Mr. Trump now leads Mr. Biden 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters nationally, a three-point swing toward the Republican from just a week earlier, before the debate. Nate Cohen in the New York Times.

Democrats have had the tendency to think, ‘Well, we owe it to the person. They’ve been good to the party, they’ve fought for the right causes over the years. Therefore, it’s kind of up to them to decide when to step aside.” Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

Michele and I didn’t see The Great Debate Disaster – we were driving to her family cabin in what is now known as Olympic Valley – although we did listen to the debate on the car radio. Well, we listened to parts of the debate anyway. After Biden or Trump would say something, I would turn the radio off, saying, “I can’t listen to this.” Thirty seconds later, in a FOMO frenzy of thinking Biden had to improve, we would turn it back on, listen for ten or fifteen minutes, and then repeat the cycle. It was painful.

I thought Maybe Biden did better on TV, where people could see how much better and more Presidential he looked. However, by every account I’ve read, Biden looked even worse on TV. Part of the problem is that Biden is not a very good campaigner. According to President Biden’s campaign team, part of the problem was that Biden had jet lag from going to Normandy to celebrate D-Day, and part of it was that he had a cold. It’s safe to say that whoever made the deal with former president Trump’s campaign team wasn’t thinking it out. And Biden surely signed off on the debate date which doesn’t speak very well for him.

Actually, President Biden running for a second term does not speak well for him. I say that even though I believe that President Biden had a great first term with a long list of accomplishments like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – which, somehow, was a bill that everybody wanted but nobody could get passed – $280B to bring very high tech chip manufacturing back to the United States, and he got the Respect for Marriage Act through Congress which codified marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples. For me, most importantly, he actually acknowledged that Climate Change was real and started doing something about it with the infrastructure law and the Build Back Better Act. However, all these bills were passed in the first half of Biden’s term, while the second two years were much less impressive.  

I think Biden should withdraw from running for president because he is too old to effectively run for office or effectively run the office – as far as that goes, and he is getting worse. I also believe he is unlikely to stop running. That’s too bad for everyone concerned: President Biden, the Democrats, and, especially, the people of the United States.

Now that I’ve said that, I want to reference a couple of similar situations that suggest I’m wrong. Running for his second term, President Ronald Reagan lost the first debate to former Vice-president Walter Mondale and went on to win the second debate and the presidency. President Johnson had a great first term – a great 1.5 terms? – and then withdrew from running after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary. Vice-president Hubert Humphrey won the nomination at the 1968 Convention in Chicago and went on to lose the election.

I do want to point out that six years after leaving office, Ronald Reagan made public that he had Alzheimer’s Disease. What he did not say was that he probably had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s during his second term in office, and it probably contributed to his second term being non-productive. I also want to point out that the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was chaotic, and Johnson would have surely lost if he had run.