Opinion | The Democratic Party Must Speak the Plain Truth to the President

For voters who held out hope that President Biden’s failure to communicate during last month’s debate was an aberration, the intervening days have offered little comfort.

Donald Trump’s candidacy for a second term poses a grave threat to American democracy. Mr. Biden, instead of campaigning vigorously to disprove doubts and demonstrate that he can beat Mr. Trump, has maintained a scripted and controlled schedule of public appearances. He has largely avoided taking questions from voters or journalists — the kinds of interactions that reveal his limitations and caused him so much trouble on the debate stage. And when he has cast aside his teleprompter, most notably during a 22-minute interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday, he has continued to appear as a man in decline.

The president, elected in 2020 as an antidote to Mr. Trump’s malfeasance and mendacity, is now trying to defy reality. For more than a year, voters have made it unquestionably clear in surveys and interviews that they harbor significant doubts about Mr. Biden’s physical and mental fitness for office. Mr. Biden has disregarded the concerns of those voters — his fellow citizens — and put the country at significant risk by continuing to insist that he is the best Democrat to defeat Mr. Trump.

Since his feeble debate performance, multiple polls have shown that both Mr. Biden’s approval rating and his chance of beating Mr. Trump have markedly dropped from their already shaky levels. In response, he has adopted a favorite theme of the floundering politician, insisting that the polls are wrong in showing that his presidency is historically unpopular. Even if the polls were off by historic amounts, they would still show overwhelming skepticism about his fitness. The latest Times/Siena poll showed that 74 percent of voters think that Mr. Biden is too old to serve, an increase of five percentage points since the debate and not a figure that can be attributed to some kind of error or bias.

He has denied that age is diminishing his abilities, not even bringing up the subject in a lengthy letter to congressional Democrats issued on Monday. In that letter, he insisted that he is the candidate best equipped to defeat Mr. Trump in November — thereby dismissing the potential candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris or any other younger, more vigorous Democrat, and in effect asking the American people to trust him instead of their own lying eyes.

It’s not enough to blame the press, the donors, the pundits or the other elite groups for trying to push him out, as he did in the letter. In fact, to use his own words, “the voters — and the voters alone — decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.” But Democratic leaders shouldn’t rely solely on the judgment of the few voters who turned out in this year’s coronation primaries. They should listen instead to the much larger group of voters who have been telling every pollster in America their concerns for a long time. Mr. Biden has to pay attention to the will of the broader electorate that will determine the outcome in November.