The New Yorker:

The President’s supporters have long treated his age as a superficial issue. The Times commentator explains why that position has become untenable.

By Isaac Chotiner

On Thursday night, President Joe Biden gave a widely panned performance in the debate against Donald Trump, causing panic throughout the Democratic Party and raising questions about whether Biden should continue on as the Party’s candidate. Biden is already trailing Trump in national and swing-state polls, in which voters have registered significant concerns about the President’s age. (He will be eighty-two in November.) At the debate, Biden stumbled over his words, at times appeared to blank out entirely, and had trouble giving clear answers, likely entrenching these concerns among voters. (A CNN poll taken immediately after the debate found that fifty-seven per cent of viewers said they had “no confidence” in Biden’s “ability to lead the country”; for Trump, the number was forty-four per cent.)

More than four months ago, the Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein wrote a column titled “Democrats Have a Better Option than Biden,” in which he called on the Party to convince Biden that “he should not run again.” He worried that Biden was on a losing path, felt that it was imperative for Democrats not give in to “fatalism” about the race, and argued that the Party should push for an open convention in which another candidate could be chosen. The column caused a splash, but obviously did not lead to Biden being significantly challenged in the primaries, or to a major push for him to step aside.

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