• President Joe Biden's reelection is in a critical moment.
• Biden entered the debate trailing. Since then, polls and pundits have shown further struggles.
• In the meantime, the president has been clear that he's not going anywhere.

President Joe Biden's reelection campaign is barely holding on.

He was already in a difficult spot before his debate with former President Donald Trump. Since his horrendous performance, Biden has, at best, fallen slightly further behind. At worst, some New York Democrats are afraid the race there could be much closer than expected. A Republican hasn't won the Empire State since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

"We're still acting like this is a one-party state, which for pretty much 20, 25 years it has been," Democratic Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine told Politico. "I truly believe we're a battleground state now."

Political prognosticators are moving more states closer to Trump. While no one is ready to say he has a chance in New York, the former president now has better chances in Minnesota and New Hampshire — even New Mexico could become closely contested.

"The notion that the presidential is a Toss Up was a stretch even before the debate," Dave Wasserman, senior editor & elections analyst for Cook Political Report, wrote on X. "Today, Trump has a clear advantage over Biden and a much more plausible path to 270 Electoral votes."

Even some voices that were once close to Biden are expressing some uneasiness.

"I think the questions and worries about Biden's path are legitimate. I think Biden has work to do, but I think he can do it," former White House communications director Kate Bedingfield wrote on X in a series of posts. "We need to see it, though, and we need to see it soon."

Bedingfield has cautioned Democrats who think ditching Biden will somehow make it significantly easier to beat Trump.

Biden's path was already narrow before the debate. He hasn't led in a single poll conducted in Georgia, a state he won by only 12,670 votes, throughout this entire cycle, according to Decision Desk HQ. There isn't better news in Arizona, according to RealClearPolitics' polling average Trump is up over 5 points there. Nevada, a state Democrats have carried since 2008, also looks bad.

The president's best-case scenario would be to fall back on Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Omaha-metro area 2nd District in Nebraska. Cook Political Report, a widely respected political prediction group, moved the Nebraska 2nd closer to Trump on Tuesday when it moved five states closer to the former president.

Biden now has the unfortunate distinction of being the first Democratic candidate to trail in national polling in July of an election year since Vice President Al Gore in 2000. Biden's dismal approval rating of approximately 38% has remains below the roughly 48% threshold incumbents have needed to win reelection. Biden's worst 2020 position was a four point lead over Trump, according to CNN. Biden now trails the former president by anywhere between 2 to 3 points nationally.

"Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House," Sen. Michael Bennett, a Colorado Democrat, told CNN's Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday evening. "So for me, this isn't a question about polling. It's not a question about politics. It's a moral question about the future of our country."

Biden's campaign does not share the same state of panic. Their belief is that Trump's campaign will rue its decision to opt against an extensive on-the-ground presence in the key battleground states.

"For months, the Biden-Harris campaign has been on the ground talking to the voters who will decide this election, and Donald Trump's been nowhere to be found. Now, with just over four months until the election, Donald Trump couldn't match our battleground infrastructure if he tried," Biden-Harris 2024 battleground states director Dan Kanninen said in a statement.

• President Biden easily won New York in 2020, powered by his strong margins in NYC and its suburbs.
• But Biden has faced tepid numbers in the state for months, which could impact down-ballot Democrats.
• While Gov. Kathy Hochul remains behind Biden, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado called on him to forgo his reelection bid.

Democratic presidential nominees have won New York in every election since 1988, generally by double-digits.

The 2020 election was no different, as President Joe Biden won the state by 23 points, powered largely by his massive advantage in New York City and its suburbs.

But this year, Biden's tepid poll numbers in New York point to a general election contest that could be remarkably closer than any presidential race in recent memory, a scenario that could sink the campaigns of down-ballot Democrats.

Empire State Democrats have taken notice and are urging the Biden campaign to invest resources in the state to not only improve his standing but also aid Democratic candidates in critical swing House districts, according to Politico.

In pointing to Biden's potentially vulnerability, Politico revealed that in two private polls taken over the past year, former President Donald Trump led Biden by one point in a battleground House district.

In a Siena College poll taken in mid-June, Biden posted an eight-point lead (47% to 39%) over Trump statewide, despite having won 61% of the statewide vote in 2020. The survey also showed that Biden's job approval rating in New York was 45%, with 53% of voters disapproving of his performance. While Biden had a 54% job approval rating in New York City, it sat at 38% in the city's suburbs.

And these figures were taken before Biden's disastrous debate performance against Trump late last month, which have pushed his numbers down nationally and even led some New York Democrats to call for the president to step aside as the party's standard-bearer.

While Biden is still overwhelmingly favored to win New York State this November, the latest numbers indicate the general election could be much closer than many might imagine.

Mark Levine, the borough president of Manhattan, told Politico that New York has become a more competitive state in recent years.

"We're still acting like this is a one-party state, which for pretty much 20, 25 years it has been," the Democrat told the publication. "I truly believe we're a battleground state now."

Since 2020, Democrats have had to fend off renewed GOP support in Long Island. And over the past two years, they've struggled to handle the influx of migrants to New York City from the US-Mexico border.

In the 2022 midterms, Democrats fared much better than had been predicted, but they underperformed in New York, with Gov. Kathy Hochul only narrowly winning reelection and the GOP sweeping key House districts on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley.

It's something that Democrats are thinking about this year as many officials reexamine their support for Biden's candidacy — fearing that he might weigh down other candidates.

While Hochul reaffirmed her support for Biden after a meeting at the White House last week, New York Lt. Governor Antonio Delgado on Wednesday called on Biden to forgo his reelection bid.

And Rep. Pat Ryan, a swing-district Democrat from the Hudson Valley-anchored 18th district, also said the president should step aside as the party's nominee ahead of November.

So while Biden remains the favorite to carry New York once again, his troubles in other parts of the country are also evident in one of his strongest-performing states.

• Weeks after George Clooney co-hosted a $28 million fundraiser for Biden, he wants him to drop out.
• Biden's Hollywood support has begun to wane as Clooney and other moguls publicly express doubts.
• Despite Biden's backing from the party, some top donors and media giants want a new candidate.

Less than a month ago, some of Hollywood's A-list attended a fundraiser for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign, co-hosted by George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Barbra Streisand. They raised $28 million.

But in an essay published by The New York Times on Wednesday, Clooney is now calling for the president to drop out of the race.

Biden has claimed that calls for him to step aside following his disastrous debate in June are coming from the party's elite instead of everyday Americans, but he has long relied on Hollywood for support — the star-studded event last month was the most lucrative Democratic Party fundraiser to date.

Though few Democratic lawmakers are publicly calling on the president to end his reelection bid, big donors and Hollywood moguls are openly expressing their doubts.

Here are the media giants who have asked Biden to end his campaign — so far.

• YouTube star MrBeast jokes about running for president.
• MrBeast says he'd abandon political parties and take a centrist approach to America's problems. 
• His viral post highlights just how much young people are disappointed with the current political leaders.

Things have gotten so bad in the 2024 US election cycle that American YouTube celebrity MrBeast is now joking about running for president himself.

Jimmy Donaldson — whose YouTube account showing elaborate games and stunts is the most popular in the world and racks up tens of millions of views — suggested running for office last week.

"If we lower the age to run for president I'll jump in the race," he wrote on X.

Donaldson's probably reacting to what we've all been watching: a race between two historically unpopular candidates getting shaken up by a disastrous debate.

President Joe Biden, the 81-year-old incumbent, has been fending off calls for him to drop out after he mumbled answers, trailed off, got confused, and stared blankly during his face-off against Donald Trump.

But Mr. Trump isn't a spring chicken himself. The former president running to reclaim the White House is 78 years old.

Biden's awful performance has Democrats worrying that Trump will win in a landslide, so they're clamoring for younger blood to take over.

A last-minute change at the top of the ticket would likely mean Vice President Kamala Harris steps up.

But that didn't stop Donaldson from floating his own platform.

In a Wednesday post on X, formerly Twitter, the 26-year-old superstar explained how he believes he could fix the country — by abandoning political parties and taking a centrist approach to everything.

Simple right?

Donaldson added he "wouldn't be buyable" or beholden to political parties. He previously told Time Magazine that he makes $700 million but insisted that he's not rich.

But, however serious he may or may not be, Donaldson knows his young age disqualifies him from running for the presidency — although his math is a little off.

"Anyways, we can pick this up in 15 years when I'm old enough to run haha," the megastar continued in his post. At 26, Donaldson would technically qualify in nine years when he turns 35 in 2033.

So is MrBeast gonna run for president? Probably not. His representatives didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. But his viral post — which has already been viewed 3.7 million times, received over 4,000 comments, and been reposted 6,000 times — shows just how jaded young people are with the current political climate.

And in an America ruled by the gerontocracy, where aging politicians struggle to connect with the issues youth voters care most about, having a younger leader at the helm might not be such a bad idea.

Should that be a YouTube star? We may find out.

• The US announced deployments of new long-range fires weapons to Germany will start in 2026.
• The capabilities will include the SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons. 
• The war in Ukraine has shown a need for more deep-strike options.

The US just announced plans to put new long-range weapons in a European ally by 2026.

The planned deployment of new weapons systems to Germany follows the collapse of the INF Treaty and comes as NATO learns key lessons from the war in Ukraine, one being the value of ground-launched long-range strike options.

The US and Germany released a statement on Wednesday on the coming "episodic deployments of the long-range fires capabilities of its Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany in 2026, as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future."

The allies wrote that "these conventional long-range fires units will include SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons, which have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe."

The US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, which Washington accused Moscow of violating, allowed it to begin developing and fielding new ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

Since then, the US has been fast-tracking the development of systems like the Typhon, which uses a ground-based launcher to fire the Standard Missile 6 (SM-6) and the Tomahawk, and hypersonic missiles like the Army's Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, which is in the works but with some delays and funding issues.

The Typhon system was recently deployed abroad during US military exercises in the Philippines.

The Ukraine war has highlighted the value of being able to effectively conduct long-range, stand-off attacks.

Russia has used its arsenal of long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, often in concert with one-way attack drones, to target Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure, and for Ukraine, Western-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMs, and Storm Shadow cruise missiles have given it the ability to hit targets in Russian-occupied areas such as Crimea.

Fabian Hoffman, a doctoral research fellow with the Oslo Nuclear Project, explained in a War on the Rocks commentary last year that "the ability to engage targets at operational and strategic depth critically enables the conduct of offensive and defensive maneuvers and can shape the conditions for victory on the battlefield."

But, he said, "European states have long ignored the shift towards stand-off range and precision strike in modern war."

New efforts are presently underway, though, and as Timothy Wright and Zuzanna Gwadera with the International Institute of Strategic Studies wrote recently, "NATO member states are reversing decades of surface-to-surface missile and rocket-inventory cuts by acquiring new capabilities."

• A psychologist who checks business leaders and doctors for cognitive decline shared how he does it.
• His assessment takes about an hour, and involves a lot more than just one test. 
• It's pretty challenging. 

Most Americans think 81-year-old President Biden is just too old to be president.

There are also concerns about 78-year-old Republican nominee Donald Trump's fitness for office — registered voters are split on whether he still has the cognitive skills for this job.

But brain aging experts say the candidates' chronological ages are, to some extent, a red herring.

"There's this widespread belief that older people lose it, but it's really less to do with chronological age per se, and more to do with all the crappy things that your age puts you at greater risk for," neuropsychologist Joel Kramer, the director of the Memory and Aging Center Neuropsychology program at the University of California, San Francisco, told Business Insider.

"It's really no different than your knees. Just because you're older doesn't mean you're going to have bad knees, but there are a lot of older people with bad knees."

There are some quick assessments that only take doctors a couple of minutes to administer in the clinic, giving them a general sense of how you're doing. You might've heard of a few of these in recent political coverage.

• The Mini-Cog test requires you to repeat and then remember a few spoken words, and draw a clock correctly with a specific time of day on it, testing not only basic memory skills but also visual spatial control and other key brain functions.
• MoCA: The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (Trump took it six years ago when he was President.) Like the Mini-Cog, there is some clock drawing, repeating and recalling, as well as naming simple pictured objects like a lion and a camel.
• SAGE: A self-administered home test designed by The Ohio State University.

These aren't perfect tools, though, and aren't really what a doctor would use to determine whether someone is mentally fit enough to hold a high-powered job. These tests are rudimentary, and people with dementia can pass them, especially if they are still in the early stages of a disease — all of us are good at masking subtle memory issues, Kramer said. ("When was the last time you ran into someone whose name you couldn't quite come up with, and you faked it for a while?")

Kramer says a full clinical assessment checking for neurodegenerative issues usually takes about an hour, or longer.

He gave me a taste of how clinicians suss out a person's ability to learn and retrieve new information, multitask, and perform age-appropriate motor skills.

A true cognitive evaluation should be challenging

"I'm going to read a list of words to you," Kramer said. "Listen carefully, and when I'm through, say back as many of them as you can: hat, berries, wrench, sweater, lemon, pliers, belt, peaches, drill."

This exercise can be adjusted based on a person's age and ability. (Kramer said if we were really doing this, he'd give me a much longer list.)

Later on in the session, the clinician might ask you to recall, "Hey, what was on that list again?" It's a test you can't really cheat on, since the words aren't written down anywhere, and can easily change from session to session.

I found the multitasking part of his assessment more challenging:

"I'm going to say some numbers, when I'm through, say them to me backward: 4, 9, 2, 6, 3."

I know it looks easy written down here, but remember, he's just saying this out loud. You have to keep the list straight in your head, while also repeating it from back to front. I did pretty terribly:

"3, 6, 4 …" Whoops.

Multitasking gets a bad rap — we've all heard it's bad for focus and, in some ways, biologically impossible. But the more complicated truth is we are actually doing certain forms of multitasking all the time, and some of them are telltale signs of a healthy, well-functioning brain (walking and talking, for example).

The particular kind of multitasking being tested here is a critical skill for a good leader. You need to be someone who's capable of operating well in high-pressure situations, filtering out irrelevant information, taking in new data while responding to it instantaneously.

Another multitasking test brain experts use involves being given a page of jumbled numbers and letters, and having to ping-pong back and forth between finding them on paper and saying them out loud, matching "A" to "one," then "B" to "two," et cetera.

"You have to keep track of where you are and what you're supposed to be doing," Kramer said. "I mean, it's not rocket science, but when it's part of a multidisciplinary evaluation, those are the things that are really more than a scan, more than a neurological workup, can be sensitive to the early changes associated with a lot of these syndromes."

More straightforward chores patients might be asked to perform in the assessment include drawing something from memory (like a clock), or being shown a picture of a common object, and then naming that item out loud.

Watching the patient in real time, and assessing things like their motor skills, language ability, and eye movements is also key to making a final diagnosis. Often, by the time a family member brings someone in, the news isn't good, Kramer said.

"After our evaluation, we sit down and we say, 'You know, here's some of the skills you need to perform well at your job, and based on our evaluation, you ain't got it, and it's time to hang it up.'"

A full neuro workup requires more than just memory tests

There's also:

• Detailed interviews with family members
• A review of any other medications the person is taking and preexisting conditions that may make their brain more vulnerable (some drugs can put you at increased risk for dementia.) "A lot of times you just change their medicines a little bit, and they do better," Kramer said.
• In general, a focus on ruling out any other non-neurological reason someone might be having some memory issues, like depression, or a deficiency of some kind.

Diagnostics vary, but can include:

• MRI scans to screen for cerebrovascular disease (sometimes caused by tiny, asymptomatic strokes)
• A spinal tap or skin biopsy, looking for proteins that may lead to Parkinson's
• A new and pricey FDA-approved blood test, scanning for key proteins that put you at risk of developing Alzheimer's
• Full blood work, to rule out some other reasons someone might be having some memory issues, like low thyroid or low B12. (Those can be remedied with diet, hormones, or supplements.)

President Biden's latest publicly-available health summary from the White House, released in February of this year, said that Biden recently underwent "an extremely detailed neurologic exam" which was "again reassuring in that there were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar or other central neurological disorder." The report also applauded his fine motor skills.

The argument against releasing Biden's cognitive test results

Journalists, including Stephanopoulos and Dr. Sanjay Gupta, have asked President Biden to undergo new and detailed cognitive testing, and release his results to the public. Given his dismal debate performance, people want to know whether this commander in chief would pass or fail if he took a cognitive exam screening for dementia right now.

"They said I'm good," Biden told George Stephanopoulos on Friday. "I have a cognitive test every single day," he added, alluding to the requirements of his job.

Trump continues to boast that he "aced" the basic cognitive tests he took over four years ago, when he was president. But he also has not agreed to a public result reveal.

But experts say these tests are not the best way to assess mental fitness for this job. A lot of things are important to job performance that have nothing to do with your memory. These cognitive tests only rule out disease. What would a passing result really tell us? And would a failing result guarantee Biden drops out?

Doctors themselves have resisted mandatory cognitive tests for older physicians — in part because it's ageist, but also because memory tests don't tell you whether someone is good at their job.

"When you're trying to decide who you want to serve in a particular position, i.e. the presidency, what are the characteristics that are really important?" Kramer said. "Is it memory, or is it empathy, or is it problem-solving, or is it a value system that you can relate to, the ability to work with people?"