President Joe Biden is just as low in the White House’s internal polls as in any of the public ones. Whenever aides stress over the numbers in their weekly political meetings, Mike Donilon — for decades, Biden’s top political adviser — is the consistent voice of the president’s innermost circle, according to people who have heard him. Biden’s numbers, Donilon says, are pretty much where they were this far out from the 2022 midterms and all the doubts sounded the same; but the president’s team pursued its own careful approach to the campaigns and then saw Democrats exceed expectations.

But while Biden advisers are dismissive of Rep. Dean Phillips’ primary challenge launched this week, they are also annoyed about it. And that annoyance betrays the fact that some of them share the same uneasiness many Democrats feel about a president whose age is twice his approval rating.

Still, they remain confident that Biden is Democrats’ best option in 2024. They also repeat that the presidential election will be decided on razor thin margins – and that if Biden loses to former President Donald Trump, the GOP primary’s current front-runner, the country will never be the same. None are heading into next year feeling overly buoyant.