Amid a growing cascade of calls for President Joe Biden to step down as Democratic nominee, Virginia Senator Mark Warner broke ground last week as the first elected official to publicly signal his openness to such a possibility from within the Senate. Reports emerged over the weekend that Warner has started to organise discussions among senators to “talk about Biden’s future”, with an eye to asking him to withdraw from the race.

A huddle was scheduled for Monday but was abruptly called off, since the news leak “made it impossible for there to be a private conversation”. However, such conversations will almost certainly take place informally as the Senate reconvenes this week, until another meeting can be arranged.

Though the sentiment may have been conveyed diplomatically by Warner’s office, it is one pregnant with significance. Because while the House has seen a handful of Democrats break ranks with the President (four more representatives joined their ranks on Sunday), so far no one else in the upper chamber has openly made gestures in that direction. Should Warner be able to convince others, it would allow for a sea change within the party leadership. His manoeuvres come as a high-stakes interview with George Stephanopoulos failed to move the needle on perceptions about Biden’s fitness for office.

The Virginia lawmaker, who is seen as an affable centrist, has reportedly been talking to colleagues since the night of Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Warner has raised questions about whether Biden as nominee will bring incumbent blue senators down with him in the coming election, potentially putting Democratic control of the Senate in jeopardy and knee-capping the party’s ability to play the part of an effective opposition should Trump be elected to a second term.

It is always a troubling sign for a party in power when it begins to think about the next campaign in terms of what can be saved rather than what can be gained, as we just saw with Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives in the UK. Yet Warner is probably right to start asking such discomfiting questions in the summer rather than in the autumn when it will be exponentially more difficult to get rid of the nominee post-Convention.

The last time the Democrats were in a roughly comparable situation may have been in the chaotic year of 1968, but then-incumbent Lyndon Johnson had been wise enough to withdraw that March. To have this level of division over an incumbent nominee this late in the game is unprecedented for modern Democrats.

To those scoffing at the seemingly negligible size of the dissenting chorus (after all, one Senator and a few Representatives may not be much to go on), Axios reports that beneath the image of calm there are many more voices in Congress who are “close to speaking out or signing letters telling Biden it should be over”. National polling trends suggest that concerns around Biden’s ability to run and govern continue to be prevalent among the voting public, with 80% saying he is too old to run according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll — a figure largely unchanged from pre-debate polling.

Notwithstanding a recent bump recorded in Biden’s favour among swing states, his campaign has struggled to overcome the larger narrative around age. The following weeks will be critical for determining the shape of the November race and Biden’s place in it. The President’s appeal to the party establishment had always been his reputation as a safe bet: he had never been the most inspiring choice but he had been one of them for so long, after all. His experience and longevity, as well as relative lack of political liabilities, meant that he was the candidate of absolute minimal risk in the last presidential election, despite signs of senility creeping in.

Now, that equation has been turned on its head. It was, of course, the US Senate that elevated Biden to national prominence so many years ago and it may just be the same body which now pushes him into the political abyss. Et tu Warner?

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Senior Editor at American Affairs.

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