son’s business activities since Trump began raising them as a campaign issue, often in false or exaggerated terms.

What remains to be seen is whether Biden can put those issues to rest on a far bigger stage — at the CNN/New York Times Democratic primary debate in central Ohio on Tuesday night.

As fierce as Biden’s efforts have been since the start of the weekend, he has in some ways raised as many questions as he has answered. If his family intends to shun foreign business in the event that he becomes president — as Hunter Biden said he would Sunday — voters may wonder why they did not do it far sooner, when Joe Biden was conducting foreign diplomacy as vice president.

Perhaps most of all, anxious Democratic leaders are looking to the former vice president for a sign on the debate stage that all of this is not coming too late in this campaign to make a difference — to quash the undercurrent of doubt among some Democratic strategists, activists, donors and voters that Biden is really ready for a general-election fight against a president prepared to scorch and smear his way to a second term.

“I’m a little worried about how Joe’s going to do if he were to get on a debate stage with the president, a little worried he’d be able to get him rattled,” said Tom Courtney, the co-chairman of the Des Moines County Democrats in Iowa, a state where the Biden campaign has made substantial investments. “I would like to see him quit getting bogged down in little things. This guy has got way more experience than all the other candidates up there. He needs to take charge and show that.”

Biden is hardly the only candidate who faces high stakes in Tuesday’s debate. Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78, the oldest candidate in the race, suffered a heart attack. He now faces significant questions about his age and stamina at a moment when he consistently trails Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in many national polls. Warren, a new front-runner, is all but certain to confront more scrutiny from other candidates onstage, which would put to the test her ability to weather sharper criticism in the national spotlight.

But no one among the 12 candidates in the debate has faced as many challenges as Biden — some of them self-inflicted, and some created by a president in full attack mode, seizing on Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings in an attempt to tarnish the former vice president. After responding tentatively at first, Biden has steadily increased his counterattacks against Trump.

At a news conference in Altoona, Iowa, on Sunday, Biden ferociously defended his family, tore into “lying President” Trump and issued several oblique swipes at members of the Trump family, who have their own records of overseas business dealings.

Biden himself has pledged to be more assertive in Tuesday’s debate, acknowledging at a fundraiser last week that “I’ve got to be more aggressive” and adding, “I’m not complaining, I’m a big boy.”

“When he says, ‘I’m going to be more forceful and active on the stage,’ I think he means he’s not going to let people misrepresent his record, and in particular, he’s going to take it to Trump because I think he’s had enough,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a Biden ally.

Biden enters the debate having endured perhaps the worst month of his candidacy, a period defined by his slow and halting pushback against Trump — a hesitancy some early-state Democratic voters have noticed — and a time-consuming scramble for campaign donations at the end of a less than commanding fundraising quarter. Biden is more reliant on high-dollar fundraisers than his leading rivals, a requirement that took him largely out of public view for days, just as Trump was amplifying his false claims about Hunter Biden’s business dealings overseas.

Steve Snyder, a college professor from Des Moines, expressed respect for Biden as he waited for Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, to address a shivering crowd gathered outside a Des Moines high school on Saturday night. But, noting the pace of the president’s broadsides against Biden, he said that the Biden campaign appeared to be “slow-footing” their response, even as he acknowledged the challenges of responding to Trump.

“This isn’t a typical campaign,” said Snyder, who said he is leaning toward supporting Warren. “This is information warfare. They’re just not responding quick enough.”

Asked to address concerns that Biden’s message was getting drowned out, a view which was shared by some other Iowa voters, Biden’s campaign spokesman, T.J. Ducklo, said in a statement Sunday that Biden “will continue punching back hard against Donald Trump’s pathetic and increasingly unhinged behavior, while also keeping the focus on issues where Trump has failed middle class families, like rising health care costs and the urgent climate crisis.”

He also cited Biden’s standing in recent polls, arguing that “these attacks aren’t working with Democratic voters.” Biden’s numbers have generally remained steady at the national level since the controversy over Ukraine broke open last month.

Yet Biden, who months ago held a commanding edge over his rivals, has nearly lost his lead in primary polls, having dipped well below 30% in The New York Times national polling average. He is barely ahead of Warren in that ranking, which gauges national support, and he is tied with her, or trailing, in three of the four early-voting states. While Biden maintains a powerful bloc of support in the race, built on the loyalty of African-American voters and moderate whites, that coalition has been shrinking rather than growing — a trend he must reverse if he is to become the nominee.

Biden raised $15.2 million in the third quarter, a sturdy sum but far less than what Sanders and Warren collected. He also trails Buttigieg, who has become a cause célèbre for many party donors.

And Biden has declined to reveal how much money he had in the bank at the end of September, raising concerns among his supporters that he may not have the cash reserves required to defend his dwindling lead. He is legally required to disclose that figure by the end of Tuesday, a coincidence that makes the evening of the debate a moment of truth for his campaign in more ways than one.

The debate, his allies acknowledge, is perhaps his best chance to reassure his supporters and regain some momentum in the race. That would likely require a feat Biden has not accomplished so far in this race: a thoroughly forceful debate performance, free of missteps or flustered responses to predictable criticism from his Democratic opponents.

“He needs to figure out how he wants to handle all this Trump noise,” said Jeff Link, a veteran Iowa Democratic strategist. “He’s got to find a way to basically say to the audience, ‘There’s only one guy that Trump is worried about and is attacking, and let me tell you what I’m going to do about it.’”

This article originally appeared in

What Joe Biden Needs to Do at the Next Debate

WESTERVILLE, Ohio — In the last few days, Joe Biden has unveiled a new government ethics plan and vowed that his family members would do no business overseas during a Biden presidency. His son, Hunter Biden, said he would step down from his role with a Chinese investment firm, and sat for his first television interview of the campaign. And in Iowa, the elder Biden delivered a fist-pounding diatribe against President Donald Trump, casting him as the embodiment of public corruption.

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Katie Glueck and Alexander Burns

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What Joe Biden Needs to Do at the Next Debate