President Joe Biden is no longer the ‘clear favorite’ to win in 2024 and appears to be ‘losing’ his momentum in the campaign, political analyst Nate Silver claims.
In a Substack post on Monday, the FiveThirtyEight founder concluded that Biden ‘should stand down if he wasn’t going to be able to run a normal reelection campaign.’
‘If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have told you that Joe Biden was a reasonably clear favorite in the event of a rematch against Donald Trump,’ he wrote in his Silver Bulletin post.
Now, Silver argues, ‘it’s time for the White House to put up or shut up.’
President Joe Biden is no longer the ‘clear favorite’ to win the presidential race in 2024, according to top pollster Nate Silver
FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver (pictured) published a lengthy post Monday arguing why Biden is losing any advantage he had over Trump a year ago in the race for the White House
Biden, 81, is on track for a rematch with former President Donald Trump, 77, in 2024 with no real competitors in the Democratic primary.
If asked in February 2023, Silver claims that he would have said Biden was the favorite to win against Trump by a 65:35 margin. But the president’s conduct over the last year of campaigning coupled with his age and fitness for office has changed his mind.
Things like participating in the pre-Super Bowl interview are important to running a presidential campaign, Silver noted – which is something Biden opted not to do this month after also skipping the tradition last year.
‘This really isn’t too much to ask,’ Silver argued. ‘These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done.’
Recent polling shows Trump continuing to close the gap with Biden and even pulling way past him in some hypothetical general election match-ups.
The most recent poll considered by FiveThirtyEight shows Trump ahead of Biden by 22 points – but most earlier this month show them apart by one a handful of percentage points.
In most hypothetical general election polls, former President Donald Trump has either closed the gap with Biden or is ahead of the incumbent – a clear change from a year prior when Biden often came out on top
‘[H]e’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,’ Silver notes.
One poll this month shows a whopping 86 percent of voters think Biden isn’t mentally fit for another term.
It comes after the DOJ released a report revealing his assessment that Biden has ‘poor memory’ and ‘diminished facilities’ and would therefore not recommend charges in the classified documents case, so he wouldn’t appear before a jury the same way he did before Special Counsel Robert Hur.
‘[E]ven the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him,’ Silver wrote in his argument that Biden can no longer easily win in 2024.
‘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 would be 86 years old by the end of his second term,’ he added. ‘It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying.’
Silver thinks that Biden could still drop out of the race before August and allow Democrats to pick a different candidate at the convention in Chicago, Illinois over the summer.