Democrats should have heeded concerns about Joe Biden’s decline long ago

By Matthew Gagnon

I speculated that the first presidential debate of 2024 would be — contrary to their typical unimportance — consequential.

My reasons were simple: both candidates had big questions circulating around their candidacy, and needed to show voters that those concerns were unfounded. President Joe Biden, in particular, needed to show that concerns over his age and mental state were unfounded, in order to reassure voters of his competency. 

He did not do that. 

There was really no way to spin Biden’s performance on debate night, it was an unmitigated disaster. In the week since the debate, party insiders have grown increasingly alarmed at what they saw last Thursday, the impact that it is having on the election, and now it appears that an open revolt is breaking out within the party. 

The New York Times published an editorial the day after the debate, saying that Biden must, to serve his country, leave the race. There is now turmoil inside the Biden White House itself, with staffers “freaking the [expletive] out,” as one official put it. House Democrats are holding impromptu anti-Biden vent sessions. Barack Obama, while publicly expressing support for Biden, is privately sharing deep concerns over his candidacy. Even Nancy Pelosi is acknowledging that it is a “legitimate question” to ask whether Biden’s debate performance was just a one-off bad night, or a “condition.” 

And here in Maine, U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine just penned a stunning column in the opinion pages of the Bangor Daily News and Piscataquis Observer, saying that Donald Trump “is going to win the election” and that contrary to the catastrophist screeching about the end of the American Republic, “democracy will be just fine” when he wins.

Calls for Biden to bow out, and for the party to replace him are growing, but that actually happening is extremely difficult and there are major complications.

Whatever happens, I have a more fundamental question to ask about all of this. How, exactly, did the Democratic Party allow itself to end up in this place?

Biden’s apparent decline is not a secret to anyone. The president of the United States is one of the most public jobs on Earth, and we have frequently seen Biden for four years. Anyone who has been paying attention has noticed the signs of decline, including his dramatically slowing speech, faltering memory, mumbling speech and signs of physical frailty.

Are those observations anecdotal? Yes. Do they tell us that he is now or would be incapable of the job? Not necessarily, but in Biden’s case they certainly raised alarm bells because the decline appeared to be significant, and accelerating quickly. 

The big problem for the Democrats was that it was the Republicans who were the loudest voices bringing up this concern. Republicans obviously do not like Biden and any criticism of him by them is opportunistic, tribal and partisan. 

Because of this, Democrats retreated into a defensive crouch and dismissed the criticisms, no matter how apparent the problem was becoming. They talked themselves into believing that what they were seeing wasn’t actually what they were seeing, gobbling up articles claiming Biden was a “superager” and taking seriously any arguments claiming that “this version of Biden is the best Biden ever.”

So when the Democrats had a chance to do something about this, they didn’t. No potential candidate decided to step forward and challenge Biden in the primary, despite the fact that the reality of Biden’s condition was becoming readily apparent. 

Let this be a lesson: Sometimes your opponents are right, even if they’re being opportunistic partisan hacks.

Observers of the president have been saying that he has shown “signs of slipping” for some time now, and this week The New York Times published an article that claimed that Biden’s lapses are increasingly common and worrisome. This means that people, particularly those inside the party establishment, have known and worried about this for some time.

And now they may be stuck. Replacing Biden, even if he decides to step aside, is not going to be easy and would throw the entire election into chaos. Yet they may not have any choice, as post-debate polling from Democratic firms is showing a potential wipeout for Biden, with states like Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Mexico now all in play for Trump.

But more important than the political impact is the potential for a president who is physically and mentally incapable of running the government. If defeating Trump is so important, as Democrats believe it to be, they simply cannot offer America a potential president unable to do the job.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.