Fluid Intelligence.

Project 2025 forgot to ask.

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1. Bloomberg.com:

President Joe Biden registered his best showing yet in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states, even as voters offered withering appraisals of his debate performance amid panic within his party.

Republican Donald Trump led Democrat Biden by only 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%, in the critical states needed to win the November election. That's the smallest gap since the poll began last October. Biden now leads Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin. He’s within the poll’s statistical margin of error in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, and is farthest behind in the critical state of Pennsylvania.

Swing-state voters thought Biden acquitted himself poorly in the debate, with fewer than one in five respondents saying the 81-year-old was the more coherent, mentally fit or dominant participant.

The poll results land as the Democratic Party finds itself in an extraordinary bind mere weeks before its nominating convention. To pressure Biden into releasing delegates would be to abandon a candidate who has beaten Trump before and has portrayed his debate debacle as the latest surmountable setback in a career marked by personal tragedies and three previous White House campaigns.

But the poll shows that sticking with Biden would mean backing a nominee about whom voters have deep misgivings, especially about his age and acuity. Nearly three in 10 Democrats said Biden should drop out of the race — far more than the 9% of Republicans who said Trump should do the same. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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2. The Washington Post:

When Joe Biden was asked in August 2020 whether he had taken a cognitive test, the 77-year-old presidential candidate interrupted a reporter and snapped, “Why the hell would I take a test?”

Since winning the White House, Biden has continued to dismiss the need for a cognitive exam, and aides have said he has never taken one as president — not in three annual physical exams, and not in the week since a halting debate performance raised more urgent questions about the now-81-year-old’s mental acuity.

That decision has been overseen by a key figure largely unknown to the public: Kevin O’Connor, the physician to the president, who has grown extraordinarily close to Biden since becoming his personal doctor in 2009. A White House official said O’Connor has never recommended that Biden take a cognitive test. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

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3. The Guardian:

Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.

The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.

According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.

The visit took place at the White House residence clinic on 17 January. Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House. (Sources: theguardian.com, whitehouse.gov, nypost.com)

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4. Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post:

President Biden’s refusal to undergo a cognitive assessment is wrong on the medical merits and wrong as a matter of political calculation — unless, of course, he fears testing would reveal problems that would further imperil his candidacy.

Biden’s explanation for refusing testing is unconvincing. It is, frankly, an insult to voters who saw what they saw at the debate and in other settings, and who reasonably want assurances that the president is capable of serving another four years.

“Look. I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday.