- Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, claims President Joe Biden is no longer the “clear favorite” to win the 2024 presidential race
- Opinion has changed compared to last year because Biden is not running a “real” campaign
- “It’s time for the White House to shut up or shut up,” Silver claims
President Joe Biden is no longer the “clear favorite” to win in 2024 and appears to be “losing momentum” in the campaign, claims political analyst Nate Silver.
In a Substack post on Monday, the FiveThirtyEight founder concluded that Biden “should resign if he is unable to run a normal re-election campaign.”
“If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you that Joe Biden was a fairly clear favorite in the event of a rematch against Donald Trump,” he wrote in his Silver Bulletin piece.
Now, Silver argues, “it’s time for the White House to shut up.”
President Joe Biden is no longer the “clear favorite” to win the 2024 presidential race, according to top pollster Nate Silver
FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver (pictured) published a lengthy post on Monday arguing why Biden is losing any advantage he had over Trump in the race for the White House a year ago
Biden, 81, is on track for a rematch with former President Donald Trump, 77, in 2024, with no real contenders in the Democratic primary.
In response to a question in February 2023, Silver claimed that he had said Biden was the favorite to defeat Trump by a 65-35 margin. But the president's behavior during the final campaign year, as well as his age and fitness for office, have changed his mind.
Things like attending the pre-Super Bowl interview are important to running a presidential campaign, Silver noted — which Biden forwent this month after also foregoing the tradition last year.
“That’s really not too much to ask,” Silver argued. “These are the kinds of interviews that every other president in recent memory has done.”
Recent polls show that Trump is further narrowing the gap to Biden and is even clearly overtaking him in some hypothetical duels in the general election.
The most recent poll considered by FiveThirtyEight shows Trump leading Biden by 22 points – but most polls earlier this month show them only a few percentage points apart.
In most hypothetical general election polls, former President Donald Trump has either closed the gap on Biden or is ahead of the incumbent – a marked change from last year, when Biden often came out ahead
'[H]“We are losing now and there is no plan to fix the problems other than hoping the polls are wrong or that voters will see the race differently when they have more time to focus on it,” Silver notes.
A poll this month shows a whopping 86 percent of voters believe Biden is not mentally fit to serve another term.
This came after the DOJ released a report disclosing its assessment that Biden had a “poor memory” and “diminished abilities” and would therefore not recommend charges in the secret documents case, so he would not proceed as before Special prosecutor Robert Hur would appear before a jury.
'[E]“Even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden, not because of him,” Silver wrote in his argument that Biden could no longer win as easily in 2024.
“Biden is likely an understaffed candidate at this point because Americans have many very rational concerns about the prospect of a commander in chief being 86 years old at the end of his second term,” he added. “It is entirely reasonable to consider this a disqualification.”
Silver believes Biden could drop out of the race before August, allowing Democrats to select another candidate at the party's convention in Chicago, Illinois, in the summer.
Biden should resign if he can't run a 'normal re-election campaign': Top pollsters say the president is blindly hoping the 'polls are wrong'