Pollster Nate Silver called for President Joe Biden to step down and let Kamala Harris assume office, saying he does not appear capable of making “high-stakes” decisions.
“Is there any particular reason to assume Biden is competent to be president right now?” Silver wrote on X Wednesday. “It’s a very difficult job. It’s a dangerous world. Extremely high-stakes decisions in Ukraine. He should resign and let Harris serve out the last 2 months.”
Silver included an excerpt of a Washington Post article about Biden’s avoidance of reporters at the G-20 summit in Brazil. The article details how Biden ignored reporters despite “repeated efforts to engage him,” including one TV producer resorting to “writing messages on a large pad of paper” to show the president.
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Biden has not taken questions from the press since Donald Trump won the presidency on Nov. 5, an election he called the most important in the country’s history.
Silver, who rose to political fame from his FiveThirtyEight polling analysis, has been a sharp critic of Biden during the race and after the Democrats’ resounding defeat.
“Trump’s win is mostly Biden’s fault, not hers,” Silver wrote of Harris on his Substack. He added that “nobody in the senior ranks of the Biden campaign should ever work in politics again,” after it was revealed that Biden’s team predicted Trump would win 400 electoral votes if he stayed in the race.
He added that he had a “a lot of sympathy for Kamala Harris’s position, maybe more than I have for any losing candidate in some time."
“[Biden] gave her tough assignments—the border, perhaps Democrats’ worst issue, and voting rights, an issue on which the White House probably knew it wouldn’t make any progress,” Silver wrote. “He blew up the debate calendar, leaving nothing scheduled after Sept. 11 even though this was one of Harris’s best formats. Even up to the bitter end, Biden was stepping on her message.”
Silver’s own polling analysis had predicted a photo-finish race in the lead-up to the election. but when early election night results showed a strong performance for Trump, Silver took down his model, saying that it wasn’t “capturing the story of this election night well.”
