Member Newsletter
Just in the last hour or two there was a rush of new articles which report that top people in the Biden campaign either think Biden won’t be able to hold on or that he has no path to victory, etc. In a way, these are all versions of the same thing, or one inevitably relies on the other. I think the real issue is that a presidential candidate simply can’t lose the confidence of his or her congressional party. Why that happens or whether it’s fair doesn’t really matter after a certain point. Or rather it doesn’t matter in an operative way. And it does appear we are either at that point or near to it.
There are two additional points I want to note. They may seem contradictory and they are at least in tension. But I think they’re both true.
One is a new poll that came out today. It’s from ABC and the Washington Post. In head-to-head match ups it shows Biden and Trump tied and Harris actually up over Trump by two points. This is only one poll of course. But I don’t think it’s greatly different from other polls over the last several days. An Emerson poll, never especially favorable to Biden, shows the two tied. A Bendixen/Amandi poll shows Biden down one, Harris up one. A handful of other polls show Biden down two or three points.
I think these polls show a few things. One is that there’s a good chance that the run of bad polls last weekend was significantly impacted by response bias. (Dems too depressed and catatonic to answer pollsters, thus showing a “false” or at least ephemeral shift.) The race actually remains fairly static notwithstanding the truly unprecedented events of the last two weeks. The idea that the bottom is falling out for Democrats just isn’t borne out by the polls. There’s other data I’ve seen that tends to bear that out. Obviously that cuts both ways. The status quo ante before the debate wasn’t good. Optimism was based on a quickening of attention to the campaign that would shift the numbers slightly but decisively in Biden’s direction — from tied or a point or two down in national polls to a point or two ahead. People say, well it’s the swing state polls that matter, not the national polls. But not really. If you know how to read the national polls they’re a pretty good proxy for what the swing state polls will say. The key is that the debates were supposed to be a key part of that move. So even if the damage is more limited than people think, that’s far from the whole story.
Regardless, you can’t make this decision on the basis of the polls. Not for any high-toned or kumbaya reason but simply because they haven’t moved that much. If you’re looking just at the polls they tell you not very much has happened over the last two weeks. The question is whether you have a campaign and candidate focused and energetic enough to deliver in the final four months of the campaign.
The second point is what happens if Joe Biden withdraws from the race and endorses and is replaced by Kamala Harris. The polls above, showing a fairly static race and Harris actually outrunning Biden (albeit within the margins of error) in a few cases, are to me fairly encouraging. Not much ground has been lost, possibly almost none, and Harris seems very much in the race to the extent we can really poll her as a hypothetical candidate.
But that’s the catch. I don’t think we quite realize the scale of the shock to the system of this switch actually occurring. And here I don’t mean “shock” in the sense of something necessarily bad for Democrats. Imagine our political world right now as a snow globe and someone is about to give it 20 good shakes. Or rather, imagine it’s a snow globe where the little versions of the Eiffel Tower or Empire State building or whatever other quaint little architecture aren’t attached to the ground. Shake things all up and see what it looks like when everything has settled back down.
A whole massive part of the structure of the campaign will simply disappear. A big new part of the campaign will be Harris and her personal story. Each new engagement, the conventions, a possible new debate, will turn on totally new dynamics. The outcomes of these unknowns will compound together to produce new unknowns. My point is simple: as much as we think this is a big deal I don’t think we really realize how big a deal and how many unknowns it unleashes. Positive and negative. Even with Trump, the U.S. presidential campaign system is highly, highly structured, choreographed, bounded by all sorts of informal but highly binding rules. Something like this blows them all apart.