Donald Trump is Now the Clear Favorite in the 2024 Presidential Race, but Joe Biden Could Still Come Out on Top Due to a Wild Card Factor

Voters intensely dislike both candidates but when they’re forced to pick in November, could a majority decide it's better to vote for the corpse than the crook? Only time will tell.

When confronted with a choice of casting their presidential ballot for a crook, on left, or a corpse, on right, it’s hard for voters to decide. Image from screen shot of segment on PBS News.

The main goal of Joe Biden’s press conference yesterday evening was to convince the country – and more importantly the growing number of Democrats who have called for him to withdraw as the party’s presidential nominee following his disastrous debate performance two weeks back – he’s fully competent to steer the ship of state for the next four years if he’s reelected in November. Alas, things didn’t go off without a hitch, beginning with his response to the first question about the strengths of running mate Kamala Harris, when he said, “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [if] I think she’s not qualified to be president.” Nor did it help the president’s cause that shortly prior to the press conference he introduced Ukrainian President President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to world leaders gathered with him at the NATO summit with the immortal words, “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.” 

At 8:29 pm EDT, four minutes after he left the stage at the press conference, Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut issued a statement urging Biden to exit the race, the Associated Press reported. Several other Democratic lawmakers soon followed suit, and calls for him to step aside continued today on the part of pundits, Democratic insiders, and party donors, who reportedly are holding up $90 million in promised contributions to increase the pressure on the president.

However, Biden’s handlers and fans immediately declared the press conference a triumph, saying it showed he remained an eloquent speaker, perhaps in reference to his comments about why he’s determined to win another term in office – “There’s so much we can do still. I’m determined to get it done. It’s about freedom. By the way, I’ll end this, well I’m not going to do that... Haley has to come up too” – and absolute master of foreign policy. “To answer the question on everyone’s minds,” White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates wrote in a Twitter post. “No, Joe Biden does not have a doctor in foreign affairs. He’s just that fucking good.”

Whether the effusive praise for Biden was offered strictly for public consumption or a case of people drinking their own Kool-Aid is impossible to know, but I expect the question on most everyone's minds after the press conference wasn’t the one Bates was referring to, but more along the lines of, “Are you fucking shitting me?” It’s true Biden didn’t completely bomb at the press conference as he did at the June 27 debate with GOP nominee Donald Trump, but after that debacle expectations were so low it would have been almost impossible for him not to exceed them, particularly as the setting yesterday was far less challenging. But if there’s anyone out there who watched the press conference and came away thinking it put to rest any further questions about Biden’s cognitive health, please be aware that if you’d like to subscribe to Washington Babylon and are short on funds, I will gladly accept whatever medication you were taking last night in lieu of cash.

In my view, Biden’s position in the presidential campaign was bad before the press conference, is worse now, and isn’t likely to get better if he stays in the race other than a blip or two if there’s good news on the economy or Trump does something extremely stupid. That’s a low bar as Trump typically does something extremely stupid multiple times a day, but it would need to be something spectacularly stupid to matter much.

The Biden camp is never short of arguments it can use to dismiss  pessimistic assessments of his odds of winning the race. So, as I did in yesterday’s story about why I believe the president is highly unlikely to drop out of the race, I’ll offer a quick list of reasons to explain what lies behind my opinion and rebut some of the arguments most commonly trotted out by Team Biden. After that, I’ll very briefly summarize countervailing evidence that reveals my entire thesis may be absolute crap.

• “The polls aren’t bad.”

Define bad. 

There are plenty of surveys to pick and choose from, some better for Biden and some worse, but they’re trending in the wrong direction and “now even his ‘good’ polls are pretty bad,” said a story in yesterday’s Washington Post about a new one freshly conducted for the newspaper by Ipsos. The good news for Biden was the Ipsos poll showed Biden and Trump each had the support of 46 percent of the voters. “The bad news,” said the story, “is pretty much everything else.”

To begin with, the Post noted its survey was something of an outlier as other recent ones show Biden behind by an average of two points nationally and “multiple high-quality polls” have him now down by six points. Additionally, more than 80 percent of the registered voters surveyed by Ipsos said Biden was too old to be president, “one of the highest numbers to date;” 67 to 30 percent said he should be replaced, including Democrats by a margin of 56 to 42 percent; and only 14 percent believed his “mental sharpness” was superior to Trump’s, down from 23 percent three months ago. 

If the primary goal of the Biden campaign is to convince the American people the president’s grip on reality is roughly half as strong as Trump’s, it’s been undeniably successful, as seen in this CBS News graphic from a story the network ran on a post-debate poll.

• Polls can get better, dementia doesn’t. 

I’m not a doctor and even if I was I wouldn’t be able to diagnose the president on the basis of the small amount of evidence at my disposal, but unfortunately I’ve observed close relatives who suffered from dementia and from what I’ve seen – most evidently at the debate, but at the press conference yesterday and other occasions as well – the question isn’t if Biden is cognitively impaired but how advanced it is. That admittedly doesn’t mean a lot, but plenty of people who’ve known Biden for a long time and are in a better position to evaluate things shared more or less the same view with reporters since the debate. 

Thus far, the Biden campaign hasn’t sent the president out for unscripted campaign events and media appearances as some of his supporters have urged, which doesn’t inspire much confidence in his handler’s confident assertions that his debate performance was a one-off. In their denials that there are any signs that Biden is senile, campaign officials have sometimes inadvertently offered evidence that suggests the contrary, such as their explanation shortly after the debate that the president is on the ball between 10 am and 4 pm, but has problems after that, especially in the evening, which is a textbook symptom of dementia known as “sundowning.” 

What I do know is dementia, senility, cognitive decline or whatever else you want to call what ails Biden will only get worse from here, and it’s all but impossible to believe he’d be able to effectively perform his duties as president throughout a second term if he were reelected, which will lead some people who’d vote for him otherwise to sit out the election or support Trump. Their numbers are likely to grow between now and November because  if the campaign continues to keep him sequestered from voters it will only increase suspicions about the president’s mental frailty and if it doesn’t it will confirm them. 

• Other than Biden’s family and closest allies, no group is more enthusiastic about Biden being the Democratic nominee than the Trump campaign 

I interviewed several sources with deep ties to MAGA World, including two prominent Trump campaign operatives I spoke to yesterday who were praying Biden wouldn’t end up being pressured to drop out of the race. I asked one of them if the reason Trump has been so uncharacteristically quiet and disciplined since the debate was that the campaign convinced him that under the circumstances, it’s better to simply sit back and reap the rewards of Biden’s epically catastrophic showing, as has been reported in news accounts. 

He put things differently, saying it’s true Trump would normally be piling on by looking to humiliate the president at every opportunity. His campaign advisors’ calculation, though, which the candidate surprisingly accepted, is the worst thing that could happen now would be to see Biden drop out of the race and they don’t want Trump to relentlessly ridicule him or do anything that could conceivably increase the risk of that. “The Democrats are probably stuck with Biden and no one on our side wants to see him gone,” the source said, “We think we can beat anyone who would replace him, but he’s already finished, there’s no way he’s going to win after the debate.” 

For his part, the campaign official thoroughly enjoyed mocking Biden, which he did during our interview and afterwards. He laughed uproariously at administration officials and Biden’s political advisors who described the president’s then upcoming media appearance as his “big boy press conference.” That did seem like an unbelievably bad choice of words when his campaign was desperately trying to portray Biden as a physically and mentally fit adult, which the image of the nation’s commander-in-chief wearing a diaper doesn’t help get across. 

The Biden campaign’s decision to describe his media appearance last Thursday as a “big boy press conference” seems like a terrible idea. The image above was sent to me by a Trump campaign consultant, and he got a big kick out of it anyway.

As the sources I spoke to are Republicans their expressed desire to run against Biden could be interpreted as blowing smoke, but I don’t think so, especially as it jibes with the opinion of some Democratic sources I interviewed who also believe Biden’s been toast since the debate and other candidates have a better chance of beating him than the party’s current nominee. It’s also a view that’s widely shared among elected Democrats, as seen in the op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by George Clooney, who said every member of congress and governor he’s spoken with in private thinks the party is “not going to win in November with this president” no matter what they were saying in public. 

However, not everyone agrees Biden has no chance to win the election, including some Democrats I spoke to who aren’t working for him or even very fond of him, and GOP sources I interviewed as well. The most compelling case for Biden came from an anti-Trump Republican who worked on the staff of one of his opponents during the GOP primaries.

The source, who rates the presidential rate as a toss-up with Biden still holding a slight edge, is a lot more familiar with the nuts-and-bolts of running a presidential campaign than I am. He also has much more direct knowledge about the current state of Trump’s campaign operations, and isn’t impressed by what he’s seen. 

Ronna McDaniel wasn’t necessarily successful as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee between 2017 and February 26 of this year, when Trump forced her to resign after he locked up the nomination by winning the South Carolina presidential primary – she hadn’t presided over a single positive election cycle, Axios noted in a story that ran two years ago – but Trump “hasn't had a ground game since she was fired,” said the source, who attributed that to idiotic decisions made by his campaign about allocating resources. One of the worst, he said, was handing over tens of millions of dollars to Charlie Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA who’s adept at stirring up kindred looney tune conspiracists in the MAGA ecosphere but not so good when it comes to motivating those in more normal demographics, like non-deranged Republicans who don’t have a high opinion of Trump but could be persuaded to vote for him. “I’ve never gone wrong by voting against Charlie,” the source added.

Biden isn’t a strong candidate with great appeal, the source agreed, but Trump isn’t either, which is why his handlers have kept him under close wraps, too. “They can’t hide him forever,” he said. “There’s a ceiling of support Trump needs to break to win and at some point he’s going to have to start working. Biden will too, but he won’t have to work as hard because his campaign team is a lot better, and there are a lot of people who’d rather vote for a corpse than a crook.”

Which is a very sad state of affairs for the country, but there’s a good deal of logic in his argument, so I may have been too hasty in reaching my own conclusions about the state of the race, and there’s still a chance it will be the corpse, not the crook, who is sworn-in as the nation’s leader come January 2025.