I've been tweeting various things about this all weekend, but let me summarize here:
1. Biden was always a middling speaker with limited brainpower, but the disastrous debate performance took that to a wholly new level: he has been hobbled by his age more than the Democratics had let on. This was not just a "bad" or "weak" debate performance (like Obama's anomalously weak performance against Romney in 2012), this was a revelation about the extent of his cognitive decline. A majority of the population has been concerned about his mental competence for months, and it turns out that concern was wholly warranted, and the attempt to dismiss it was a con job. There's a reason Biden has given fewer interviews than any President in history; there's a reason his staff has been hiding him. Now we all know.
2. The day after the debate fiasco, Biden asserted: “I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job.” What Biden believes is wholly irrelevant, a case study in self-serving biases. Anyone who has tried to get an elderly parent to give up driving has heard this spiel. It's meaningless: one has to look at the evidence. We had 90 minutes of evidence that his mind isn't working, and he can't do the job, which includes advocating for your agenda in public, sometimes without a teleprompter. That his policy achievements have been substantial for a Democrat is neither here nor there: most of the work in making that happen is not done by the President.
3. The repeated blather that "Joe and Jill will have to decide" is an insult to democracy: this is not a fucking monarchy, this is a democracy, and it's the job of the Democratic Party, Biden's party, to get him to step aside given that the secret is now out. The Democratic Party, so far, is proving itself as supine to its leader as the Republicans are to theirs. That's a rather disturbing parallel.
4. The reason this matters is precisely because a second Trump Presidency will be a disaster, a bigger disaster than the first was. The Democratic Party effectively suppressed democratic opposition during the primaries, with the result that we have a Democratic nominee most don't want (as poll after poll reveals). Polls also reveal that Biden is losing, not just nationally, but in almost all the key swing states (when he leads in some swing states in some polls, the leads are not reassuring, and they aren't consistent).
6. Take a look at this poll that has been making the rounds:
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Data for Progress
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Data for Progress
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Data for Progress
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Data for Progress
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Data for Progress
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Data for Progress
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Data for Progress
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Data for Progress
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Data for Progress
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People who aren't running for President, and most of whom are unknown to most of the public, are polling as well, or almost as well, as Biden! That's extraordinary! How can that be? Read Achen and Bartels on Democracy for Realists, a book which vitiates most of the commentary on the election. First fact about American democracy: people support their party's candidate (and, more strikingly, they choose their party not for its ideology, but because of their group loyalties: religious, racial, ethnic, cultural, work-related--they then adjust their views to those of the leader of the party). So whomever is the Democratic candidate will get 43-45% of the vote. Second fact: elections are decided by those politely described as "low information voters." How do these people vote? To quote Achen and Bartels:
While they, too, have group ties and social identities, they are often quite unclear about which groups “belong” in which party. Typically less-informed, they may fail to grasp what is at stake in the choice of one party or another, much less where their overall interests lie. Thus, they are often swept along by the familiarity of an incumbent, the charisma of a fresh challenger, or a sense that it is “time for a change,” even when the government did not cause the current unsatisfactory situation and cannot greatly alter it. When the party balance is close…election outcomes turn on how these “swing voters” happen to feel when they go to the polls. As Philip Converse [citation omitted] put it, “Not only is the electorate as a whole quite uninformed, but it is the least informed members within the electorate who seem to hold the critical balance of power, in the sense that alternations in governing party depend disproportionately on shifts in their sentiment.” (Achen and Bartels 2016, 312)
The problem here is these voters are "familiar" with the incumbent, and not in a good way. The challenger is not "fresh," but he is charismatic (in a slightly unhinged way, but vide Hitler). "Time for a change" will tip in favor of Trump, unless the change comes from the Democrats. A charismatic, new face for the Democrats is the only hope at this point, if Achen & Bartels are right.
7. As an aside, the "science" of election forecasting by the middling historian Allan Lichtman should not be taken seriously. He only came to attention because his silly formula predicted Trump in 2016, and he was right when all the polls were wrong. But the polls have been less wrong since. He issues his predictions in August, and boasts getting 9 out of 10 of the last Presidential elections right. But almost anyone could get 9 out of 10 right based on the polls come August! And so many of his factors require interpretation, that this is more art than science. As of now, by my lights, Biden is already down on 6 of the 13 factors, and maybe 7 of them.
8. I'd be delighted to be wrong about Biden's prospects, but at this point there is simply no evidence that he's on track to be re-elected. And that's a catastrophe! Joe must go!
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