Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said that Democrats should be panicked about President Joe Biden’s debate performance on Thursday night, calling it a “Defcon 1 moment” — meaning the party needed to be at its maximum state of readiness to make a change.

Plouffe made the remarks during an MSNBC interview with far-left host Rachel Maddow when he was asked for his personal take and what he was hearing from top Democrats.

“Well, I think consistent with your reaction, Rachel and others on the panel, it’s kind of a Defcon 1 moment,” he said. “Listen, I’ve been deeply involved in presidential campaign debates. Some went well, some didn’t go well. The only thing that matters, and you won’t really know for three or four days, is how the voters that will decide this election will react.”

He said that voters’ concerns about Biden’s age and fitness for office were “compounded tonight” by his poor performance.

“So what the campaign’s going to do is try and run ads,” he said. “Biden will go out tomorrow and the next day be aggressive. … But the concern level is quite high. This is a race that it reminds me a little bit of 2012, but in reverse.”

“We had a small, significantly important lead in battleground states,” he said. “We had a really bad first debate race tightening, but we’re okay. Biden is behind narrowly right now. He’s the one that has to change the equation here. And the biggest barrier that’s keeping his ceiling too low is concerns about age. And I think that’s a tragedy because I think Trump had so many openings that you could have just scissored him up on tonight.”

“And Biden did have a couple of big moments,” he claimed without providing examples, “but I think at the end of the day, the overwhelming reaction again, it doesn’t matter, quite frankly, what people like us say, it’s what voters say. And if they were already concerned about his effort, and the way I think about it is, sadly, it’s really pains me to say this. They’re three years apart. They seemed about 30 years apart tonight. And I think that’s going to be the thing that, voters really wrestle with coming out of this.”

WATCH:

David Plouffe, former senior advisor to Barack Obama, on Joe Biden’s debate performance: It was a “DEFCON 1 moment”pic.twitter.com/4xUt3PJLHM

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 28, 2024