Here's a thought. Imagine a scenario in which Trump never ran for the presidency, the one-term GOP President Biden defeated in 2020 was Jeb Bush or Scott Walker, and that his GOP opponent this year is Mike Pence or Rick Scott or whoever. Suppose Biden has a similar debate and polling to irl.
Do we see a similar reaction, with significant Dem party and vaguely aligned media panic and calls for Biden to go? I strongly doubt it. People would probably consider it a disappointing bad night, but not worth tossing out an incumbent and completely upending the Dem nomination process over.
Obviously, it *is* Trump, and the different nature of that and how politics has changed since 2016 fundamentally informs people's attitudes to this election and their reactions to events within it. Many is not most Dems, quite correctly, see Trump as an existential threat.
I guess what I find kind of worrying about the panic is, firstly, the tendency of many Dem/aligned folk to slip easily into a kind of self-victim-blaming, but particularly at a point where they're in power and have been for the past 4 years.
Many people who call for Biden to go on the basis that they (I repeat, correctly!) see Trump as an existential threat, over crucial points over the last four years either didn't see him that way or were unwilling to accept what that might mean.
Which is how things ended up the way they are now, where seemingly the only possible way of changing the approach to the existential threat is changing the candidate put up against it, and so people hyperfixate on that, feeling they *need* to find the "just right" option.
