Pollster Nate Silver is calling on President Joe Biden to resign, saying that he should leave the "high-stakes" decisions of his final few months in office to Vice President Kamala Harris.
The election modeler questioned Biden's fitness for office, given that the 82-year-old president was pressured to drop out of the most recent presidential election over concerns about his age.
"Is there any particular reason to assume Biden is competent to be president right now? It's a very difficult job," Silver shared on X. "It's a dangerous world. Extremely high-stakes decisions in Ukraine. He should resign and let Harris serve out the last 2 months."
Silver shared his prescription for the Biden administration alongside a screenshot of a story from the Washington Post that claimed the president spent a trip to Brazil to attend the G-20 summit ducking reporters. Biden gave a speech encouraging Democrats to "get back up" following his second-in-command's loss to Donald Trump but has refused to take questions from the press.
Biden's stock has taken a massive hit in the days since the election. Aides in Harris' camp and Democratic leaders have placed the blame for Harris' poor performance squarely at Biden's feet. Silver counts himself in that number, saying on his Substack that the president set Harris up to fail on election night.
By tapping Harris to take the lead on the border, Silver argued that Biden handed the vice president "Democrats' worst issue." The timing of his bowing out, coupled with a schedule tailored to keeping Biden off the debate stage, robbed Harris of one of her "best formats," according to Silver.
That isn't to say the prognosticator is fully in the bag for Harris. Silver's final prediction of the Trump-Harris showdown called the election a toss-up, and that same post-mortem calling out Biden's bad deal for Harris said that the vice president ran a particularly bad campaign.
"People confuse their sympathy for Harris’s position for her having been a good candidate," he said.
Silver isn't all doom and gloom, though. He's predicting that Democrats will rebound in 2028.
