Anita Dunn, a former senior adviser to President Joe Biden, thought his June 27 debate performance wasn’t the reason for his campaign’s demise.

The nightmare event would have been salvageable, Dunn said, but that the media’s reaction and the way Democrats turned on him and pressured him to abandon seeking reelection was what tipped him over the edge. Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21, less than a month after he debated former President Donald Trump.

“It was a bad debate, but it didn’t feel catastrophic at all, certainly in terms of voters,” Dunn told Politico. “This campaign had been fairly static for a long time, and the debate didn’t change that. What did change it was 24 days of unremitting negative, horrible attacks on Joe Biden … from his own party and from the press.”

While the political world agreed Biden’s performance on June 27 signaled a huge problem for Democrats, Dunn said she thought voters’ distaste for Trump would have been enough to help the president ride out the storm.

“Voters didn’t particularly like Biden’s performance in the first half hour,” Dunn said. “He wasn’t scoring well at all. But it’s not as though they walked out. They very much liked a lot of the second half of the debate for Joe Biden. They hated Donald Trump.”

Biden had been caught in the crossfire from both parties accusing him of being too old to take the mantle of the party in 2024. His debate performance reinforced a narrative that he was too old and made many mental errors.

Dunn thought he could have held on afterward, especially given his low point in 2020 after losing the first three primary contests and rebounding to win the presidential nomination.

Dunn and Biden’s campaign teams thought they could run out the clock on criticism, but Democratic power players such as Reps. Hakeem Jeffries’s (D-NY) and Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) doubts proved too loud to overcome.

Dunn no longer works for the Biden White House, recently transitioning into a new role with the Future Forward PAC that aims to elect Harris.

Dunn appears to have played a key role in pushing for the debate that wound up sinking Biden. Despite skepticism about why Democrats wanted to do the presidential debates earlier than tradition, Dunn said there was a clear strategy in mind.

“There were a couple of reasons [why we wanted the debates earlier],” Dunn said.

“One is that the race was fully formed quite early, that Biden was the nominee of the Democratic Party, and Trump was going to be the nominee of the Republican Party. Trump was not getting the kind of scrutiny that we felt he deserved, in terms of what he was saying, the policies that he was proposing and the media was trying to figure out how to cover him,” she said.

Dunn had no doubts the president would perform well, citing he “won both debates in 2020” and that he “performed brilliantly” in a hostile environment for his State of the Union.

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Since Harris took Biden’s place as the Democratic nominee, a surge of enthusiasm has coursed through the party. Fundraising has boomed, and more volunteers have joined the Democratic cause. Polls have shown Harris outperforming Biden against Trump.

Biden may have held on if the media and his own party hadn’t turned against him, but his dismissal has appeared to have improved the party’s chances in November.