Relatedly- the thing with "I think Biden should drop out now and running him would be a huge mistake but if he gets the nomination I'll support him unconditionally" is that I don't fucking believe you. Not for one moment.
This is the part that worries me. A lot of people are saying a lot of stuff that they’re gonna find hard to put back in the bottle, and part of this whole thing is the implicit threat of *that* itself doing enough damage to justify the switch.
Not that that’s how everyone intended their statements, but they simply weren’t thinking about it, about how to work things if he wound up staying, and now it’s like “well I said it and I can’t unsay it so you can’t stay.”
Eh, I think they’ll be like a lot of Republicans under Trump. Their critical comments will wind up in the opposite party’s attack ads, but they’ll end up being good soldiers.
The politicians, sure, I think that’s mostly true, though the attack ads thing isn’t nothing. But the pundits and activists who claimed this was all because of the extraordinary threat of Trump? The ones who have decided that Biden continuing to run guarantees a loss? Less sure.
I think the Biden campaign as a whole has priced in a level of elite hostility to their strategy.
Because the thing is, good stuff not being covered really does cut both ways; it makes planning a counterstrategy harder.
The thing is we all kind of know that the readership of the NYT/Washington Post isn’t who decides the election. So it’s possible Biden pulls a 2016 Trump and makes genuine connections with voters while the media tries to sink him.
I think 2020 and 2022 show that it's a good strategy; the polls are missing _something_, and it's not a 40-pt slide to the right among core Democratic constituencies.
I also think that Republican incompetence is really starting to bite, hard. There's gotta be a point of no return.
Just calmly asking "ok, and what comes next?" and if they *do* have an answer to that (many won't) then "and how do you think that's going to work out?"
