Early on, one day after the disastrous debate, Joe Scarborough contemplated the idea of Joe Biden stepping down. However, he also took a “wait and see” stance. This morning he looked at all the subsequent Biden public performances, the interview with Stephanopoulos, the Press Conference with NATO, the statements to the UAW, the statements to the NAACP, and the interview with Lester Holt.
He’s also looked at the polls and he lays out here that based on all the public polls Joe Biden remains with 2-3% of striking distance of Donald Trump nationally and in the swing states. If he lost any ground, it was only by 1-2% at best.
Contrary to the common wisdom,he argues that after that terrible debate Biden has only lost 1-2%, he’s in pretty good shape. That’s going to take effort to recover, but it’s not insurmountable. People have known that he has a stutter and he has had a tendency for gaffes for decades — that is not any sort of indication that he is “declining” due to age.
Via Rawstory
Sharing graphics of the latest polls taken weeks after Biden's disastrous debate performance on CNN, the MSNBC host pointed out that the election remains tied — just as it was before the debate.
Using the numbers, he took aim — while also singling out longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod — at Democratic insiders who are continuing to try to force Biden to step aside.
"Now, we hear from Democrats on the inside, see also Obama supporters, saying there's no way he can win, he's down so low, it's all over," he began. "Well here's the latest Morning Consult poll taken on Monday. Last week, before the tragic assassination attempt, Donald Trump was up by two points. On Monday — it's just a snapshot — Donald Trump up by one point."
"Here's the deal, everybody, if you're looking at this, don't look at the margins, look at the fact that it's a tie. This race is tied," he said before later adding, "'Oh, we must do something,' David Axelrod says on CNN. 'There's no way he can win' said the pod bros,' 'Oh, it's all over.'"
"The Democrats have got to either fish or cut bait," he advised. "Like if they can't drive Joe Biden from the race, they need to line up behind Joe Biden. Because there's no middle ground here ... you're either united or your side loses. They've got to make decisions fast. All of these stories about Nancy Pelosi furiously going around trying to undermine Joe Biden — it's not working. I mean, I don't even know if that's true."
From ABC News.
Americans divide 46-47% between Biden and Trump if the election were today, almost identical to a 44-46% ABC/Ipsos poll result in April. Among registered voters (though there’s plenty of time to register) it’s an absolute tie, 46-46%.
Were Vice President Kamala Harris to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee, vote choices are 49-46%, Harris-Trump, among all adults (and 49-47% among registered voters). Harris’ 49% is slightly better than Biden’s 46%, although she doesn’t have a statistically significant lead over Trump.
Wapo
Is a hazy 2-point shift enough to warrant dumping Biden?
Baked-in views and incremental shifts add to uncertainty about November — and give the president cover.
The states that decided the 2020 presidential election went for Joe Biden by one percentage point or less: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Four years before, Donald Trump was elected president thanks to similar narrow margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In both elections, the Democratic candidate won more votes nationally — millions more votes. But that doesn’t matter. Those razor-thin margins in the electoral college do.
The implication then is that this election may — or really, will — come down to similarly narrow margins in many of the same states. A candidate with an edge in those places, even a small one, is a better candidate for his or her party. If, for example, there were a Democrat who the party was confident could beat Donald Trump by one point in swing states instead of losing to Trump by one point, that candidate would be a better bet for winning the White House, even if he or she got 2 million fewer votes in California or New York.
This is the fundamental challenge the party faces at the moment. It is trying to decide whether another candidate would fare better than President Biden against Trump this November, but polling continues to suggest that other candidates — particularly Vice President Harris — would have only incremental advantages.
More Wapo.
Those in the Democratic Party hoping to replace Biden with someone better positioned to win are obstructed, in part, by this obstinance from Biden. But they are obstructed, too, because while Biden’s position is historically weak, polling doesn’t (and perhaps can’t) show someone else doing demonstrably better.
At his news conference on Thursday, Biden repeatedly dismissed questions about dropping out of the race or about his ability to win.
“How accurate does anybody think the polls are these days?” Biden said at one point. He noted that some polls showed him winning, some losing, some tied. (In the past few days, in fact, polls from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist University showed Biden with a statistically insignificant lead over Trump; The Washington Post’s poll with ABC News and Ipsos showed him tied.) The polling data, Biden said, was “premature because the campaign really hasn’t even started.”
[...]
Near the end of the news conference, Biden was asked whether he would step aside for a candidate better able to win in November.
“No,” he replied, “unless they” — meaning his advisers — “came back and said, there’s no way you can win. Me.” He shifted to a conspiratorial whisper. “No one’s saying that. No poll says that.”
That is true. No poll says he can’t win and no poll says that some other candidate definitely will win. As we noted on Thursday, this is in part because the race will likely come down to a handful of swing states that will be determined by slim margins. And polls aren’t effective at sussing out those sorts of small differences.
Also, there are these new “Internal Dem” Polls that indicate Biden losing ground in 14 states and expanding the battlegrounds to Virginia and other fairly safe Dem areas. Again, this shift is only by 1-2% and isn’t catastrophic. Although it’s notable, it is curious that an “Internal” poll was leaked at all. Normally, we would never have any access to this kind of data at all — it seems like this was a strategic leak to damage Biden’s campaign publically because Dems themselves already had this data. Who’s to say that there aren’t other internal polls that don’t support this narrative?
With all this in mind, the elites of the Democratic party have to make a decision. They have to decide whether to keep up this whisper campaign to have Biden step down -— which is going nowhere — or they need to cut the back-biting and get behind Biden as the presumptive nominee.
If someone wants to step up and challenge Biden at the convention, fine, do it. Go for it. That is the place to do that, but trying to push him out ahead of that is not going to work. No one has the polls to indicate that his position is hopeless, or that anyone else has a certain lock on victory. Without that evidence, he’s not leaving.
There is more than 110 days to the election, there is time to figure this out.
(I know there is this effort to implement an early virtual roll call for the DNC which was put in place because of Ohio’s early deadline — but that obstacle has been removed and counting delegates early isn’t necessary anymore. I think this effort should stop. Edit: This appears to have been tabled.)
We have to make a decision that we’re with Biden or we’re not. And right now, we’re better off being with Biden than not. They can keep polling, seeing what the data shows. Sure.
What it shows now is that this fight is a tie, we can win this.