Aren’t the same people freaking out about Biden the ones perfectly happy to weekend-at-Bernie’s Feinstein — or play along with that — as long as they could?
This is a genuine question; I don’t know.
Oh yes, definitely.
Eh. I’m not freaking out about Biden; I am freaking out about the press, the pundits, the donors, and especially the campaign.
This seems to me to be the You Have One Job of a campaign and that they can’t manage it scares me. It’s not a surprise!
Right. And folks can (and plainly do) have lots of opinions on what to do now, but the overriding concern here, and in the D party apparatus isn't "will Biden be ok in the Oval Office" but "is his campaign going to get him there" and if not, can we fix it, and can someone else fix it, in that order
I didn’t much like Biden and never liked the primary system. I thought he was too old in 2020! But the time to fix it was before the primaries. I don’t have the impression that he’s changed much, only the world, both in very predictable ways.
I think the thing for me is there's still 4 months left. That's not a giant amount of time, but it's also plenty if they really did light the fight in the campaign
The problem is this is just a really hard election to properly model; in some profound ways it's not like any election up to 2016, and has some very important differences to 2016 or 2020 too in lots of important directions. Which isn't great for anxiety. But it does mean it's still all to play for.
Is it? Most international commentary I read have been assuming a Trump WH for months - not as something that will necessarily happen, but as a strong likelihood. Most polls have went only one way so far.
Aren't there still big money differences, campaign offices, staffing and staff quality differences favoring Biden - the mechanics aren't much changed are they?
Yes. Lots of advantages there. The number that worries me more than favorability tho (which is the big one that's usually quoted) is "enthusiasm to vote" numbers, where Ds consistently poll below Rs
The flipside to that as well is that the R groundgame is basically trash, which makes even those types of numbers a bit hard to interpret. Basically the whole cycle is a flock of black swans and everyone's trying to peer through frosted glass a bit to interpret what's going to happen
A lot of both problems: people imputing to polling a false precision, or throwing up their hands and saying polls don't matter they're all junk. Interpreting them can be nuanced, even experts can misread all the time. But sometimes they're not that ambiguous, and that Biden's losing is such a case.
oh 100% agree. My comment isn't a "ignore the polls" thing, and the trendlines very much don't fill me with happy thoughts. Just the D campaign is really struggling to give lean-Ds a lot of enthusiasm to vote, which is ... well it's not great
But that's also sort of where I see opportunity for the campaign. The problem isn't a lack of plausible D votes; it's giving them the oompf to /want/ to line up for hours to put their X next to your name
For better and worse, that is, unfortunately, giving their campaign a bit of sparkle and leaning into the theatrics of it. Should it be? No. But such is life.
But that's why you do weighting and it's not perfect but it can still do a pretty decent job. All these things you hear causing problems for pollsters are true, response rates etc. But they're not without tools to address them, and even if they contribute to the error gap, it's not by a huge amount.
Election held tomorrow, he'd have a shot. But not a good one. 1 in 4, being generous. 1 in 6 would be plausible.
And worth remembering, Trump overperformed the polls in both 2016 and even more in 2020. If there's a polling error, it could be cutting the other way and Biden's in even worse shape.
Poll misses aren’t really predictive of future poll misses (and if they were pollsters would already account for them)
I don’t know what the odds are. I know people hate Trump and he’s lost the popular vote in two straight presidential elections.
We’ll see.
I get texts all the time “will you vote for Joe?” (of course), but I don’t truly know where they’re coming from so I always delete. Polling now is dicey at best: who is being polled? Who answers the phone? So it’s a media panic attack right now that may or may not have a basis in reality.
Yup, and that's what leadership is all about - bringing the juice to the juiceless, motivating the unmotivated, inspiring the uninspired.
And this guy just... can't.
Well, that’s one reason I am back to volunteering for a local campaign.
That, and it’s a way to manage my anxiety by doing something that’s not online.
Yeah, if a traditional presidential campaign was going to work in this cycle, it would already be working.
Joe should lean into it. "Look folks, I haven't got much time left. I won't see the full horror of what's coming. Most of you will. And what's coming is the Fourth Reich. Here's their plan."
That's what the Biden campaign doesn't seem to get. They keep talking about this being no contest. Orange man bad, that sort of stuff, without acknowledging that the people turned off by Biden's age aren't going to flip their votes to Trump, they just won't vote, handing the election to Trump.
I’ll canvas from time to time. I’m trying not to feel this way, but I’ll be real. Why bust my butt when the campaign continues to humiliate itself? These people are paid to do this work and keep fucking up with no accountability. Why am I doing volunteer work for them? Why donate money to them?
Harris looks to be a significant plus pulling Blacks, Hispanics (why?), youngs off the couch. ACAB votes for Trump fill a thimble, lawnorder votes against Trump fill a bucket.
Nobody else mentions it (do they?) but the VP candidate card can win a few tricks at this stage of the game.
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Pwn if there are only so many Rs these days because they've been purging the infidels for ~8 years and what's left is a very small of true believers, won't those numbers inherently be skewed when the "other" side is a bunch of people who are "anything but that" which lends itself to dispassion
But many will vote out of desperation, or fear...No one who isn't corrupt, deluded, or very, very stupid will vote for Trump.
Unfortunately, there are far too many people out there who fit in one of the above slots, or more than one.
Deluded is all of us, unfortunately. I was just thinking yesterday about how deluded I've been these last 10 years, imagining the politics of average American following my life experiences just because my entire social circle did as well
Astute point. I do however talk to people across the barriers, class or other social categories. (I'm an anthropologist.) The thing I notice now is that it's much more difficult to communicate with people now, because we speak different languages and inhabit different realities. One Trump supporter>
told me that January 6th was a "peaceful rally: I've seen the real videos" he said. Also, Trump supports "family values" but Biden doesn't.
I found myself absolutely without words, because you can't argue with alternative facts, when the truth of things no longer seems to matter.
Yes. I have several similar experiences. I've had so many longsilences where I carefully go backwards and backwards to the last point of commonality... and sometimes I can't even find one. And that's with family I grew up with! They occupy an America I've never been to
That's the point, isn't it? It's almost impossible to find commonalities. These people don't even think of Putin as an enemy. Finding someone to hate in common used to be a quick and dirty way (which I don't like, actually) to establish commonality. Even that low method is useless now.
I think inflecting this through the filter of which Ds and which Rs pick up the phone to answer a pollster also adds a layer of complexity. Not sure of the exact nature of it, but all the samples are unusual...
's one of the reasons I keep trumpeting D wins in Wisconsin. There's been close vote after close vote basically since 2019, and pretty steady results driving turnout into wins. Not all wins (Ron "that asshole" Johnson is still in office even after promising to retire), but it's WAY better.
