One thing that must differentiate liberals from the GOP in today’s era is a willingness to confront and accept uncomfortable truths when we get new data in.
If we are not willing to do that, then we cannot make the best decisions possible. If we can’t make the best decisions possible, then it will become all the more difficult to prevent the return of Trump and the loss of our democracy.
Towards that end, I am doubling down on my previous unpopular diary to highlight new polling that gives a bleak look at what the electorate as a whole, and, more critically, democrats in particular are saying about Biden’s chances.
The current front page headline on the Washington Post is that a clear majority of Democrats, 56% according to the poll, want Biden to drop out of the race.
The poll results contradict Biden’s claim that only party elites want him to step aside. He has said that positive interactions with supporters on the campaign trail have helped persuade him to stay in the race after a debate in which he trailed off and occasionally appeared confused. But the poll finds that 56 percent of Democrats say that he should end his candidacy, while 42 percent say he should continue to seek reelection. Overall, 2 in 3 adults say the president should step aside, including more than 7 in 10 independents.
Before we examine the results further, let us establish one thing. According to 538’s Pollster Ratings, this is a poll conducted by a couple of the top pollsters in the country. WashingtonPost/ABC News checks in at #2 overall in their ratings, whereas Ipsos is at a still very respectable #17.
In other words, this pollster is not one of the trashy right-wing polling outfits that have sprung up everywhere in recent years and reliably flooded the polling zone with unreliable garbage polls to influence the narrative. This is a pollster with a longterm track record of accuracy and fairness.
There is also some good news for Biden buried below the lead above.
Despite the terrifying number that nearly 7 out of 10 adults think Biden should end his candidacy, he is tied with Trump on the topline number of who they intend to vote for at 46% each. This is a measure of just how unpopular Trump is that a lot of voters who don’t even want Biden in the race, still will vote for him if the alternative is Trump. It means that Trump himself remains deeply unpopular and very beatable if the country is simply presented with what they feel is a credible alternative.
The poll finds Biden and former president Donald Trump in a dead heat in the contest for the popular vote, with both candidates receiving 46 percent support among registered voters. Those numbers are nearly identical to the results of an ABC-Ipsos poll in April.
This also likely means that Biden’s debate performance did not move a lot of voters off of him. After years of the right’s narrative being that Biden is senile, it may well mean that most voters had already internalized that lie and therefore the debate did not impact their voting preference.
However, what the poll does draw attention to is that the common belief that only a small minority of Democrats want Biden to drop out is wrong. It rebuts the argument that this is a completely media created narrative, or that those of us calling for him to do so here are rightwing trolls. It is a reminder that DailyKos is a community of some of the people of the most loyal partisans in some ways, and, while the desire to have Biden stay in is a clear majority here, we may not be wholly representative of the party as a whole.
Yesterday, no less a party luminary than Nancy Pelosi herself, possibly the greatest liberal lion of our lifetimes, gently nudged President Biden to reconsider his decision to stay in. She did so in the nicest way possible to avoid damaging him.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short,” Pelosi said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “ … He is beloved, he is respected, and people want him to make that decision.”
Biden had, of course, already made his decision when she said that. He’d firmly insisted that he was staying in. Former Speaker Pelosi is not stupid. She knew this when she made those comments. It is her way of urging him to reconsider that decision without actually coming out and saying it, and without possibly damaging him if he still insists on staying in.
It may be she is pushing this “right wing troll” viewpoint because she has decades of experience in being able to read polls, and she read one of the other poll questions:
Q: Did the debate make you think more favorably or less favorably of each of these candidates?
50% answered less favorably to Biden, vs. only 7% more favorably.
Folks, these are not winning numbers. They may not be numbers that a lot of people want to hear. In an ideal world, an extremely successful Democratic president who has been a lot more liberal than advertised would get a well deserved second term, and have all the energy and vigor to be able to use it well for another four years.
But that is not (or at least may not be) the current reality that faces us if we stay on the current path. When we read everywhere that the party wants Biden to present his plan for victory, what they likely mean is that they want him to prove that he can change the electorate’s current perception of him.
They want him to show that he can be out there doing unscripted interviews without a teleprompter every day (and without him saying that if he gives it his “goodest” that he’ll be fine if Trump wins, because the country, nay the world, won’t be). They want him working the phones to reassure various elected Democrats.
They don’t him to be giving out quotes to the media that the debate has convinced him that he needs to work fewer hours and stop events after 8:00pm because that simply is not how the hardest job in the world works.
And, last of all, they don’t want to be reading stories that Hunter Biden is now a White House Advisor!
Edit:
A pair of links. First is to an archived version of the full Washington Post poll about the story and the second is to the poll results themselves.
Washington Post Story
Poll results