Will there be a Joe Biden ‘comeback?’

After several weeks of almost daily embarrassing senior moments on the campaign trail, Joe Biden is somehow improving in the polls. The FiveThirtyEight website’s average now puts him 0.1 percent ahead of Donald Trump in national surveys — the first time this year he’s lead his rival. 

The current president is still behind the former president in nearly all the swing-state polls, his “job approval” numbers continue to worsen and bookmakers still have Trump as strong favorite to win again in November. But Trump is not pulling away towards victory. On the contrary, if Biden defies very low expectations and performs well in the first debate on Thursday next week, the Democratic media machine will start talking about Joe’s “hot streak,” “Trump’s slump” or even “Biden’s comeback.”

Intelligent commentators have long said that the 2024 presidential election will be extremely close. What’s interesting, however, is that the mass circulation in recent days of video clips of a demented Joe Biden struggling through yet another public appearance — whether that’s D-Day, Juneteenth, alongside Barack Obama or just ambling to and from Marine One — seems not to damage his chances of re-election. 

Maybe Biden is faring a little better because voters are finally starting to feel better about America’s strong economy. Maybe Biden’s decline is “baked in,” as the pundits like to say — voters already know that he is gaga and have done for some time. Or maybe America’s aging population, far from despising weakness, just feels sorry for the guy. 

Democrats make themselves sound silly as they deploy their newfangled term “cheap fake” to describe any video which shows Biden in an unflattering light. But there’s no doubt that senior citizens — who make up 27 percent or likely American voters — feel uncomfortable when the Republican media machine and Donald Trump mock Biden for his apparent senility. People have spent many months wondering if America might be wild enough vote for a convicted felon in Donald Trump. A more pressing question might be: is America crazy enough to re-elect a fast-declining octogenarian to the White House?

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.