If last Thursday night's NATO press conference was the top of the mountain in terms of Joe Biden's lucidity and powers of persuasion, we might as well take off our crampons and oxygen tanks and throw ourselves into the nearest crevasse. While he was not worryingly incoherent like he was at the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump, he displayed the same limitations that had many people calling for him to step aside prior to the debate fiasco. He spoke slowly, sounded hoarse and tired, repeatedly flubbed names and places and perhaps more problematically, trotted out the same tired, uninspiring lines that he has frequently used to justify his pursuit of a second term. "I think I'm the most qualified person to run for president," he said in response to a question about the campaign. "I beat him once and I will beat him again."
Folks, that kind of rote, bunker thinking is not going to cut it at this perilous moment for Democrats. Consumed in the furious post-debate debate in Democratic circles is the reality that Joe Biden was already very much on track to lose the election. Widespread concerns about his age, unpopularity, and inability to forcefully defend his own administration's policy record have been causing panic on the left since at least late last year, and it has now been five months since a single New York Times columnist triggered a vigorous national debate by calling for him to step aside. To assuage critics, Biden would not have to simply appear occasionally semi-coherent in highly stage-managed public events, but to unveil new energy, talking points and strategies that could convince people that he has a plan to win this thing that doesn't rely on circular logic and wishful thinking.
Some Biden defenders are aggressively calling for an end to whatever you want to call the big freakout that has dominated the last two weeks. Continuing to highlight Biden's flaws is hurting him, and hurting our chances in the general election, they say. It is fracturing the party at precisely the moment it needs to come together to beat back yet another effort from the far right to subvert American democracy. It all reminds me of the scene from Monty Python's The Life of Brian, where a heretic on the verge of getting stoned to death is chided by his executioners for talking back to them. "You're only making it worse for yourself," the Roman centurions warn, to which he replies, "Making it worse? How could it be any worse?"
The situation facing Joe Biden before the debate was quite dire, and it has only gotten worse since. The president trails in polling averages of every single battleground state and looks set to lose them all decisively. He is the first Democratic candidate since John Kerry in 2004 to consistently poll behind his GOP opponent in national surveys, a deficit that has roughly doubled since the debate. His approval ratings are worse than Donald Trump's when our illustrious 45th president lost the 2020 election and are now approaching late-second-term George W. Bush levels of public hostility. Any appeal that he once had to independents has vanished. He is, in short, a candidate with no conceivable upside whose political skills have utterly deserted him over the past year. Voters have been telling pollsters for years that they think he is too old and that they very much didn't want him to run for a second term. No one listened.
Worse than the polling toplines—which have gotten worse but not as bad as some feared in the wake of the debate—is what's under the hood. There has been a dramatic erosion in Biden's already weak numbers about whether he is fit to serve as president. In Thursday's ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, the number of respondents saying that "mental sharpness" applies to Joe Biden dropped from 23 percent to 14 percent. Sixty-seven percent of respondents in that survey want him to drop out, including a clear majority of Democrats and Democratic learners. Friday's PBS News/NPR/Marist survey found that an astonishing 64 percent of Americans now believe Biden lacks the mental fitness to serve as president. Yes, many of those people will vote for Biden anyway, but why not give them what they want and juice Democratic enthusiasm and put the focus back on Donald Trump and his lunatic, authoritarian plans for his second term.
The problem isn't journalists and politicians weakening the nominee by pointing this all out; the problem is the nominee who shouldn't be the nominee and the legions of elected Democrats who know this but refuse to come out publicly and say it. You can't circle the wagons for a last stand when people can still clearly see a perfectly accessible escape route in the form of Vice President Kamala Harris or the many prominent Democrats who could step into Biden's shoes and instantly seem like Abraham Lincoln in comparison. With alternatives like Harris now polling even or better than Biden, what possible justification could there be to keep Biden in place when his peers would be much better positioned to turn this race around for Democrats?
Blaming this basic reality on "the elites" or "pundits" or shouting at the millions of Americans who are justifiably terrified that Biden is going to fumble away both this election and the very existence of American democracy is not going to work. People cannot unsee what they saw on June 27. It elides the indisputable political reality that it is voters who want Biden out and that it is voters who will decide his fate. There are only a few weeks left to convince Biden to leave the race. At that point, we really are stuck with him and will be totally powerless to do anything about it in the wake of another disaster like the June debate. Imagine if Biden bombs the second debate on Sept. 10, less than two months from Election Day. If you don't want that to happen, it is long past time to join the chorus of voices calling for him to get gone.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
