Nate Silver is re-upping his call to Joe Biden: old man, please stand aside. The president got bulldozed by Donald Trump last Thursday night. There’s no sugarcoating it. Two-thirds of the nation already felt he was too old to run again—those figures will get worse as new polling is released. The Biden campaign says their internal polling shows no change; they’re all smoking Hunter Biden’s crack cocaine. If there’s no change, why is the entire donor base freaking out? Beyond the Beltway, Democrats know Biden is in trouble, and so does everyone else who has been paying attention.
Silver, a sports statistician, opened his lengthy post by exposing how aging has impacted some professional sports’ marquee players, including Michael Jordan. The age range is different, but Silver noted that we all know someone elderly in our families. We know the signs, and when it comes to Biden, Mr. Shuffles, we know he’s cooked. He does try to make a case for Biden’s age, but zeroed in on that playing defense for months on this age and competency issue isn’t working. One thing that might irritate you about Silver is that he finds Donald Trump’s alleged actions in January 2020 disqualifying. However, he also finds Biden’s age to be on equal footing, which will likely anger liberals.
As for the situation overall, Silver thinks Democrats should be furious that Biden picked a vice president he didn’t want. Kamala Harris’ disastrous tenure might have led to Biden taking on this second run at the White House. In closing, he makes a plea for Biden to do what’s best for the party:
7/1 model update.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 1, 2024
Debate beginning to take a real bite out of Biden. pic.twitter.com/lSESmUd4JZ
Nate Silver's model gives Trump more than 68% to win the election against Biden. For the first time, Silver also predicts that Trump will win the popular vote by a wide margin. pic.twitter.com/ZXBHEgETvI
— Raylan Givens (@JewishWarrior13) June 30, 2024
The second thing I realized in September was that this wasn’t the sort of thing Democrats were going to be able to spin their way out of. Not when there were still another 15 months to go in the campaign. They weren’t going to be able to duck the question by blaming ageism or blaming the media — not for 15 months.
There were two things that might save Biden. First, that Trump is also really unpopular — and also really old. Even now, I suppose I think Biden has some chances if he remains in the race — but surely they’re lower now, probably by quite a lot, than the already-low 35 percent chance that Biden woke up with in the Silver Bulletin forecast this morning.
[…]
The other way out is if Biden had consistently been able to deliver vigorous and crisp performances in his public appearances. Notwithstanding his other electoral liabilities, Bernie Sanders — also aged 82 — at least seems roughly as sharp as he’s always been. But Biden is a shadow of himself. This is the most obvious thing in the world — and it was obvious before tonight. Seriously, go ahead and watch clips comparing Biden’s 2012 debate performance against Paul Ryan or even one of his 2020 debates against Trump to virtually any of his recent prolonged public appearances. Republicans, predictably, have begun to weaponize the issue and if Biden remains on the ballot, Democrats ought to be deeply worried about an “October surprise” in which Republicans simply run clips of Biden then compared to Biden now.
Instead, Biden has been graded on an incredibly generous curve, like after his substantively fine but poorly-delivered State of the Union address. And the White House has been playing hide-the-ball, from Biden’s declining to do a Super Bowl interview to reducing the number of debates from three to two to using executive privilege to block the release of the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur — who concluded that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory” and was pilloried for it, even though Hur had been appointed by the White House’s own Attorney General, resistance hero Merrick Garland.
White House staffers who unskew the polls showing Biden trailing, charlatans selling you “hopium”, columnists who predicted (!) that Trump was going to drop out of the debate (!!) — if you’re a Democrat, you should be angry at these people for putting you in this predicament. The same goes for special interest groups who insisted that Kamala Harris ought to be VP — against Biden’s initial instincts — even though she’d just run one of the most underperforming campaigns in primary history. Without that, Democrats would have a better set of options, or Biden might not have run again in the first place.
And you should be angry at Joe Biden, every bit as much as you should be angry at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
[…]
Picking a new nominee via superdelegates at the convention would be like attending a shitshow at a plumbers’ convention. And Harris remains quite unpopular too, although her disapproval ratings are now notably better than Biden’s. Either of these candidates are probably below 50 percent to win against Trump. But what matters is that they’re probably better bets than Biden. Give me Harris at this point, who at least is more of a blank slate. I’m not a Gavin Newsom guy, but give me Newsom, who at least has had designs on the job and governs a state with the 5th largest economy in the world. Harris and Newsom are very much not my preferred options — but I prefer them to Biden.
But don’t give me any more bullshit about how age is just a number or just a media fixation — or how changing candidates just isn’t how it’s done. We’re playing the highest-stakes game of poker you can imagine, and you do whatever in your power to improve your odds — even if it’s only from 25 percent to 35 percent.
Well, the latter part isn’t going to happen. Biden is staying in the race after talking with his family at Camp David. So, forget Newsom, Whitmer, Harris—and anyone the hell else who was floated as a replacement candidate. One thing that is concerning are reports that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer warned the Biden campaign that after that miserable debate, her state is no longer winnable.
Also, Silver now has Trump with a 71 percent chance of winning the election:
.@NateSilver538's model has it now at
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 2, 2024
Trump: 71.9%
Biden 27.6%
(he can sometimes be a jerk online but I paid for his substack anyway because I find it nuanced and insightful).https://t.co/2aUnlB2MGp pic.twitter.com/h0c5UyAvPT
1) Post-debate polls already pretty bad and may get very bad
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 2, 2024
2) Any more "senior moments" probably unsurvivable
3) Rats flee a sinking ship
4) Also some actuarial risk
5) Fundamentally untenable to nominate this guy for 4 more years so things will tend to break badly
The last bullet is the most important. It's fundamentally a terrible idea to ask the public to make the guy they saw on Thursday president until he's 86. One of the craziest "asks" in the history of American politics. And Trump likely wins close calls in the Electoral College.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 2, 2024
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