Famed pollster and statistician Nate Silver says that Joe Biden was "a reasonably clear favorite in the event of a rematch against Donald Trump" a year ago. Not anymore.
"The first time my internal needle began to shift was in late summer, when Biden’s approval numbers remained poor even as the economy was improving and it was becoming more apparent that his advanced age — Biden turned 81 in November (Trump is 77) — was an enormous problem for voters and one that Democrats weren’t going to be able to spin away," he explained.
He notes that since then things have only gotten worse for Biden. "If he were 10 years younger, he might still be a 65/35 favorite. But if his campaign is substantially encumbered by his age, he's probably the underdog. If you’re someone who would rather not see Trump re-elected again or who cares about the election for other reasons, it’s time to face the facts. You need to adjust to the new reality and not be mired in anchoring bias by your previous impression of the race."
Silver identifies three categories of problems for Biden that have gotten worse.
First are his poll numbers. Silver notes that "a president’s approval ratings do have some meaningful predictive power at this stage as compared with a year ago," and they are not good. As Silver notes, they are "well below the threshold that would ordinarily make a president a favorite for re-election" and show "no signs of improvement." The same goes for match-up polling that has been consistently showing Trump ahead nationally and in battleground states.
Second, Biden doesn't have many "contingencies that could improve his situation." Trump is still going to win the nomination, and his various legal troubles are rife with problems and they've only improved his poll numbers because Americans see these efforts as politically motivated.
And then there is the economy. Silver argues that the economy has gotten better — which is debatable — yet Biden's standing hasn't improved. "On balance, that ought to be a concerning fact for the White House," he says. "It implies that Biden’s poor position is not the result of something fixable (the economy) but rather something that very much isn’t — the fact that he’s 81 and getting older every day."
And third, of course, is Biden's age. "As many as 86 percent of Americans say he’s too old in one poll, though numbers in the 70-to-75 percent range are more common — still an overwhelming majority in a bitterly divided country," Silver notes. "There’s also been recent bad news for Biden on this front," he adds, pointing to the Hur report, which described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," his impromptu press conference which most people agree did not go well, especially when he confused the leaders of Egypt and Mexico, and his refusal to do a Super Bowl interview.
Silver says that he personally "cross[ed] the rubicon" in November, "concluding that Biden should stand down if he wasn’t going to be able to run a normal reelection campaign — meaning, things like conduct a Super Bowl interview."
Yes, it's a huge risk and, yes, Biden can still win. But he's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it. Neither is so implausible and it is likely to be a close race. But even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can't sit through a Super Bowl interview isn't someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat when he'll be in his mid-80s.
"In November, there was still theoretically time for another Democrat to enter the race," he continued. "Now, there isn’t."
It's true. Absent Biden voluntarily stepping aside, there's little that can be done. The filing deadlines have passed in most states. The time for Biden to drop out is past, and while Silver thinks that a younger candidate could help the Democrats' chances, recent polling shows that is not the case.
Silver proposes that to turn things around, Biden needs to challenge the narrative that he's too old and cognitively impaired by doing lengthy sitdown interviews with "non-friendly" sources. But does anyone really think that will happen?
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