Gillian Branstetter: Pretty clear! And he's articulated no vision for how to change this. Combine it with 1) years worth of consistent polling finding majorities of Dems don't want him to run again and 2) Harris's improving approval numbers and continued saliency of abortion, her strongest issue.

Agreed that there's no way of knowing for certain if it would work but that's not an excuse to keep doing what's clearly not working and might actually be hurting

what you want isn’t Nominee Harris. it’s a comfortable lead over Trump. the evidence that switching to Harris will produce that comfortable lead is nonexistent. so reassure me that you’re not going to continue filling your drawers if you get what you say you want.

do you mean running the incumbent President for a second term?

Correct, that is going very badly

it is far from clear that it isn’t working. we are not in Hail Mary territory, we are not freerolling this, and Harris is not our only possible path to victory.

Pretty clear! And he's articulated no vision for how to change this. Combine it with 1) years worth of consistent polling finding majorities of Dems don't want him to run again and 2) Harris's improving approval numbers and continued saliency of abortion, her strongest issue.

We’re in coinflip territory no matter what but now some elected Democrats and a bunch of megadonors are running a fun experiment in splitting the incumbent president’s coalition and giving him extended bad media coverage to exacerbate his problems. I’m losing it over here.

lot of people just don't appreciate polls are probably 2-3 times less accurate than they used to be so being high or low by 10-12 pts is probably pretty common in the real world we wouldn't dignify what they're doing with "prognostication" it's a lot closer to guessing the way polls are modeled rn

not exactly beating the allegations of bedwetting here

Real democracy is throwing the primaries away and letting a Disney heir decide on the candidate.

There was no primary. There was a coronation that a couple of egotistical maniacs crashed.

The primaries were open. Who did you want to run that didn't?

Are you in denial about how incumbent-year party primaries work?

Of course I know about incumbency advantage, but you're totally disingenuous to call it a coronation. If he was this problematic 10 months ago, I'll say again: Who did you want to challenge him? Why didn't they buck history then?

So we've gone from saying there were no primaries to saying the real issue is that primaries don't count when there is an incumbent?

This is well inside MoE, especially in the swing states that are most important, and the needle's moved less than after Romney's 2012 debate. You are scared but your fear is neither caused by this nor would be fixed by this being better.

If you were not terrified and demanding Biden be replaced pre-debate you shouldn't be terrified and demanding Biden be replaced post-debate, because absolutely nothing besides a bunch of people saying the sky is falling indicates the sky is falling.

I also tend to trust Morning Consult more than RCP.

Iirc, the RCP average is the one that got gamed by a ton of low quality R pollsters in 2022 and where much of the “red wave” narrative originated

they’d be more useful if they were a straight average- the operators are GOP and they exclude/include polls for no reason all the time

Didn’t one of them have a meltdown in 2022 when someone pointed that out?

Yep. And they've just generally taken a pretty sharp turn to the right over the last 8 years.

What is the margin of error for this, I wonder? How close is it to the harm done by a very loud and visible part of his coalition turning on him?

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