Yesterday I heard from TPM Reader GZ in response to the Backchannel email newsletter. (I always encourage you to write to me. You can do so simply by replying to my newsletter. Comes right to my personal inbox.) “Even though you aren’t saying Joe should drop out you are participating in the fun of talking about it,” he wrote. “Giving air to negativity.”

I think a lot of people are having fun with this. Many of the most prominent journalistic voices. But I felt the need to correct the misapprehension. “If you think I’m participating in any fun you gravely mistake my thoughts and profound anguish over this … The last two weeks have been pure agony,” I wrote. As I went on to explain, I don’t get into my personal experience of any of this because it’s simply not relevant to what I’m writing. But I took both sides of this exchange as examples of the toll this extended and seemingly frozen crisis has had on so many people.

Today I have been corresponding with a number of readers about, well … what’s happening? Like, some want this and some want that. But everyone is wondering wtf is happening or, to put it more specifically, why the whole thing hasn’t been decided yet.

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.