I don’t normally push people to our podcast. Maybe I should. But if you’re interested in what we think about the crisis at the top of the presidential ticket and, to a lesser degree, the Supreme Court immunity decision, I really recommend listening to this week’s podcast, which we will post soon — probably late this afternoon. There’s a lot going on and there are way more issues we address in the pod than I’ll possibly be able to write about today. So if you have questions about what we think on the numerous questions Democrats are wrestling with at the moment, that’s where to find the answers.

This may seem like a minor point. But I thought it’s worth saying because I have seen a minor rearguard argument to this effect: that the SCOTUS immunity decision doesn’t actually change any laws, doesn’t change what a president can and can’t do. It simply removes the possibility in many or most cases for post-presidency prosecution, something which has actually never happened in American history until last year. This is notionally a good point, but in a purely notional way. It’s true as applied to presidents who didn’t need this kind of hammer hanging over them. All of us are constantly through every day abiding by laws even though we’ve never been prosecuted — or at least most of you, maybe some have been prosecuted before — for breaking a criminal law. We report all our income on our taxes; we don’t fraudulently sign documents; we don’t steal from the store. Most of us act that way just because it’s the right thing to do, though most of us have been tempted at the margins. But laws work in complicated ways. Much of our understanding of what is the right thing to do is in fact conditioned by the laws themselves. As we’ve noted before, laws and prosecutions are not only to keep people in line and punish wrongdoers. They are how societies speak to themselves about what is acceptable and what is not.

Two thoughts on our current predicament. The first is that while people are seizing on this or that bad poll — and there are some — we now have seven polls in which we have before and after data from individual pollsters, before the debate and after. This is the only real way to judge the public opinion of last week’s debate. Putting all those together you have Biden going down one point and Trump remaining unchanged. This data point is certainly not determinative in itself about what should happen next or anything about the campaign. But from what I can tell it is the best systematic and data-driven look at the impact of this event which has consumed the political world and especially the Democratic Party for a week. The slight shift could in fact quite easily be explained simply by non-response bias. By any measure it is very limited.

From TPM Reader JB …

Per your correspondent WT’s comments posted this morning:  I made a comment on Twitter before the Trump v. US ruling that the Court was taking so long because Republican Justices were looking for a way to protect Trump without empowering future Democratic Presidents.

It was a joke, the kind of sour humor that is the best I can do anymore.  But Roberts’ ruling did exactly what I said the Court’s Republicans were aiming for.

Some things I write are not what I believe, think should happen, etc. They are merely statements of what is happening. Statements today from Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn make me think that Biden may be losing hold of the key stakeholders at the center of the Democratic Party. There’s far too much chaos and noise at the moment to confidently distinguish between signal and noise at the moment. But that is what I see.

Late Update: The comment from Jim Clyburn that I saw didn’t really accurately convey what he said. So this really now goes on a comment from Nancy Pelosi. Again, I think all remains in flux.