The polls matter: Democrats must dump Joe Biden or lose | Opinion

If last Thursday night’s NATO press conference was Joe Biden’s high point in terms of clarity and persuasiveness, we might as well take off our crampons and oxygen tanks and jump into the nearest crevasse. He wasn’t as worryingly incoherent as he was in his debate with former President Donald Trump on June 27, but he displayed the same limitations that led many to call for his resignation before the debate debacle. He spoke slowly, sounded hoarse and tired, repeatedly got names and places wrong, and, perhaps more problematic, repeated the same tired, boring lines he has used so often to justify running for a second term. “I think I’m the best person to run for president,” he said, in response to a question about the campaign. “I beat him once and I’m going to beat him again.”

Folks, that kind of cookie-cutter, covert thinking won’t cut it at this critical time for the Democratic Party. What’s been brought up in the fierce post-debate debates within the Democratic Party is the reality that Joe Biden is already on track to lose the election. Widespread concerns about his age, unpopularity, and inability to forcefully defend his administration’s policy record have been causing panic on the left since at least late last year, and now, five months in, not a single presidential candidate or presidential candidate has given Biden a run for his money in the race. The New York Times Columnists have called for the president to resign, sparking a fierce national debate. To appease critics, Biden will need to demonstrate new energy, talking points and strategies that convince people he has a plan for winning this election that doesn’t rely on circular reasoning or wishful thinking, rather than just the occasional semi-coherent remark at a highly choreographed public event.

Some Biden defenders are actively calling for an end to the hype that has dominated the last two weeks. Continuing to highlight Biden’s flaws, they say, hurts him and our chances in the general election. It’s dividing the party at the very time we need to unite to fight off further attempts by the far right to subvert American democracy. It all reminds me of a scene from Monty Python’s “The Great Evil.” Brian’s LifeIn this scene, a heretic about to be stoned to death is reprimanded for talking back to his executioner. “You are only making things worse for yourself,” a Roman centurion warns him. The heretic responds, “Are you making things worse? Can you get any worse?”

The situation facing Joe Biden before the debate was pretty dire, but it has only gotten worse since then. The president is trailing in polling averages in every battleground state and looks set to lose decisively in all of them. He is the first Democratic candidate since John Kerry in 2004 to consistently trail his Republican opponent in national polls, and that margin has nearly doubled since the debates. His approval rating is worse than Donald Trump’s when our famous 45th president lost the 2020 election, and it is now approaching the public hostility levels of George W. Bush at the end of his second term. Any appeal he once had to independents has evaporated. That means he is a candidate with no conceivable merit who has completely lost his political skills over the past year. Voters have been telling pollsters for years that they never want him to run for a second term because they think he is too old. No one listened.

Worse than the top poll numbers (which have worsened since the debate, but not as much as some feared) is the flip side of it: Biden’s already weak approval rating on whether he’s fit to be president has fallen dramatically. In an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll on Thursday, the number of respondents who said “mentally sharp” applied to Joe Biden dropped from 23% to 14%. Sixty-seven percent of respondents in that survey want Biden out, which includes a majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners. A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll on Friday found that a whopping 64% of Americans think Biden lacks the mental fortitude to be president. Sure, many of those people will vote for Biden anyway, but why not give them what they want, stoke Democratic enthusiasm, and refocus the party on Donald Trump and his insane, dictatorial plans for a second term?

The problem isn’t with journalists and politicians pointing out all this to undermine candidates, but with the candidates themselves, who shouldn’t be doing so. Become familiar The candidate and the hordes of elected Democrats who know this but refuse to say it publicly cannot battling for a final stand when a perfectly available escape route is still in plain sight to the public in the form of Vice President Kamala Harris and a host of prominent Democrats who would instantly look like Abraham Lincoln if they were to take Biden’s place. With alternatives like Harris currently getting approval ratings equal to or higher than Biden’s, what good reason is there to keep Biden in his position when his colleagues are in a much better position to flip this race for the Democrats?

Blaming this basic reality on “elites” or “pundits” or yelling at the millions of Americans who are rightfully afraid that Biden will ruin this election and the very existence of American democracy will not work. People cannot forget what they saw on June 27th. It ignores the indisputable political reality that it is the voters who want Biden out of office and it is the voters who will decide his fate. There are only a few weeks left to convince Biden to withdraw from the race. At that point, we really have no choice but to be with him and not be able to do anything about it after another disaster like the June debate. Imagine Biden failing the second debate on September 10th, less than two months until Election Day. If you don’t want that to happen, it’s long past time to join the calls for him to step down.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University. It’s time to fight dirty: How Democrats can build a durable majority in American politics. His writings include: 1 week, The Washington Post, New Republic, Washington Monthly Etc. You can find him on Twitter at @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.