The economy is breaking President Biden’s way. Inflation is retreating to normal levels just months before the November election, while job growth remains strong. This would normally be a bullish indicator for an incumbent president seeking reelection.
Guess who’s talking about this Goldilocks economy: practically nobody. The overwhelming story of the 2024 election is President Biden’s age and his ability to serve until he turns 86, should he win this year. Biden wants voters to focus on his steadily improving economic record, but voters don’t even know if Biden will be the Democratic presidential candidate in November.
Biden’s bumbling performance at the June 27 debate with Donald Trump reset the campaign as a referendum on Biden’s fragility. Biden has been doing damage control ever since, with pressure mounting from inside Biden’s own party for him to withdraw from the race and make way for Vice President Kamala Harris or another younger Democrat.
In the political headlines, Biden’s presidential campaign is comatose one minute, resuscitated the next. The broader picture is that his odds of remaining the Democratic candidate are even, at best.
“We are maintaining our high 70% odds that Biden will not be on the ballot in November,” Henrietta Treyz, managing partner at investment research firm Veda Partners, wrote in a July 11 analysis. She expects Harris to get the nod at some point after the Republican National Convention concludes on July 18. Waiting till after the convention would deprive the GOP of an opportunity to attack Harris during primetime, when more Americans might be paying attention.
Biden clearly isn’t going without a fight. He fielded tough questions about his candidacy during a July 11 news conference, in which he articulated an impressive vision for how the West needs to contain a nascent alliance of nihilist nations including Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China. On foreign policy, Biden still has the chops of a seasoned eminence.
At the same news conference, however, he referred to Harris as “Vice President Trump” without realizing the mistake that everybody else caught. Earlier in the day, also on camera, he referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin,” although he recognized this flub and quickly corrected himself.
Biden is not senile. He retains the ability to comprehend and express complex ideas. But he is frail, and a speaking style that was never especially graceful is now clunky and off-putting. David Frum of the Atlantic likens the 81-year-old Biden’s aging process, which the whole world is watching, to photodegradation, in which the colors of an old painting fade and become less vibrant.
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This is normally a column about economics. For the time being, however, economics is subsumed by geriatrics. Voter concerns about Biden’s age, whether justified or not, are the dominant feature of the 2024 presidential race, and possibly the decisive feature.
If Biden ends up withdrawing, the Democrats will no longer have an age problem. But the Republicans will. At 78, Trump would probably be a generation older than whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being, and on track to be the oldest president ever if he wins in November and makes it through four years. Trump has his own lucidity problems, and a younger Democratic opponent would flip the fragility card.
Another Democrat might also be able to get more traction with voters on an economy that should be an increasingly strong selling point for the party. Inflation will probably be below 3% by the fall, and upbeat news on retreating prices has renewed hopes of a Federal Reserve interest rate cut in September. Stock prices remain near record highs. So far, it looks like the “soft landing” scenario many economists have described as the ideal, if unlikely, way out of the problem.
If Biden remains the Democratic candidate, there’s no doubt he’ll keep telling voters pay is up, unemployment is low, and inflation is on the run. That may not be what they hear, though, when it comes in the raspy voice of an octogenarian who sometimes struggles to finish the sentence.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
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