After the first debate between US President Joe Biden and his presumptive challenger Donald Trump last Thursday night, it's no exaggeration to say that the liberal-leaning part of the country was in despair.

Again and again throughout the night, Biden sounded frail and delivered sentences that made no sense. Social media users joked that Vice President Kamala Harris should be "subbed in" during commercial breaks, and that the debate resembled a humiliating family fight.

Since then, Biden has blamed his performance on exhaustion from extensive international travel before the debate, and a little bit of calm has settled in.

"Where the time right after the debate saw a lot of nervous energy run through the party, the last couple of days have been a shoring up of the Democratic basis," Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, a German-American trans-Atlantic politics expert with the German Bertelsmann Foundation, told DW.

"And would-be candidates that were floated to replace Joe Biden immediately after the debate have come out very strongly in support of the president."

California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who was among those being suggested as a replacement, said on US broadcaster MSNBC, "You don’t turn your back [on your candidate] because of one performance. What kind of party does that?"

Not everyone in the Democratic Party sees it the same way. Lloyd Doggett, a member of the US House of Representatives from Texas, became the first sitting Democrat in Congress to call for Biden to step back on Tuesday.

"Recognizing that, unlike Trump, President Biden's first commitment has always been to our country,........

© Deutsche Welle