Cobretti said:
Biden wasn't quite as bad as all commentariat moaning & whining suggested. I thought John King had the most balanced take on that panel....."yeah, we are insiders and we all agree it was a weak performance, but the public outside the beltway sometimes sees & rates things differently. So let's give it a week." Or words to that effect. I Maybe Trump will get a bump. Or maybe the performance is already baked into the polling we have in hand....voters know Biden is too old already. What about last night changed that? The media reaction was not some sudden realization of that fact. The watched the Wizard behind the curtain being revealed as just a shriveled up old man. Only those involved in creating the illusion are truly surprised and horrified at the real thing. How many voters didn't know the truth already?
So the far more interesting observation of the night was the reaction of the commentariat, with all the unattributed quotes from unnamed Dem sources. I think the majority of the energy behind that reaction was not the performance itself, but the dawning realization that Dems are going to get a shellacking this fall, for a whole host of reasons. They have no way out.
The only practical
achievable solution is to have Biden stand down voluntarily in favor of Harris. But the inside baseball on that is......Biden is notoriously arrogant. Not likely he will go willingly. And even if he does, Harris polls meaningfully worse than Biden versus Trump. She's no moderate Dem. She's a progressive. She has a chance to solidify the black vote that is trickling away from them, both in percentages of votes and in percentages of turnout. At least, she would likely stabilize Dem standing with black women (the most important component of the black vote). She did admirably as the Dutchboy with the finger in the dike defending Biden on TV, and for that reason SHE was the big winner last night. All other options get very unwieldy. Any other candidate risks fracturing rather than uniting the party and not one option on the horizon polls better against Trump than Biden does (for now, at least). Just very hard to bypass Harris and not alienate swathes of the party. And all scenarios for getting new candidates on ballots are trickly....very, very hard to do.
So what will they most likely do? Try to get Biden elected and shift monies to try to limit damage in Senate and House. It's a higher percentage option that any other insight.