Nate Silver has been a thorn in the side of both Republicans and Democrats. The former didn’t appreciate his liberal bias, while the latter was incensed that his projections were mostly bearish on Democratic chances of victory in 2024. What united both sides was Silver’s lengthy and, at times, elliptical language when describing why he came to his decisions, especially when it showed Trump was going to lose the popular vote but clinch the Electoral College. Many saw this as a cop-out.
With the 2024 election over, Silver listed a few reasons why Joe Biden lost, most of which you already know. Yes, he sprinkled in his leftish commentary, but Silver has been a vocal critic of Biden for being too old, too ineffective, and waiting too long to drop out of the race. Overall, his lengthy post on Biden’s failed presidency is mainly on the money, except for a few paragraphs here and there, which we can agree to disagree:
First, there were the supply chain backlogs and rising inflation. This was right when it became hard to claim that the early spring uptick in prices had been “transient.” In fact, things were rapidly getting worse:
Second, there was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, including Kabul falling to the Taliban in mid-August.
Third, there was immigration, which was surging to record levels on the southern border after changes to asylum policy and an increase in demand for labor…
Fourth, there was a spike in crime, with the homicide rate surging to its highest levels since 1996…
Fifth, there was increasing fatigue with the racial reckoning, with perceptions of Black Lives Matter turning negative at about the same time that Biden’s approval ratings did…
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was still COVID — plenty of it…
Though the case fatality rate was lower than in 2020 because of immune protection from vaccines and previous infections, the number of new cases rose sharply from June through September 2021 due to the Delta variant — and then reached nearly three times their previous peak in January 2022 amid Omicron. Moreover, there were the cultural battles over COVID, which were more contentious than ever since Americans had long ago lost their patience. Battles over airplane mask mandates, vaccine passports, constantly changing CDC guidance, vaccines that weren’t as effective at stopping transmission as those studies had initially promised, and especially over school closures.
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Last, there’s a lengthy bit about Joe Biden’s age and how it handicapped him from governing, but there's no shocker there. Yet, as a leader, Silver noted from Vox, no less, that Biden was incapable of keeping the ship of state on a coherent course since he was often paralyzed, thanks to the policy demands of the party’s far-left flanks. Also, the Delaware liberal likely misread his mandate.
Ultimately, he won Wisconsin, which tipped the race in Biden's favor, by only 0.6 percent while ignoring the red surge in urban areas, South Florida, and South Texas; the latter saw Mr. Trump’s support quintuple in these majority Latino border counties. It was the reddest of red flags for Democrats, and what did they do: open the border and allow millions of illegal alien rapists, drug dealers, and murderers to terrorize our communities. When you peel back all the layers to this, Trump and the GOP came within less than 50,000 votes of winning everything. As for COVID, you can promise normalcy and have that arrive two years later. Silver added Joe gambled heavily on the vaccines being the silver bullet, but they were not:
…while perceptions of the direction of the country improved [after the 2022 midterms], Biden’s approval ratings did not — save for a half-year reprieve in late 2022 that, happily for Democrats, coincided with a relatively strong midterm for the party. Instead, they entered a slow and steady decline beginning in early 2023, interrupted only by a brief sympathy bounce after Biden was finally forced from the presidential race in July 2024.
The reason for this — I think pretty obviously — was mostly Biden’s advancing age. Even in the 2021 inauguration speech, you hear a few slurred words. But based on plenty of subsequent reporting, Biden’s condition was steadily and self-evidently getting worse from roughly the midterms onward. Americans weren’t buying the White House’s attempts to gaslight them about it and cover up his shortcomings.
I’ve written a lot about Biden’s age. But it wasn’t just an issue for his reelection bid — it also affected his ability to govern effectively.
Dylan Matthews at Vox has a great, well-researched critique of Biden’s inability to prioritize under the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. The government spent more than it probably should have, especially at a time of rising interest rates. And some of the programs Democrats did choose were bogged down by other polycrisis priorities: climate provisions and “racial equity” red tape. The spending was tremendously effective in stimulating the jobs market but at the cost of higher inflation, historically a bad trade-off from a presidential popularity standpoint. And Biden didn’t have a lot of shiny objects to point to for all that spending. Many infrastructure programs are only now coming online, in fact, with Trump set to receive credit for them.
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In the end, Biden made what was essentially a triple devil’s bargain in exchange for winning the 2020 nomination and the presidency. First, he sold people on a quick return to normalcy from the pandemic when it would instead take until summer 2022 thanks to reinfections, new variants, and sharp divisions over mitigation measures. The extent to which this is his fault isn’t so clear. I have plenty of critiques of the White House’s handling of COVID — and plenty of critiques of Trump’s — but COVID is a uniquely wicked problem. Biden gambled on COVID going away when vaccines became widely available, and it didn’t work out. But he made matters worse by promising not just to solve COVID but also to save democracy and even deliver racial justice.
Second, he misread his mandate between his savior complex and the constant whispers in his ear from Democratic interest groups. Anointed by the party for his electability, he instead governed as a fairly left-wing president, from major issues like immigration and the size of the stimulus package to others like student loan forgiveness and his administration’s interpretation of Title IX. And he picked a vice president with a mediocre electoral track record despite his misgivings based on pushback from progressive groups, but then never really entrusted her with much responsibility, or to replace him in office or on the ticket.
Third, he reneged on what many voters took as an implicit promise to be a one-term president. (Though he never said this outright, and recent reporting suggests he wasn’t decided either way until midway through his term.) Even in 2020, about half of voters questioned whether Biden had the mental capabilities to serve effectively as president.
Biden was saved by the pandemic and ushered into an office he was ill-equipped to run. The man had run twice already and lost. Yet, the overall theme here is that Biden is simply a terrible politician. Wheeling and dealing as a senator in his prime is different than being president, and the man couldn’t adapt; it was painfully obvious. The withdrawal from Afghanistan also is overlooked, but I think its impact on the electorate was immense.
I’m not the only one: Jerry Dunleavy, who penned a book on our shambolic exit, also noted that this event shredded Biden’s image as an empathetic leader. The man checked his watch at Dover during the transfer of the 13 American soldiers killed during the Abbey Gate terrorist attack. He reportedly napped as grieving families waited to greet him and, after all that, got snippy with them. The fall of Kabul also struck a massive blow to his reputation as a foreign policy master. Biden was never a foreign policy guru—it was just a myth peddled by liberal media circles.
While he doesn’t say it explicitly, the list of critiques here points to an utterly failed presidency marred by incompetence, stupidity, and an engrossing arrogance.
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