Should Joe Biden quit the Presidential race? Two questions are in play.
The first is whether he is too sick to be President. Of the three branches of government, the Executive is unique for being just one person, and an extremely powerful one. He doesn’t just manage the agencies. He commands the armed forces, makes foreign policy, issues pardons, and advises the nation in speeches that are the most influential of any American. The Supreme Court notes that he cannot do his job if he decides feebly. Indeed, the Court’s grant this week of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official Presidential assumes that fending off criminal charges would leave him little time for big decisions. The Court wrote that, as with civil suits, criminal prosecution might “chill” the President “from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive.”
But surely feeble reasoning also leads to feeble decisions. In a debate last week for which he himself proposed the rules, Biden struggled for thought and sometimes ended in non sequiturs (“We finally beat Medicare”). This was not just one bad night. In an interview with David Muir of ABC News just before his D-Day speech, Biden again spoke barely above a whisper and was virtually impossible to understand. In his first two years, Biden gave fewer press conferences than any President since Reagan, reported The New York Times. He met with journalists 54 times; Trump in his first two years, 202 times. On Monday night, Biden passed up the opportunity to show that he could think on his feet. Instead, he read from a teleprompter his statement about the Court’s immunity ruling and refused to answer questions. His recent faux pas include saying in February that he had just met François Mitterrand, a French President who died in 1996, rather than President Emmanuel Macron, as well as meeting with Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, who died in 2017, rather than with former Chancellor Angela Merkel.
On the other hand, Trump in a January speech confused former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with his own United Nations Ambassador and chief rival for the GOP nomination, Nikki Haley. And in 2020 he proposed on TV to cure Covid-19 by injecting bleach into the blood.
Is Biden mentally incompetent as President? The Constitution has a way to answer this question – the 25th Amendment. The President can be removed if the Vice President and a majority of Cabinet officers agree that he is not fit to serve. There is no evidence that Biden is anywhere near this point. By Constitutional standards, he is competent. At the moment.
But we have faced this problem before. When President Woodrow Wilson fell to a neurological illness in 1919 while campaigning for the Versailles Treaty ending World War I, his wife Edith was said to have secretly made decisions for him. Aides to President Ronald Reagan considered the 25th Amendment when his attention flagged in his second term. Yet the Constitution recognizes only the Vice President as the successor to an incapacitated President.
What about informal standards for Presidential competence? Every person will answer for herself. I think that most of Biden’s decisions have been reasonable, although, as a fiscal conservative, I disagree with most of them. I have not seen an increasing trend toward ridiculous decisions, aside from his threat in May to withhold smart bombs from Israel if it invaded Rafah by land, a threat with no obvious connection to American national interests.
Trump, on the other hand, has proposed to use the military as mercenaries, which demonstrates feeble reasoning. He brought this idea up in a 2017 meeting in the “the Tank” of the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff met, wrote Leonnig and Rucker. And he returned to it in last week’s debate, when he said he would consider pulling out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization if NATO members did not pony up to their funding pledges. That amounts to using the armed forces to make, or save, money.
The second question is whether Biden’s poor speaking will cost him the election. In national polls, Biden and Trump are in a dead heat. In a few battleground states, Trump leads, according to the newspapers. But they have overstated the number of states in which he leads, because they apply to state polls too small of a margin of error.
For example, The Washington Post declared on June 26 that Trump was winning in four of seven battleground states (North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia), assuming a 3.5% “normal-sized polling error.” The other three battleground states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—were too close to call.
How did The Post decide that 3.5% was a “normal” error? Its technical notes say: “We found in the last few presidential cycles that the average modeled polling error in competitive states was 3.5 percentage points, so to account for this, our averages factor in the 90th percentile possible error (i.e., how bad would the error be in the worst 10 percent of cases).”
The point to note is that The Post is allowing for a potential error of 10% in identifying the winning candidate, not the usual 5% maximum error. Because The Post is unusually tolerant of error, it uses an unusually small margin of error in determining whether the candidate leading in the poll is actually winning the race. This means that Trump may not be winning in all four states by the usual criteria. For a state poll, and a potential error in identifying the winner of 5% or less, a margin of error of 5% would not be surprising. Using this margin of error, Trump led in only one of the seven battleground states—Georgia, where his margin over Biden was 6%.
The Post did not explain why it had doubled the conventional tolerance of error. Nor did it tell the general reader that it had done so.
To the Post's credit, it did try to go beyond the standard margin-of-error analysis, which, as you have pointed out, assumes that the polled sample is randomly drawn from the population of likely voters and therefore a reasonably accurate reflection of it. The Post mentions measurement error and frame error.
(A note for readers who have better things to do with their time than pore over statistics: Measurement error arises from one's attempt to measure a process. For example, if I use a ruler marked off in centimeters to estimate the length of a cockroach -- hey, I've got to have some kind of hobby -- my answer will probably be off by several millimeters. In political polling, measurement error may occur because the interviewers are poorly trained, and so forth.
(Frame error occurs because the makeup of the sample differs from the makeup of the population studied. If my sample is 70% women and the population is 50% women, then the sample might not accurately depict the population.)
But The Post doesn't make clear exactly what it did about particular errors.
I worry especially about nonresponse error in Trump-Biden polling. Nonresponse error may be growing: The Pew Research Center said that in telephone surveys, its response rate in surveys had dropped from 36% in 1997 to 9% in 2012. It is reasonable to think that potential respondents whose favored candidate is losing are less likely to take part in a survey. That would bias the sample in favor of the winning candidate. I suspect that many Biden fans will be too depressed to talk to interviewers.
(Here is a nice article on political polling: When You Hear the Margin of Error Is Plus or Minus 3 Percent, Think 7 Instead - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
(On nonresponse rates, see Assessing the Representativeness of Public Opinion Surveys | Pew Research Center/)
But Biden is certainly not winning the race. In a post-debate CBS poll, 72% of the respondents doubted that he could think clearly enough to be President. In a flash poll after the debate, CNN found that two-thirds of the respondents thought that Trump had won the debate. Roper and Gallup, which have been polling reactions to Presidential debates since the 1940s, have not yet released their results.
Biden has committed to the second and last debate on September 9, hosted by ABC News. I assume that it would follow the same rules as the first. Given the visible deterioration in Biden's speaking over the past month, I do not see why he would do better in two months. And losing a second debate two months before the election cannot help him.
In sum, I worry less about his fitness for office than about his chances of winning, although I worry about both.
This question bears upon Central Asia because Biden strongly supports Ukraine in its war with Russia. The American support of Ukraine has led to sanctions against Russia, and these indirectly create a black market for military exports from Central Asia to Russia. If Trump returns to the White House, he will probably end sanctions against Russia, and the black market will collapse. -- Leon Taylor, Seymour, Indiana tayloralmaty@gmail.com
Notes
For helpful comments, I thank but do not implicate Annabel Benson, Paul Higgins, and Mark Kennet.
References
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. James Baker’s 7 Rules for Running Washington - POLITICO September 28, 2020.
Peter Baker, David E. Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Katie Rogers. Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Lenny Bronner and Diane Napolitano. How The Washington Post’s presidential polling averages work - The Washington Post June 26, 2024.
Lenny Bronner, Diane Napolitano, Kati Perry, and Luis Melgar. Who is ahead in 2024 presidential polls right now? - Washington Post June 26, 2024.
Dartunorro Clark. Trump suggests 'injection' of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and 'clean' the lungs (nbcnews.com) April 23, 2020.
Jim Dunnelly. Watch David Muir's Exclusive Interview with President Biden on the D-Day Anniversary | ABC Updates June 5, 2024.
Ariel Edwards-Levy and Jennifer Agiesta. CNN Flash Poll: Majority of debate watchers say Trump outperformed Biden | CNN Politics June 28, 2024.
Michael Gold. Trump Confuses Haley and Pelosi, Accusing Rival of Jan. 6 Lapse - The New York Times (nytimes.com) January 24, 2024.
Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker. 'A Very Stable Genius' book excerpt: Inside Trump's stunning tirade against generals - The Washington Post January 17, 2020.
Becky Little. Reagan Aides Once Raised the Possibility of Invoking the 25th Amendment | HISTORY November 6, 2023.
Iain Marlow. Biden Threatens to Withhold Weapons to Israel Over Rafah Invasion | TIME May 9, 2024.
National Constitution Center. 25th Amendment - Presidential Disability and Succession | Constitution Center
Zoë Richards. In his second mix-up this week, Biden talks about meeting with dead European leaders (nbcnews.com) February 7, 2024.
Michael D. Shear. Biden Holds Fewest News Conferences Since Reagan - The New York Times (nytimes.com) April 21, 2023.
Andrea Vacchiano. Doubt in Biden's cognitive abilities jumped after debate against Trump: poll | Fox News June 30, 2024.
Woodrow Wilson - Wikipedia
Caitlin Yilek. When the next presidential debate of 2024 takes place and who will moderate it - CBS News June 28, 2024.
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