This is a complex and very difficult situation for the president and his party. It involves many overlapping questions, most of which have no clear answers. Given that complexity, it is useful to clarify what questions are being or should be asked, and how those questions can or might be answered.
Is Biden currently fit to serve as president?
One point of confusion since the debate is Biden’s Run for office The president and his Work as Republicans have been quick to conflate the two, arguing that the question of whether Biden should be the Democratic nominee is really a question of whether Biden is currently fit to serve as president. We return to this former question below.
Reports from The Washington Post and elsewhere have said that the effects of Biden’s aging, which became apparent during the debates, have become more pronounced in recent months. There are many possible reasons for this, including the obvious passage of time and the more subtle effects of the pressures of his position.
But the issue itself raises questions that are difficult to answer: What are the standards of eligibility? What qualities must a president possess, and how can those qualities be assessed? How impaired must one be to cause problems?
Biden has tried hard to host events and give interviews to demonstrate his ability to do the job, but the results have been inherently unsatisfying because the standards are unclear: Critics point to verbal stumbling as evidence of incompetence, setting a very high bar, while supporters point to other indicators as evidence that he is competent, generally applying a much lower standard.
There are tests to assess memory and cognition, of which Donald Trump is always bragging. But even if the results of such tests were at hand, the question would remain: what does it have to do with the special job of being the President of the United States? It seems unlikely that such test results would be made public, since it is not clear what they would mean, unless the results were very dire.
Such an outcome is not expected, as the Biden team has no intention of adding fuel to the fire.
Is Biden eligible to serve a second term?
Of course, the question of where Biden is now is very different from where he will be in two years if he is re-elected. The same uncertainties noted above apply. It’s hard to know what kind of decline will be an issue or how it will manifest itself. But it’s clear that Biden won’t improve over time.
Again, there is no clear answer. Anyone who sees Biden as unfit now will inevitably be unfit a year from now. Anyone who thinks Biden is fully competent and the question is an exaggeration can see him effectively serving as president for another four and a half years.
The former outnumber the latter. Most Americans believe Biden is too old to be a viable president. In a national poll conducted by Siena College for The New York Times after the debate, nearly half of respondents said he is not currently up to the job, including 16 percent of Democrats. Six in 10 Democrats said his age makes him incompetent.
Despite these numbers, Biden remains within the margin of error against Trump in national and state polls, which leads to a central question his party is grappling with.
Would Democrats have a better chance without Biden?
Biden has mixed his case in defending his continued candidacy. did Who defeated Trump in 2020? Intention I beat him again. Speaking to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos last week, Biden argued that he was underestimated in 2020, presumably during the Democratic primaries, and that his party is underestimated ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Speaking with the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, he reiterated, “I beat him last time. I’m going to beat him again.”
It’s possible, but the question plaguing Democrats is whether their chances of a Democrat in office next year will be significantly increased if their nominee is not Biden.
Polls haven’t changed much throughout the year, mostly because Biden is facing off against Trump: In a recent CNN poll, most Biden supporters said they planned to vote for him primarily out of opposition to Trump, but a majority of Democrats suggested the party would fare better with a different candidate.
If Biden runs, he would benefit from a strong opposition to Trump: Voters who are worried about Biden’s abilities heading into 2025 are often far more worried about what they know about Trump and what he promises as president.
Of course, Biden isn’t the only one who isn’t Donald Trump. CNN posed a series of questions to other Democrats running in Biden’s place, and most of them gave answers on par with the president they faced off against in person — all within the margin of error.
Biden is right to point out that he has been tested in ways that other candidates have not been tested (this year’s Democratic primary is no good example; it was not a raw competition that was designed or circumstanced to provide such a test). There is a nonzero risk that a successor will stumble on unpredictable issues.
But Biden has a known problem that his successor doesn’t have: the problem at the heart of the entire debate.
First of all, Biden did it He will replace him as the Democratic candidate. Parties can write their own rules and revise the procedures for how delegates are actually cast. State-by-state deadlines for getting on the ballot are set by different states, but none of them are imminent. The question is, how will replacement delegates be determined?
This is a very tricky question, and two scenarios yield two viable answers.
The simplest scenario would be if Biden were to withdraw his candidacy and announce that he was endorsing Vice President Harris (the best candidate to challenge Trump, according to a CNN poll). Biden could simply step aside and wait for the party to decide who to nominate. Or, in the most confusing scenario, the party could decide to vote for someone else rather than Biden, who is still in the running.
One solution proposed by Democratic activists looks at rerunning an abbreviated primary with delegate targets. Candidates could run and spend a few weeks campaigning in forums and other ways that are positive for them. It’s a proposal that appeals deeply to the vanity of pundits and donor classes who think they know what’s best for everyone, including Biden. But it’s instructive because it requires considering how it would actually play out: the party would wage public intraparty battles for weeks, stoking new resentment among supporters of the candidate who ultimately loses.
Biden has not signaled any intention to withdraw. Quite the opposite. (This is in part because it is not clear what evidence he could present to allay existing concerns in response to the first question above.) On “Morning Joe,” Biden denounced the “elites” who had been calling for his withdrawal as part of an effort to rally support among rank-and-file Democrats. But those Democrats, like many of the “elites,” worry that Biden is endangering efforts to defeat Trump. In the same interview, Biden pitched his candidacy as a key bulwark against a second Trump administration. Many Democrats believe that Biden is making such a future more likely, not less.
In other words, the party is already locked in a weeks-long public battle that has three possible solutions: Biden steps down (potentially setting off a new, more intense fight), Democrats follow Biden, or Election Day comes.
The above questions are very difficult to answer, so it’s hard to predict what will happen.
