Nate Silver Sounds the Alarm on Biden Campaign: ‘He’s Losing Now and There’s No Plan’

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Political commentator and elections analyst Nate Silver is sounding the alarm about President Joe Biden’s chances of winning reelection, writing in a Substack post that Biden is “losing” and appears to have no clear plan to right the ship.

While Silver believes that Biden was “a reasonably clear favorite” a year ago, he now believes that he’s “probably the underdog” due to his poor approval rating, dearth of “contingencies that could improves his situation,” as well as public perception of his age and abilities.

The FiveThirtyEight founder went on to argued that if Biden won’t run a “normal” campaign during which he would accept interview requests and other high-profile opportunities to improve his situation, he should step aside:

Personally, I crossed the rubicon in November, concluding that Biden should stand down if he wasn’t going to be able to run a normal reelection campaign — meaning, things like conduct a Super Bowl interview. Yes, it’s a huge risk and, yes, Biden can still win. But he’s losing now and there’s no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it. Neither is so implausible and it is likely to be a close race. But even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can’t sit through a Super Bowl interview isn’t someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforeseen threat when he’ll be in his mid-80s.

According to Silver, Biden could drop out of the race and allow Democrats to pick their nominee at their convention in August. “If the past couple of weeks are any evidence, it might nevertheless be Democrats’ best option for beating Trump,” he wrote. But failing that, his prescription for the Biden campaign is to complete four challenging interviews over the course of the next few weeks.

“This really isn’t too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done,” submitted Silver, who concluded that if he can’t, “it’s awfully audacious to ask Americans to make him president for another four years.”