Nate Silver is one of the most vocal voices backing Joe
Biden exiting the race. One of politics’ preeminent pollsters and data
crunchers, Silver has been blunt and unrelenting in making his case that
Biden is cooked and should stand aside. It carries more weight that
he’s no fan of Trump and liberal, but he’s not going to shy away from
the fact that he’s apprehensive about Biden’s mental health and age. He
noted that the president’s team might be under the impression that it’s
2020. It’s not; Biden has far worse numbers than any incumbent helming a
re-election effort.
He also was honest, though some would see his lengthy paragraphs
about the world of polling, getting things wrong, and other aspects of
data journalism that most would find to be ways for him to cover for
himself if things go haywire. Silver does delve into the minutiae of
this world, but he also ends with a damning analysis of Biden. His
latest piece spoke about the “broken leg” syndrome with Joe, where the
model doesn’t consider some political aspects. While Biden’s chances to
win aren’t good, Silver warned that there could be a circumstance where
the president might be inclined to think that he could pull off a
comeback.
Silver quickly throws cold water on that narrative,
admitting that Biden’s chances now post-Trump debate are probably even
worse than his model prediction. Second, after the ABC News interview
with George Stephanopoulos, he acknowledged that he ‘wimped out’ adding a
few sentences about the president regarding his mental health, where
the best possible move is to make plans to transition the presidency to
Ms. Kamala Harris. He admits he’s entirely in that camp now after this
interview, adding, “Something is clearly wrong here” (via Silver Bulletin):
Biden
is, in all likelihood, literally incapable of waging the sort of
campaign that a league-average Democrat would be able to wage. The
reporting on Biden’s condition is highly distributing — the debate
probably wasn’t entirely an anomaly, and it’s not even clear to what
extent Biden is making the decisions rather than his staff. Frankly, I’d
rather have Kamala Harris be president right now in the event of, say,
an unconfirmed report of a North Korean nuclear missile inbound to
Honolulu after 8 p.m.
A fully engaged president would have done
something like this following his debate performance: schedule a press
conference at 9 a.m. the next morning, and answer questions forthrightly
and competently until he’d demonstrated that the debate was indeed just
a “bad night”. Instead, it’s been more than a week, and Biden has
continued to hide from the press, using a teleprompter even at private
fundraisers and making repeated verbal stumbles –- like referring to
himself as a “Black woman” — in the few impromptu media appearances he
has done.
I’m not going to mince words here: this is not remotely
acceptable from the leader of the free world, or from the staff
advising him. In consideration of Biden’s age, 81, his debate
performance, and his obviously deteriorating condition, it’s not tenable
for him to ask for another four years as president. (That’s not a
prediction of what Biden will do but rather a proscriptive statement of
what would be best for the United States.)
What’s more up for
debate is whether Biden should be president now. My personal view is
that we’re past the point of no return — one or two good interviews (say
on ABC News tonight) would be too little, too late to restore enough
trust, especially given the White House’s persistent lack of
transparency. These are precarious circumstances for Democrats, at best.
Although I don’t think this is the base case, I think Democrats are
underestimating the possibility that this could turn into a
Watergate-type scandal if the White House has been concealing details
about the president’s condition from the American public.
OK —
let’s turn it down a notch and get back to the implications for the
forecast. Because as much as I’m a probabilist at heart, if you sweat
enough sports bets, you’ll sometimes encounter circumstances where
sometimes the outcome does seem pretty damned deterministic. For
instance: the obviously severely concussed quarterback, down 7 points at
halftime, is brought out for the second half and then immediately
throws a pick-six. That’s a hard deficit to overcome to begin with — but
it’s much harder if the concussed QB can barely do more than hand the
ball off and the coach insists on keeping him in the game anyway.
Now,
unlike in football, the “final score” in elections isn’t always
accurate — sometimes the polls are wrong. It’s almost as though there’s a
fifth quarter after the game in which the referees audit the result to
make sure they have the right score. If a lot breaks right and if the
polls aren’t pegging the situation correctly to begin with, it’s not out
of the question that Biden could win.
But it’s pretty unlikely —
this is a “broken leg” circumstance if I ever saw one. Biden plainly
has shortcomings that the model isn’t really designed to account for.
When we launched the forecast last week, I promised that I’d tell you if
we reached a point where there were material circumstances that weren’t
being handled well by the model. We’re in such a circumstance.
And then, post-ABC News interview, he tweeted this:
Everyone
can see Biden is a mess, except the people paid to advise the president
on the best possible course of action. Either they’re incompetent, just
as mentally ill as Joe, or they're being held hostage by the wrath of
Jill Biden, who very much has a ‘we’re done when I say we’re done’
attitude within this White House.
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