Pollster Nate Silver slams Dems for ignoring ‘cold, hard facts’ about Biden’s decline
Democrats who are insisting that President Biden stay in the race despite his apparent cognitive decline are engaged in “reality distortion” while ignoring “cold, hard facts” and lashing out at the media, data journalist and pollster Nate Silver said.
Silver, founder of the election prognostication site FiveThirtyEight, wrote in his Substack newsletter on Monday that “progressive media scolds” on X are blaming the press for reporting on “things the public can see with its own eyes, like Biden’s obviously deteriorating condition” as well as Biden-era inflation.
“Progressive media scolds are like the dog who caught the car,” Silver wrote in a piece titled “Blaming the media is what got Democrats into this mess.”
“They succeeded in getting the media to frame the issue gingerly” by churning out stories alleging that videos showing Biden appearing disoriented were “cheap fakes” and doctored clips.
“But having caught the car, the critics aren’t sure what to do with it. Because the car was a lemon,” he added.
Silver’s essay came in response to backlash from Biden supporters against media outlets that have finally begun reporting on the president’s frequent memory lapses and age-related flaws.
He dismissed the outcry, writing that the “Democratic Party now finds itself in a state of crisis.”
Silver has also been critical of mainstream news outlets for failing to adequately give weight to Biden’s cognitive decline.
He noted that “most who work for high-prestige media outlets like [the New York] Times and the Washington Post are left-of-center” and that “vanishingly few are Republicans or would like to see [Donald] Trump elected again.”
But Biden’s debate performance sparked subsequent calls from left-leaning news organizations and personalities sympathetic to the president for him to step aside — something he has vowed not to do.
Before the first presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27, when Biden struggled to form coherent sentences and organize his thoughts, mainstream media outlets gave scant attention to the topic of his cognitive fitness.
Silver on Monday said the coverage of Biden’s deteriorating capacity was “clearly inadequate” since “it centered too much on the electoral implications and not the even more fundamental question of Biden’s fitness for office.”
A Wall Street Journal story published early last month, which cited several people who met with the president as saying that he was “slipping,” was met with fierce criticism from pro-Biden voices on social media and in the press.
Silver noted that journalists likely stayed away from digging into the story because “although they don’t want to admit it, most of them actually do read the mean Twitter messages” that are written about them.
