Joe Biden should drop out

Denying Joe Biden's decline has put Democrats in a terrible position.

Maybe it’s because I’m a statistically-inclined sports fan that I recognize the inevitability of age-related decline. Build a projection system like RAPTOR or PECOTA, and the backbone is what’s called the “aging curve”. Major league athletes improve rapidly through roughly age 22, improve more slowly from age 23 though 25, peak from about age 26 to age 28, and then enter a decline phase. There is some variability in this last part, especially with modern medicine, training regimens and sports science. Some players manage to extend their peak into their early 30s or even their mid-30s. And there’s some variation by position and by sport. Positions that emphasize leadership and cognitive skills, like being a point guard or a quarterback, usually age more gracefully than those like running backs that rely on raw physical talent.

But the decline comes for everyone, sooner or later — and sometimes it comes suddenly. Think Michael Jordan with the Wizards. Peyton Manning with the Broncos.¹ Babe Ruth hitting .181 in 72 at-bats in his last major league season. Tiger Woods repeatedly missing the cut. One of my favorite sports memories was watching Serena Williams from high up in the 300 level on an electric late summer night at Arthur Ashe Stadium in 2022. Clearly lacking the mobility she once possessed, she gave everything she had to eke out a win over Anett Kontaveit, the No. 2 seed in the tournament, in a thrilling three-set victory. Then she lost in the next round to an unseeded Croatian-Australian player named Ajla Tomljanovic. The win over Kontaveit was the last of her career.

Cognitive decline is harder to measure, and varies a lot by the precise skills required by the job. Physicists and mathematicians seem to peak earlier than economists, for instance. Tasks that benefit from life experience and the ability to build social relationships can peak later still; the average Fortune 500 CEO is age 58. But almost no CEO apart from Warren Buffet is Joe Biden’s age, 81.

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Other than perhaps some COVID stuff, nothing has made a certain type of politically-engaged Democrat angrier at me than my insistence that Democrats needed to take the electorate’s concerns about Joe Biden’s age seriously. To be fair, I wasn’t even that early on the case; the first time I wrote about my concerns was last September. By that point, it had become clear that Donald Trump was likely to be the GOP nominee again. And had become clear that an overwhelming majority of voters thought Biden was too old to be president. At that point, Biden at least still had a narrow polling lead against Trump — but he relinquished it later that month and has never really regained it, at least not for a sustained period.

It wasn’t just that voters were incredibly consistent about mentioning Biden’s age in polls: it was also two other things. First, that voters had a pretty fucking good point. As anyone who’s had an aging friend or relative knows — which is to say, almost everyone — the late 70s and early 80s are often a sad point of decline. They’re frequently an inflection point past which people have good days and bad days, but can’t carry out day-to-day tasks to the same degree of consistency and fluency that they once had. It’s also the age at which the risk of death begins to exponentially increase:

And it’s not just that Joe Biden is 81 now — it’s that he’s seeking a second term and wants to continue being president until he’s 86! Michael Jordan wasn’t awful with the Wizards, but he also wasn’t about to ask for a four-year contract extension. An 86-year-old president is a ridiculous and untenable proposition. Few world leaders are anywhere close to that old, other than in authoritarian countries — and none of them are the American president, the hardest job in the world.

Is an 86-year-old Biden being president as ridiculous and untenable as an 82-year-old Trump being president? (Trump just turned 78 so would be 82 by the end of his second term.) For me, the answer is still no. In fact, although this is an increasingly unpopular view, I think Biden’s had a pretty good first term. And if I lived in a swing state², I’d still vote for Biden — if for no other reason than because I think January 6 is so disqualifying to outweigh everything else.

But an 86-year-old president would be disqualifying under any other circumstance. And I can’t really blame any voter for thinking otherwise. In a political environment full of misinformation and distrust, that Biden is 81 and seeking to be president until he’s 86 is something rare: an unassailable, objective fact. If I were a single parent supporting three kids on a minimum-wage job, who barely had time to follow the news, could you really fault me for thinking the one thing I know is that this guy is too fucking old to be president?

The second thing I realized in September was that this wasn’t the sort of thing Democrats were going to be able to spin their way out of. Not when there were still another 15 months to go in the campaign. They weren’t going to be able to duck the question by blaming ageism or blaming the media — not for 15 months.

There were two things that might save Biden. First, that Trump is also really unpopular — and also really old. Even now, I suppose I think Biden has some chances if he remains in the race — but surely they’re lower now, probably by quite a lot, than the already-low 35 percent chance that Biden woke up with in the Silver Bulletin forecast this morning.

I’m not really in a mood to critique Trump’s debate performance, which was stronger than I’d expected but also included lots of wild, rambling tangents that only seemed coherent in comparison to Biden. Trump never won a post-debate poll in any of his three debates against Hillary Clinton or his two against Biden in 2020. But he absolutely crushed Biden, 67-33, in CNN’s poll of debate-watchers. How bad do you have to screw up to lose a debate by 34 points to Donald Trump in a country as divided as this one? And yes, these polls historically do have some predictive power in anticipating movement in the horse race, especially with a result as lopsided as this one.

The other way out is if Biden had consistently been able to deliver vigorous and crisp performances in his public appearances. Notwithstanding his other electoral liabilities, Bernie Sanders — also aged 82 — at least seems roughly as sharp as he’s always been. But Biden is a shadow of himself. This is the most obvious thing in the world — and it was obvious before tonight. Seriously, go ahead and watch clips comparing Biden’s 2012 debate performance against Paul Ryan or even one of his 2020 debates against Trump to virtually any of his recent prolonged public appearances. Republicans, predictably, have begun to weaponize the issue and if Biden remains on the ballot, Democrats ought to be deeply worried about an “October surprise” in which Republicans simply run clips of Biden then compared to Biden now.

Instead, Biden has been graded on an incredibly generous curve, like after his substantively fine but poorly-delivered State of the Union address. And the White House has been playing hide-the-ball, from Biden’s declining to do a Super Bowl interview to reducing the number of debates from three to two to using executive privilege to block the release of the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur — who concluded that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory” and was pilloried for it, even though Hur had been appointed by the White House’s own Attorney General, resistance hero Merrick Garland.

White House staffers who unskew the polls showing Biden trailing, charlatans selling you “hopium”, columnists who predicted (!) that Trump was going to drop out of the debate (!!) — if you’re a Democrat, you should be angry at these people for putting you in this predicament. The same goes for special interest groups who insisted that Kamala Harris ought to be VP — against Biden’s initial instincts — even though she’d just run one of the most underperforming campaigns in primary history. Without that, Democrats would have a better set of options, or Biden might not have run again in the first place.

And you should be angry at Joe Biden, every bit as much as you should be angry at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Maybe Biden can still win. There’s certainly some point above zero at which I’d buy his stock, although he’s fallen to just 23 percent on Polymarket. But he was already behind, he’s very likely to fall further behind as a result of the debate, and — don’t neglect this — he still has four-plus months of campaigning (and one more debate) to go, and will have to survive what will be both relentless media coverage and unsparing Republican attacks against his age on every slow news day between now and November.

Maybe Biden could survive by playing prevent defense — although the White House has been trying that and it hasn’t been working — if he were leading. But instead he’s behind. And once the polling fully accounts for the effects of the debate within a few weeks, he’s likely to be as far behind as he’s ever been, with less time left than he’s ever had. How is the man you saw on stage tonight supposed to turn things around? Or even a 30 percent better version of the man you saw tonight? Sure, it’s possible. But is that really the bet you want to make if you’re a Democrat who thinks Trump is an existential threat to democracy and everything else?

I may have some further thoughts in the coming days on how I’d begin to benchmark a replacement’s chances against Trump. Under ideal circumstances — if Biden had stepped aside a year-and-a-half ago and made way for a competitive primary — I’d think such a Democrat might be a favorite against Trump, who, to repeat, remains quite unpopular himself. Democrats are narrowly ahead on the generic Congressional ballot. And their Senate candidates are generally polling quite well — almost always much better than Biden is in the same polls — another point that the poll-unskewers have conveniently neglected.

But these aren’t ideal circumstances. Picking a new nominee via superdelegates at the convention would be like attending a shitshow at a plumbers’ convention. And Harris remains quite unpopular too, although her disapproval ratings are now notably better than Biden’s. Either of these candidates are probably below 50 percent to win against Trump. But what matters is that they’re probably better bets than Biden. Give me Harris at this point, who at least is more of a blank slate. I’m not a Gavin Newsom guy, but give me Newsom, who at least has had designs on the job and governs a state with the 5th largest economy in the world. Harris and Newsom are very much not my preferred options — but I prefer them to Biden.

But don’t give me any more bullshit about how age is just a number or just a media fixation — or how changing candidates just isn’t how it’s done. We’re playing the highest-stakes game of poker you can imagine, and you do whatever in your power to improve your odds — even if it’s only from 25 percent to 35 percent.

As I wrote at the time, the one saving grace to holding the debate this early was that it gave Democrats the option to pull the emergency lever and urge Biden to quit before the convention if it went really badly. Well, emergency levers exist for a reason. It went worse than I ever imagined — and I was expecting it to go poorly. It’s time for Biden to consider what’s best for his party, what’s best for the country and what’s best for his legacy — and that isn’t seeking the presidency until he’s 86.

1. Yes, he won the the Super Bowl — with one of the worst quarterback ratings in the league. If you want to argue this is some sort of metaphor for how Joe Biden could still win the election — a proposition I don’t deny — go right ahead.

2. But since I don’t live in a swing state: after that debate tonight, I’m going to vote third-party if Biden remains on the ballot as a protest against Biden’s irresponsibility in seeking a second term and the Democratic Party’s irresponsibility in nominating him without a serious primary contest.