Famed pollster Nate Silver said President Joe Biden is headed for defeat this November due to his age and declining job performance — and the Democrats have “no plan to fix the problems.”
Silver, the founder and former editor-in-chief of the FiveThirtyEight statistics website, said that, while the incumbent president “can still win,” it will only be the result of polls being wrong or “voters [who] look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it.”
“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,” Silver wrote in his “Silver Bulletin” newsletter.
“It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying.”
The Post has sought comment from Biden’s re-election campaign.
Last week, ABC News/Ipsos released the results of a poll which showed that a staggering 86% of adults think the 81-year-old Biden is too old to serve another term in office.
Biden supporters note that the presumptive GOP nominee, former President Donald Trump, faces significant legal challenges. Silver countered that argument, saying that is “not a good reason to nominate Biden.”
Some polls show Trump ahead of Biden in key swing states.
“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 unforeseen threat when he’ll be in his mid-80s,” Silver wrote.
Silver advised the Democrats that their “best option for beating Trump” might be to have Biden step aside and for the party to pick their nominee at the convention in August.
He wrote that Biden should make one final push to assuage doubts by agreeing to four tough media interviews over the next few weeks.
“This really isn’t too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done,” Silver wrote, adding that if he can’t, “it’s awfully audacious to ask Americans to make him president for another four years.”
Biden last week skipped the traditional Super Bowl pre-game interview with CBS television — the second straight year that the president decided against the sit-down.
White House officials told reporters they decided because Super Bowl viewers wanted to watch football, not the president.
The New York Times editorial board said Biden’s decision to skip the Super Bowl interview was part of a pattern of “less substantive, unscripted interaction with the public and the press than any other president in recent memory.”
Biden bypassed the high-profile interview as his approval ratings linger below 40%.
The decision intensified talk about Biden’s mental acuity and stamina, particularly in light of a damning report by a special counsel who declined to bring charges against the president for mishandling classified documents because he was an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report by Robert Hur prompted a rebuke from Biden, who said his “memory is fine.”
Biden has also recently committed several verbal gaffes, which include forgetting the names of public figures as well as mixing up the heads of state of Mexico and Egypt.
With Post Wires
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