A high-ranking official within the Biden-Harris campaign is pushing back on reports that Vice President Kamala Harris is preparing to take over for President Joe Biden following his weak debate performance last week.

Principal Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks emphatically told CNN that such reports are categorically “false.”

The denial comes amid reports that Biden himself has told close aides and allies he is weighing whether to remain in the race following his shaky performance, during which he appeared confused, vacant, and unable to enunciate his words clearly during responses to debate questions.

Fulks reiterated his denial in a follow-up interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. Such claims are “unequivocally false,” Fulks said.

Despite the Biden-Harris campaign denials regarding Biden’s future, the results of internal Democratic polling leaked to a D.C.-focused news organization were more bad news for him after his debate. According to Puck News, Biden is losing even more ground to Trump in the battleground states, but the polling also shows that reliably blue states that have voted Democrat for decades are in play.

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The nonprofit OpenLabs “conducts polling and message-testing for a constellation of Democratic groups, including the 501(c)4 nonprofit associated with Future Forward, the preferred Super PAC for Biden’s reelection campaign,” veteran political journalist and former CNN correspondent Peter Hamby wrote. OpenLabs is a Democrat/left polling firm.

Hamby wrote that the data found that 40 percent of voters who supported Biden in 2020 now think he should leave the race. An OpenLabs poll in May had that number at only 25 percent.

“This is, of course, only a single poll, conducted during the initial aftershocks of the debate. It will take a few weeks to determine if Biden’s slippage in the polls is a trend and not a blip,” he wrote. “But given their reputation inside the party and connections to Future Forward, OpenLabs is a firm that Democratic campaigns take seriously.”

“In the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania, Biden now trails by 7 points, compared to 5 points before the debate,” Hamby wrote. “He has also dropped in Michigan, where he now trails Trump by 7. OpenLabs also found that he is now losing by roughly 10 points in Georgia and Arizona, and by almost 9 points in Nevada.”

As bad as that is for Biden, it gets worse.

“Biden is now only winning by a fraction of a point in Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, and New Mexico — and he’s now only winning Colorado by around 2 points,” Hamby wrote.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has reportedly informed the Biden campaign that the president’s poor debate performance last Thursday may have cost him the electoral votes of her state. She also denied rumors that she was considering running as a replacement on the 2024 Democratic ticket.

A source told Politico that Whitmer called Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon on Friday night with an “unambiguous SOS” and said Biden could no longer win her state. She has since publicly denied that report.

“Anyone who claims I would say that we can’t win Michigan is full of s–t. Let’s go,” Whitmer’s campaign account on X snapped back Monday afternoon.

A separate report published this week claimed that Biden never started prepping for his debate before 11 a.m. and was always “given time for an afternoon nap each day.”

“In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The report said there were incidents where Biden misspoke about military aid to Ukraine, froze up at a Juneteenth event, appeared confused at a D-Day anniversary event in France, and even forgot the name of his own secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.

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