Gastonia, NC
The second half of this question is not an argument. It is a claim about what the public believed, and the claim is false, and it is false by very large margins that were published every month for two years.
Voters priced it. In February an AP survey had roughly three-quarters of American adults saying Biden was too old to serve another term — and about seven in ten Democrats said the same thing. That is not a country failing to notice. That is a country that had noticed, said so out loud to pollsters, and been asked to vote anyway.
I read copy for a living and I want to be precise about what that number does to the question. It removes the information hypothesis entirely. There was no secret. There was no failure of comprehension. Seventy percent of the President’s own party told anybody who asked that they thought he was too old, and then the primary calendar produced him with ninety-nine percent of the delegates.
So the elite information control half is also wrong, or at least badly named. You cannot control information that three-quarters of the country is telling pollsters every month. Whatever failed on June 27, it was not concealment.
What failed was the connection between what people believed and what the system could do about it. Everybody knew. Nobody had a lever.
That is a worse diagnosis than either option in the question, because a control failure can be fixed by better journalism and a voter failure can be fixed by better voters. What actually happened cannot be fixed by either, and it is the thing this morning’s letter to congressional Democrats is designed to prove — the man’s answer to a party that wants him gone is that the delegates are his.
He is right about that. They are. That is the problem, and it has nothing to do with what anybody knew.
Owatonna, MN
Minnesota is going to decline both halves of this question, and I want to do it with the numbers rather than by being clever.
Through 2023 and into this year, poll after poll had large majorities saying the President was too old for another term. Not a plurality. Majorities in the seventies, including majorities of Democrats. Those numbers were published, discussed, and cited by everyone including the White House, which treated them as a messaging problem.
So the information was universal. The belief was near-universal. And the primary produced him with essentially all the delegates.
That is the finding and it is not about knowledge at all. It is about the absence of a channel.
Consider what pricing actually requires. In a market you price by selling. In a nomination you price by voting for somebody else. There was somebody else — Dean Phillips ran on precisely this issue, said the quiet thing in public, and was treated by his own party as a defector. He won nothing and was gone by early March. There were no debates. The calendar was arranged to close early.
A voter who believed the President was too old had exactly one instrument available to express it, and the instrument was a ballot with no viable alternative on it. Casting it changed nothing, and everybody could see it would change nothing before they cast it.
So what collapsed on June 27 was not a belief and not a control operation. It was the last excuse available to people whose positions required them to act as though the belief did not exist. The public had priced it for two years. The party had refused delivery.
This morning the President wrote to congressional Democrats saying he is firmly committed, that any weakening of resolve helps Trump, and that anybody who disagrees should challenge him at the convention. That is an accurate description of his position and it is also the whole indictment. The place he is inviting them to challenge him is the only place the challenge was never allowed to happen.
Prescott Valley, AZ
I want to take apart the word “price,” because the question rests on it and the metaphor does not survive contact with how a nomination works.
In a market, pricing is something an individual can do alone. You sell your position. Your view is expressed and registered regardless of what anybody else thinks, and the price moves a little.
A nomination is not like that. Your view registers only if there is an alternative to move toward, and it registers only if enough other people move at the same time. A voter who thought the President was too old and voted accordingly in March had nowhere to put the vote, and knew it, and knew the outcome was already determined.
That is the thing a class needs to understand about this question. Asking why voters did not price it is like asking why depositors did not sell a bank they were not allowed to withdraw from.
And they did believe it. That part is not in dispute and never was. Surveys through 2023 and into this year consistently put the share of adults saying he was too old somewhere around three-quarters, with most Democrats agreeing. There is no version of the last two years in which the American public failed to notice.
So the second half of the question is empirically false and I would say so without hedging.
The first half is closer but the word is wrong. “Elite information control” implies suppression, and there was none — the age story ran constantly. What existed was something more like an official position that everyone was expected to defer to in public while believing the opposite in private, which is a different failure and a more embarrassing one, because it required no one to lie and everyone to pretend.
June 27 did not inform anybody. It made the pretending impossible to sustain in front of fifty million people, which is a fact about the pretenders and not about the audience.
Dayton, OH
I said in the first of these that the press covered this constantly and covered it as a polling story rather than a capacity story. I want to stay consistent with that, because it rules out one of the two answers on offer here.
If the coverage was constant, there was no information control failure. You cannot run a suppression operation on a subject that appears in the news every week for three years and polls in the seventies. Whatever happened on June 27, it was not a leak.
And if three-quarters of the public was telling surveys the man was too old — including most of his own party — then there was no voter failure either. The public had a view, held it strongly, and expressed it every time anybody asked.
Both halves fail, which usually means the question has the wrong variable in it.
The variable is the mechanism. Here is the process description. You have a measurement system reporting out of tolerance continuously for three years. Everybody reads the report. Nobody disputes the numbers. And there is no corrective action available, because the only station that could act — a nominating contest — was taken off the line before the run started.
That is not an information problem. Information was excellent. It was a control problem: a measurement with nothing downstream of it.
In a plant that condition produces exactly what it produced here. Operators stop treating the gauge as actionable. Management develops a vocabulary for why the readings do not mean what they appear to mean. And the failure, when it arrives, arrives all at once in front of the customer, because there was no intermediate point at which anything could have been done.
June 27 was the customer visit. Everything before it was three years of accurate measurement with the corrective-action step deleted, and everybody involved knew the step had been deleted, which is why the readings stopped feeling urgent to anyone.
Wheeling, WV
I want to talk about the letter he sent this morning, because it answers this question better than anything I could write.
He wrote to congressional Democrats saying he is firmly committed to staying in the race, that any weakening of resolve only helps the other side, and that anybody who disagrees should challenge him at the convention.
Now think about what that last part means. The convention is a month away. The delegates were selected in a primary season with no debates and no serious opponent. He has essentially all of them. He is telling the people who want him out that the proper forum for their objection is the one place where the objection has already been made impossible.
He is not wrong. That is the part that gets me. Everything in that letter is procedurally correct.
So the question of who failed — the elites or the voters — has an answer neither half wants. Nobody failed to know. Three-quarters of the country had been telling pollsters for two years that the man was too old, most Democrats included. The information was not withheld and it was not ignored.
What was withheld was the vote that would have mattered. There was no contest. The one man who ran on this was treated as a traitor and got nothing.
I have watched this exact structure in a plant. Everybody knows the foreman is done. Everybody says so in the parking lot. And the grievance procedure that would have let anybody do something about it was suspended two years ago by agreement, so all that knowledge just sits there doing nothing until something happens on the floor and it comes out all at once.
That is not an information failure and it is not a workforce failure. It is a missing procedure, and the people who removed the procedure are now writing letters about how the only place to raise an objection is the meeting they control.
Tyler, TX
East Texas would look at this question and say the market metaphor is doing all the work and none of it is honest.
A market prices things because it has two sides and continuous trading. You can sell any day, for any reason, and your view registers whether or not anybody agrees with you.
A nomination has one product, one settlement date, and no short position. If you think the incumbent is impaired, your only instrument is a vote for somebody else. There was no somebody else. Phillips ran, said exactly this, was treated by his own party as a defector, won nothing, and was out by early March. After that the instrument did not exist at all.
So asking why voters did not price it is asking why a market with no counterparty failed to clear. It did not fail. It was not a market.
And they had priced it, to the extent they could. Surveys had roughly three-quarters of adults saying he was too old, most Democrats included, sustained for two years. In underwriting terms the loss was fully anticipated by everyone in the book. What was missing was a mechanism to reprice the policy, and the reason it was missing is that the carrier had cancelled the renewal review.
That is why I will not take either half of this question. The elite half implies the information was hidden and it was published weekly. The voter half implies the public did not believe it and seventy percent of his own party did.
What actually happened is that a party built a year in which a nearly unanimous public judgment had no way to become an outcome, and then acted surprised when the judgment arrived all at once on a stage.
Anticipated losses with no repricing mechanism do not go away. They accumulate and settle at once, on a date you do not choose. June twenty-seventh was the settlement date and the terms were set in 2023.
Long Island, NY
Both halves of this question are false and I want to say why in order, because the framing has been repeated all week and it is going to harden.
The elite information control half fails on volume. Suppression means the material did not reach the public. The material reached the public constantly — the President’s age was among the most heavily covered subjects of his term and among the most heavily polled questions in American politics. There is no plausible account in which this was hidden.
The voter half fails on the polling. Through 2023 and into this year, surveys consistently found roughly three-quarters of adults saying he was too old to serve another term, with clear majorities of Democrats agreeing. The public did not fail to price it. The public priced it emphatically, continuously, and in public, for two years.
So we are left with a fact pattern in which the information was available, the judgment was formed, the judgment was near-unanimous, and it produced nothing.
The correct diagnosis is a failure of instrumentation. The public had a settled view and no procedure through which the view could operate. The nominating calendar produced no debates and no serious contest; the one declared challenger was treated as an act of disloyalty rather than as the ordinary exercise the calendar exists for; and the primaries functioned as a ratification of a decision made before they began.
That is not information control and it is not civic sloth. It is a party removing the mechanism by which its own voters’ settled opinion could become an outcome, and then relying on the absence of an outcome as evidence that the opinion did not exist.
June 27 changed nothing about what anyone believed. It changed what the people whose positions depended on the pretense could continue to say out loud. That is a fact about them, and the attempt now underway to reframe it as a public failure is a rear-guard action by an institutional class looking for somebody else to have been wrong.
The public was right for two years and had nowhere to put it. That is the sentence.
Cheyenne, WY
I keep books, so let me post what the record actually shows before anybody assigns blame.
Entry one: the information was published. Constantly, for three years, in every outlet, as one of the most covered subjects of the presidency. Nobody hid it.
Entry two: the public believed it. Three-quarters of adults told pollsters the man was too old for another term, and about seven in ten Democrats said the same. Those numbers held for two years and nobody disputed them, including the White House, which treated them as a communications problem.
Entry three: the primary produced him with essentially every delegate.
Three entries and only one of them requires an explanation. The information was there. The belief was there. The outcome was the opposite of the belief.
That is not a failure of control and it is not a failure of voters. It is a missing account. There was no line in the ledger where a near-universal opinion could be posted as a result, because the contest that would have posted it was cancelled before the year began.
And this morning he wrote to congressional Democrats telling them that if they disagree they should challenge him at the convention — which is the meeting where the delegates he already holds will vote.
He is right and that is the whole problem. Everything about his position is procedurally correct. The procedure was arranged in 2023 by people who could see exactly what the polls said and arranged it anyway.
So I would not grade the public on this one. The public did its part every month for two years, in writing, to anybody with a clipboard. It just turned out there was nowhere for the answer to go.
Sydney, Australia
There is an uncomfortable inversion in this question and I do not think anybody in the American discussion has stated it, so I will.
The United States is essentially the only mature democracy that selects party leaders by mass election. Tens of millions of ordinary voters cast ballots in nominating contests. Nowhere else does anything remotely like it. In Britain the Conservative parliamentary party narrows the field and the membership picks between two; in Australia the party room votes and that is the whole of it; in Canada it is a membership ballot with delegate weighting. In the Westminster systems the number of people who can actually end a leadership is measured in dozens or hundreds.
Now compare the outcomes this year.
The system in which fourteen million people voted could not act on a judgment that three-quarters of the country had been expressing continuously for two years. The systems in which a couple of hundred parliamentarians decide have removed four Australian prime ministers in eight years and three British ones in six, each time within days of the room concluding the leader could not carry the next election.
Popular participation and institutional responsiveness turned out to be inversely related. That is not a comfortable finding for anybody and it is the most interesting thing about the last fortnight.
The mechanism behind it is not mysterious. A mass primary is a single, scheduled, all-or-nothing event that closes months before the information matures. A party-room ballot is available continuously, requires no calendar, and can be triggered by whoever holds the signatures on any given Tuesday. One is a referendum held at a fixed date; the other is a standing option. Standing options get exercised when conditions change. Referendums do not.
So I would decline both halves of the question as posed. There was no information failure — the age question was among the most heavily covered and most heavily polled subjects in American politics for three years. And there was no failure of public judgment — the public formed one, held it firmly, and reported it to every survey that asked.
What there was is a selection instrument with no continuous form. The judgment existed and the mechanism was closed. That is a design property rather than a failure of anybody’s character, and it will produce the same result the next time a president declines in office, regardless of how well the press performs.
I would add one observation for whatever it is worth to allied capitals, since that is my brief. What is being watched from outside is not whether Joe Biden was fit. It is that a system with fourteen million participating voters took three weeks of private telephone calls to arrive at a conclusion the public had reached in 2022, and that the arriving was done by people whose names appeared on no ballot. Both halves of that sentence are noticed.
