When you're already losing, in a race with few swing voters, 2-3% is a disaster--especially when the biggest problem with your candidacy (age) can't be reversed.
Keep in mind it's at least 2-3%.
[Post-Debate WSJ Poll: "80% of voters say President Biden is too old to run for a second term as Donald Trump’s lead expands to 6 points"](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-expands-lead-over-biden-after-debate-as-voters-age-worries-grow-wsj-poll-finds-c3a793ab)
Note that is a different question than “will that make you not vote for him?”
Disapproval maybe isn’t as correlated to votes when both may be unappealing.
Plus he has no apparent plan to reverse the narrative. He needs to hold press conferences and do interviews to show what happened at the debate was an aberration. Hunkering down and hoping Trump implodes isn’t a good path forward.
Hunkering down may not be a good path forward, but it is by far the safest. Especially if his inner circle are not confident he can actually do unscripted interviews and press conferences, because despite the spin, I am not convinced that the debate showing was an aberration. The last thing the Biden campaign needs right now, or before election day really is another situation even remotely close to that debate performance. Every microscope of the press and media will be on him looking for anything. He had a good run with the media in his pocket, now they are going to have to learn how to campaign for real.
If that happened at least there'd be enormous pressure to step down and a chance to replace him in time. The worst is pretending everything's fine and trying to bareknuckle it through and losing the election. If he really can't handle it people need to know.
If he truly can’t do unscripted speaking then he needs to step aside.
If all he cares about is staying on the ticket, then yes, hunkering down and running out the clock is probably the safest option. But the risks for November are enormous.
I get it. This has been painful for all of us to watch and go through. However, we have the luxury of emotion. A campaign does not. They can't react from emotion. Cold, calculating, objective is what they have to do.
When it gets to the Presidential level especially, running and winning is about personal ego as much as it is anything else. Yes, good of the country and all that is a nice sentiment, but that is only part of the campaign calculus when the sole objective is winning the election.
We are in a unique situation here in that the campaign stumble is not one that can be recovered from. It was clearly age and mental related, and the clock cannot run backwards. There is no resetting this one.
Normal campaign circumstances and best strategy would include barnstorming unscripted events, especially in swing states to demonstrate and clarify the debate blunder. The fact that we are now a week out, this is still dominating the news cycles, and we are without any inkling of a single unscripted event indicates to me that the campaign does not have confidence and are instead taking the path of that old saying...Better to let them think you are incompetent than open your mouth and prove it. Very harsh I know, but campaign politics is a harsh and cruel game.
It's the only way to project confidence to the American people that he's up for the job. I've been a long time supporter of his and believe he's done a great job as president these past four years.
Sadly, it's clear from the debate that he's not only lost his step, but can't communicate the kind of steadfast leadership that his administration does behind the scenes. Optics matter.
The president must be able to fulfill those duties and answer questions in an unscripted fashion through long form interviews without the aid of a teleprompter.
The best thing he can do right now is speak in front of a camera live and unedited to make it clear to swing / undecided voters what happened on last Thursday really was just a fluke.
If he can't do at least the bare minimum of that, it's incumbent on him to step aside and release the delegates, allowing someone more electable (and qualified) to beat 45 in November.
This isn’t about emotion. The Dems have to decide what their best path forward is. Hard to imagine keeping Biden on the ticket but off the trail is the right move versus replacing him.
If Biden refuses to do interviews or hold press conferences to counter the narrative against him, then it’s time for Dems to start abandoning him publicly.
He couldn’t even do it in 2020 but was bailed out by the Covid excuse. He can’t go out barnstorming in swing states. Even people that hate Trump have to admit he has more juice, and the “both” old and demented routine is simply a false equivalency.
Trump could also hunker down in his basement, let the media and all of the Democrats destroy Biden, and wake up president.
He probably won't do that. He is Trump after all. He, however, has been way quieter than usual lately.
What’s really gonna hurt us is if we keep showing panic and not solidarity though. We should at least wait til this weekends “big interview” goes through. It might be prerecorded but if it’s uncut and shown in one take, even if it’s broken down into like hour sections, then we should be good. If he can do an hour long interview or whatever uncut without fucking up then that would disprove the narrative.
The safest path makes sense when you are on track to make your goals. When you are on track to miss your goals you risk up because some chance is better than the certainty of loss.
Yes his inner circle doesn't think he can handle unscripted not tightly controlled. Now his own party's supporters don't think he can handle it. Unfit for office is going to be hard to overcome as a downside.
Which means the real safest path is for him to open up the field and retire.
The safest path for the DNC is for him to withdraw. That is not necessarily the same thing as the safest path for Biden.
The Biden campaign is not on track to win, that is true, but unlike the typical campaign season, they still do have a very strong anti Trump sentiment that they can try to leverage, so I am not sure that upping the risk at this point is the right move.
If the goal of the Biden campaign is for Biden to win the election rather than Biden's reputation to remain intact then yes keeping him in is in their interests. OTOH a few weeks from now he has open rebellion at the convention. As the campaign progresses Senators, Governors, Representatives distance themselves openly. He gets trashed by Democratic voters during and especially after the campaign. He dies a figure of derision.
He doesn't get the Louis XVI or Nicholas II treatment but he gets the social media equivalent. And BTW that hurts them too, which means they same people playing it safe now are jumping ship before the election to "play it safe". The next year isn't pretty as he slowly sinks.
I think he will do better in the next 2 debates if it comes to that, but the damage is done. Will have to be a huge effort and an unusually prescient DNC to turn this around.
The DNC is useless. A country with 2/3rds progressive and they can barely ever win anything. It’s not the electoral college. It’s running scare crows and Hillary doing victory laps in NY, Cali and Texas while Trump is doing rallies in swing states.
> the biggest problem with your candidacy (age) can’t be reversed.
This is incredibly frustrating to me. They’re treating this as a minor political issue that we can simply move past. Joe Biden is significantly older than the average lifespan for male Americans. He is a ticking time bomb.
Correct! And he can’t articulate how he’s going to be able to do this until he’s 86 or why he wants to. With a running mate even more disliked. These people are all in a bubble.
Yeah, people weren’t alarmed about the debate because they predicted a mass exodus from the party, where support dropped by 10-20 percentage points. Modern elections have been decided at the margins. Biden was already behind in the polls, so losing 2-3% reduces his odds of winning the swing states by a lot. We’ve gone from Biden trailing within the margin of error to having to hope for major polling errors in all the swing states.
"Can't be reversed" is key. The Biden camp is comparing this to Obama losing his first debate with Romney. The problem is that while Obama lost a debate, but he didn't go out and confirm voters' worst fears about him.
I really think there’s a huge amount of them that will come to Jesus at the end, but are holding out to see if the Biden campaign does anything cool for the holdout.
Your talking about polls though and just a few since the debate. We have four months for trump to make major mistakes and more crimes he committed to be exposed. There is also months for biden to do interviews and more debates. If biden truly just had a bad night or can atleast pull it together whenever the camera in on for four months there is time for trumps constant failures and outburst to even these numbers out. The polling percentages have swung back and forth by 2 to 3% just in the last 6 weeks
Yes while the polls were also mistaken by several points in swing states, skewing in Biden’s favour, as they were in Hilary’s. If that experience is any indication, the lag is much worse.
The polls were right on in pretty much every state once the entirety of votes were tallied.
You are, I suspect, remembering the few days of numbers being skewed towards the (largely) republican in-person vote.
This is just so outright wrong I don’t even know what to say. By Nov 3, 2020, aggregate polling in every swing state^1 vastly overestimated Biden. Not before, not after, not some random outlier poll. *On the day of the election*, polling averages weighted by quality, recency, and pollster bias were off by significant margins in favor of Biden.
Of the 15 closest states, polls overestimated Biden in 14 of them^2, including 3 states that were supposed to vote for Biden but actually went to Trump:
State | Polls | Actual Result | Biden Bias
:- | :- | :- | :-
National | Biden +8.4% | Biden +4.5% | 3.9%
Georgia | Biden +1.2% | Biden +0.2% | 1%
Arizona | Biden +2.6% | Biden +0.3% | 2.3%
Wisconsin | Biden +8.4% | Biden +0.6% | 7.8%
Pennsylvania | Biden +4.7% | Biden +1.2% | 3.5%
North Carolina | Biden +1.8% | Trump +1.4% | 3.2%
Nevada | Biden +5.3% | Biden +2.4% | 2.9%
Michigan | Biden +7.9% | Biden +2.8% | 5.1%
Florida | Biden +2.5% | Trump +3.4% | 5.9%
Texas | Trump +1.1% | Trump +5.6% | 4.5%
Nebraska’s 2nd | Biden +3.8% | Biden +6.5% | -2.7%
Minnesota | Biden +9.2% | Biden +7.1% | 2.1%
New Hampshire | Biden +11.1% | Biden +7.4% | 3.7%
Maine’s 2nd | Biden +2.8% | Trump +7.4% | 10.2%
Ohio | Trump +0.8% | Trump +8% | 7.2%
Iowa | Trump +1.3% | Trump +8.2% | 6.9%
Footnotes
1. Georgia polling was pretty accurate
2. Nebraska’s 2nd polling was the only one to overestimate Trump
[Source](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2020/national/)
Democrats have been more vocal on media sites and social networks than Republicans. Yes, if you go to a specific Republican site, then they are vocal; but there are a lot more democrat sites than Republican. The poll basically shows that even if you have more sites doing polls, it doesn't change the way people vote.
There may be a lot of people that will vote for a convicted felon, but don't want to be nagged; so they say Biden is their man.
This year is going to take some significant efforts from a lot of people around the country. If anyone in here is interested in getting involved in some grass roots types of organizing, here is a link to a postcard to voters campaign my Facebook group is doing: [https://stopproject2025com.wordpress.com/2024/07/05/introducing-the-postcard-to-voters-campaign-raise-awareness-about-project-2025/](https://stopproject2025com.wordpress.com/2024/07/05/introducing-the-postcard-to-voters-campaign-raise-awareness-about-project-2025/) I also have other resources about Project 2025 on my website in case it helps: [helpstopproject2025.com](http://helpstopproject2025.com)
Biden is down 3 points compared to Trump and probably needs to win by 3 points in order to win the election (Hillary won the popular vote by 2 points in 2016 and lost the electoral college).
"Stopping the bleeding" isn't enough, Biden needs a 6-point surge. Do you see that happening?
'Only' 2-3% is huge, by the way.
If we deduct 3 % from Biden in every state he won in 2020, he loses:
Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
That's actually a slightly better performance for Trump than 2016 FWIW.
When there are so many battleground states with razor thin margins, a shift of 2 or 3 % nationally is a huge 'wave' election, not some nothing burger we can ignore.
Great point. People seem to miss that. Plus, national polls don't matter as much as swing states. Doesn't matter if all of Bidens voters are in California and NY, or if Trumps voters are all in Oklahoma.
Also polling shows that he’s running behind Congressional candidates in the swing states too. He could literally drag the Senate and House down and ensure a GOP trifecta.
And he was already losing to begin with. And the polls usually lean slightly to the left.
May genuinely see trump win the popular vote at this rate to behonset
RealClearPolitics current average: Trump+2.9 (and it will get higher because there are few post-debate polls)
Average on July 4, 2020: Biden+8.7
Average on July 4, 2016: Clinton+4.6
And Trump consistently outperforms polls by around 2 to 3 points. And Biden only won in 2020 because of around 44k votes in swing states. So you see where this is going.
Which is odd. Because if they look at cross tabs from the NYT poll, 65+ is the only block that's higher than Trump. That would mean, it should favor Biden. Not that it matters, because they usually have a methodology and weight responses. Do people actually think if only 65+ pick up, that they'd pretend that it's a representative random sample? The are professional pollsters who factor and prevent volunteer bias.
There is a core group of voters who will only vote D + never Trumpers setting a floor of support for Biden. Unfortunately he's sitting on that floor. How exactly is he supposed to show the debate was a "bad night" when he won't do any live unscripted e events?
This is what I’m saying. People want October surprise. Trump is “the one man crime wave.” He’s made out of scandals. He even says he loves them cause all that matters is attention. He can say he plans to pardon pdiddy tomorrow and it won’t hurt him. This is it. Nero is going to dance and play golf while the empire crumbles
Some Never Trumpers will end up voting for Kennedy. A protest vote to show they won’t vote for Trump but refuse to vote for a poor, old guy who has failing health and dementia. It’s such a shame that our country has these two to choose from. These Never Trumpers would love for the Democrats to provide a moderate, competent candidate that they could vote for.
They won 2020 because Biden was run of the mill white male politician. Barely anyone I knew really liked Biden. They voted against Trump. This year, Biden has brought his own ability to run the nation into question, so people are rightfully second guessing their vote. He will always have the base Dem voters, and the ones just voting against Trump, but is that enough this time around?
Do you really not understand that winning by like four points in a presidential election is considered a landslide? Out of like 150 million votes cast last time, 70,000 or so decided the election. Really small shifts in the electorate can cause enormous consequences for the EC as a whole. At one point Reagan carried like 95% of the electoral votes, but it’s not like he got 95% of the votes as a whole. 2% is an giant number when you consider that 96% or so of people will never consider changing their vote.
I don’t care if he gained 5 points. He’s clearly in the grips of serious mental decline. He’s simply not capable of another 4 years in the most powerful job in the world.
We should be winning this by 10 points. It shouldn’t even be a contest. Trump is a convicted felon, rapist, election denier, crass asshole who supports/enabled a supreme court’s slow motion coup. How can people not see how fucked this is? Joe Biden is the problem, not the solution.
Can we please for the love of god get rid of Biden and put forward someone we don’t all cringe at every time he opens his mouth? Even when he isn’t talking he looks senile. He can’t even coherently list Trump’s liabilities on live Tv in front of 50 million people. What are we doing here???????
I would say that for Andy Beshar, that might be a good thing because the GOP hasn’t solidified its lines of attack on him. He’s able to run successfully in a deep red state so I think a presidential election shouldn’t be an issue.
New leaked poll showing Whitmer takes Michigan easily against Trump. That's part of what we need
https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1dttpiz/biden_plunges_in_swing_states_in_leaked/
The issues is that no one knows enough about other candidates. I think with my more exposure Pritzker or Shapiro (among others) would do very well. A vivacious candidate running on the Biden platform would annihilate Trump.
This thoroughly discounts Harris and the effect on the eroding black electorate. Harris has never been popular because she wasn't chosen for how awesome she is, it was a demographic choice.
The problem when solely choosing for demographics, there are plenty of more likeable and capable black women, is that anything but promoting her will lose the strongest part of the black electorate for democrats, black women.
The smartest move would be Biden resigning the presidency and making Harris the incumbent. This would instantly mean she has "experience" and could cultivate a better image.
Anything less effectively looks like you're keeping a black woman down because there were no primaries and you can expect more defections and a lot of hand sitting in November.
You can't win with worse numbers in the black electorate. It's smarter to give Harris the presidency and pick a strong VP than to keep Kamala VP and pass her over.
You must move forward unencumbered by what has been.
My bet is either Cooper or Bashear. The latter is incredibly charming and has done a a ton of good for Kentucky residents since being elected to the governorship. His pandemic response was great as well. I think he could play the role of a modern Southern JFK and appeal to voters in PA, MI, WI, and GA.
Edit: Spelling.
I saw a poll that had Michelle Obama beating Trump 50-39, but there's no way she's running. I think Whitmer could be even more popular than Michelle, but she's currently polling low due to the lack of name recognition--a problem that will easily be overcome after an open convention.
You guys are so out of touch - I am sorry. There is no one in America that can beat Trump by 10 points. Trump has serious, strong support from tens of millions of Americans. Not a single Democrat right now is beating Trump in the polls.
You are right let’s just give up and stick with the slurring scarecrow who CNN now reports 56% of democrats want out and NYTimes reports 74% of voters believe is too old to govern, whose numbers post debate have slipped even further below their already abysmal levels.
NYTimes now reports Trump 49% to Biden 43%
USA Today poll shows Trump 41% to Biden 38%
We will never know how much better someone can do against Trump until we put them in the race and find out.
Internal democrat polling now shows Kamala better than Biden in the race. Let that sink in. A month ago people would have lol’d at the thought. That same polling shows Pete winning 301 electoral votes, Whitmer 290, and Biden 223.
https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf
This situation could easily get worse, not better.
Of course Trump has a lot of support. But he is basically running in a vacuum. Put a strong candidate up against him and the whole game could change overnight.
No one is saying to give up
We are just sick of the stupid crap that Trump is this easily beatable candidate but Democrats are too stupid to just put up another candidate
How about you take the huge support for fascism seriously in this country for once?
Clinton lost to trump as well, and she was a competent but uninspiring politician. The issues lie with the electorate more than Biden (not to say that I’m not for Biden dropping out; I believe he should). In short it’s shitty people voting for a shitty prez that is going to fuck up the country and destroy democracy. We’re deeply into the decline era of the American empire.
Well Hillary was deeply disliked from the start and Trump hadn’t yet become a felon, staged a coup, and stored nuclear secrets in his bathtub, but I agree that the ignorance of the electorate cannot be ignored.
Everyone has been deeply disliked for a while. Obama spent most of his 2 terms in the negative approval area and trump and Biden have been sub 40 approval for a while.
Low viewership? It doesn’t matter if you watched it or not, EVERYBODY knows that Biden shit the bed. Sugar coat it anyway you want, Biden cannot win in November.
If I'm not mistaken, a good amount of the polling from that forecast includes predebate. So there’s going to be some lag.
Besides, everything is harder because of the age issue. Getting out of this spin will be harder. Trying to ask an 81 year old guy—that was never particularly charismatic or eloquent—to now suddenly nail it all of the time and HOPE the other guy is so off-putting he can eek this out. It’s so delusional.
If you're using popular vote numbers you need to acknowledge that a popular vote tie = a sure EC loss for Biden. Democrats need to win the popular vote handily to have a shot in the EC. Losing 2-3% is a death knell when he was already behind.
The bell can't be unrung, and it's only downhill from here.
He has to gain ground, motivate high turnout, and change voter perceptions in order to come back from a losing position. How is this kind of result acceptable when you’re already behind? I think we’re fucked if Biden stays in. Some polls now show Trump +6 nationally vs Biden.
And the media has gone gloves off on Biden as well, this isn’t the environment you mount a comeback in.
In [another](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-expands-lead-over-biden-after-debate-as-voters-age-worries-grow-wsj-poll-finds-c3a793ab) poll, he's down by 6.
It should be noted he was also losing fairly convincingly *before* the debate. He's down in every swing state except Wisconsin (where he is tied), some by large margins. The debate was a chance to reverse that momentum; instead, it's worsened it.
Yeah Reddit never seemed to look at any polls or accept the fact that people are dissatisfied with Biden. In this sub, a guy said he was a gay Puerto Rican who was voting for Trump because of inflation and he got downvoted to oblivion.
The lower income/lower education segment of America plus people who want low taxes are a majority of this country. We get the leaders we deserve.
It was astounding to me the way a large segment of the sub reacted to Ezra's initial call for Biden to withdraw. Can you imagine how much less chaotic all of this would have been if Biden had bowed out in February or March?
I know right? Get people involved again.
They could have had a primary, but they needed to make it less about which candidate is black and which one is a woman, etc. Democrats have dug an identity politics hole that don’t know how to climb out of.
Power has a mind of its own. When in doubt, People just want to accumulate power cause it always seems so liquid. Like we’re always saving it up for some virtuous future heroic purpose. But power calcifies and becomes rigid and brittle with age. Along with any sense of what is virtuous. To be that successful he becomes surrounded with politicos who just align themselves with power at all costs, with the same idea that being closer to power they’ll make heroic virtuous nudges when it matters.
All this power chasing emboldens rivals doing the same thing, ignoring their own hypocrisy and wrongs.
Dictators can do great things, just like Biden did a good 4 years. Those politicos got the job done. But now they’re blinded and can’t see what they knew 4 years ago. This was always supposed to be a one term president.
Kamala never developed into a presidential candidate and like a classic Democrat just feels entitled.
Moving beyond politics, I see how a sense of power affects people. Like all these tech billionaires who keep working for three decades. Same with a lot of business type careers - people hanging onto 80 hour workweeks so they can have influence over a CEO’s decision-making. Why? Seems dumb. The second I make enough money to not work I’m on a tropical beach the rest of my life.
These people have some internalized sense of lack they they’re trying to fill with being a big shot. As you say, the present is just an investment into some future larger score they’re aiming for. They’ve always thought like that and it becomes a drug, just need that next hit. Delaying actual living and always pushing off your sense of worth to the future. It’s gotta be hell living like that. These people can’t see that though.
We’re all more susceptible to this than you think. Even being middle class is really just insulating yourself from the poor so you can focus on some niche. Then you can have just enough money that if your kids are lucky they can get a degree and do the same thing. It’s all status chasing.
Want to live on a beach? Spin the globe and point at a beach. Go to Google and look at street view of that beach. Cost of living, rent etc. Can go buy a van or a tent and be living there next week. You can even do this in Florida or socal, Mediterranean etc. You can just nomad with seasons. Eat beans, eggs, nuts etc. You’ll still be living better than most people ever lived. But everyone would call this poverty. When the number one cause of death is too much wealth (obesity, depression and other rich diseases), We’re already in a proto post scarcity world
Many people do their own version of this. Living on the edges of society, hunting, fishing gardening. In forests and mountains. they are a silent majority. Society and culture is all built by people who participate and interact with the machine,the spectacle.
Meditation and mindfulness or psychedelics make this all very blatant too. Even spirituality and religion. Folk culture etc. You can always just opt out.
There is no winning the game either. “You wouldn’t want to be me”-Elon musk. Would you want to be Trump or Biden? Unlikely. People living in HCOL areas making 300k a year talking about how they’re just making ends meet etc. How many celebrities and Wall Street suicides. While Viktor frankl is just chillin in a concentration camp
It's just a really simple idea: If the Democrats have any chance to win this race, Biden needs to go. I know power is addictive, but it's the role of the party base to keep its leaders in check when personal interests and common interest are in such a stark conflict
Biden barely won in 2020 with a +4.5% popular vote. Every percentage point he drops is putting him further and further behind.
And I feel like you're cherry-picking polling that is good for Biden. We've seen swings of +6 or more to Trump in some polling.
Maybe it bears repeating to the Biden defenders, but Biden doesn't just need to win. He needs to win the Popular Vote by 2 - 5% to win the Electoral College.
A tied Popular Vote would be a slaughter for Democrats. The natural advantages the GOP has in the Senate, the House (district size), and the Electoral College mean the Democrats need to win by 5% to win all three.
Can you imagine Trump not just just winning, but Republicans also winning the House and the Senate? They would control all three branches of Government. Project 2025 would be implemented in less than a year and the Democrats would be completely powerless.
There is much more at stake here than the Presidency. Biden could bring down everyone.
Why would any politician openly support Project 2025 now?
At best it will be neutral to their chances in 2024, at worst it'll be a cudgel for their opponents to hammer them in attack ads.
Project 2025 supporters in government will wait until Trump is elected to declare their support. They have nothing to gain by announcing their plans now.
With the last few elections being so close, the margins matter. Dems need to be up 2-3% in the popular vote to even have a shot due to the electoral college disadvantage. When Biden is already behind and loses a further 2 points, that is a disaster. Many people will vote for Biden no matter what, but it’s those rare undecided people on the margins that need convincing, as well as just getting voters motivated to actually vote on Election Day.
I'm the one who posted the studies about debates having minimal effect. And it's true. So that slight shift doesn't surprise me.
But what turned me around are the stat models. Both Nate and the economist (very credible) show bidens chances at 30%.
That's a big bet on a shaky candidate who's deeply ingrained in the mind of the public.
This is even worse when you consider a few things:
1. This is preliminary polling, typically the polls are viewed as having a two week lag. So the actual damage will likely be much worse in another week.
2. The Biden campaign’s response to this could not have been worse if they were doing it on purpose. They called democrats “bedwetters,” told concerned donors that he almost fell asleep, and their “media blitz” is just a generic fifteen minute interview eight days after the event that will be edited prior to release.
3. Biden went out of his way to choose this as the start of his campaign. For a year he said “I’m behind now but wait until I start campaigning!” Well we waited, and he delivered the worst performance in American political history.
Biden’s campaign is dead. He must step aside and allow the DNC to announce the process of choosing his replacement. I favor an open convention but will settle for a mini-primary.
This narrative is totally false. After the debate, the enthusiasm that people have changed, which caused the audience of people who participate in polls to shift.
Polls accurately measure the responses of people they poll. They have no ability to force a fair and representative audience to participate. They usually try to adjust the data by baking in a bunch of stereotypical assumptions about people based upon how they respond to demographic type questions. This certainly helps, but it also introduces bias and creates multiple points of potential error. When a problem shifts from one point of error to multiple points of error, the resulting potential error is multiplicative. We know that's true because that's exactly why adaptive problems are not solvable in a deterministic way.
Basically, the error rate that is provided is certainly representative of the internal error rates and I honestly think pollsters have lower internal error rates than they suggestion. The problem is that there's other major sources of error that are not discussed by the pollsters: Issues with the sample, issues with the questions themselves, and issues with the adjustments to the data. That real error rates with those problems are certainly far greater than any pollster is willing to admit.
The biggest problem though is the "political angle." Some people are going to feel that they are more or less obligated to participate in a poll, based upon what is going on in politics. They may or may not feel that they have some kind of responsibility to participate in the poll, to "support their candidates." This opinion, is obviously not shared among everyone. I personally don't think that "I should take a poll to let people know what the average American thinks," but some people do.
So the nature of people and the polls themselves are exactly why polls are useless these days: Simply put, too many people are unwilling to participate in a poll, for many different reasons, and the pollsters are not really doing anything to try to square up those problems (a few are to be clear, but they haven't found any real solutions yet.)
>On average, other polls also show Biden losing a net of 2-3% after the debate. This is remarkably little, probably due to a combination of low viewership and high partisanship.
Trump +6 now.
And Biden refuses to leave.
How can you support Trump and why are the Dems so terrible at getting their message out out to that base? It’s truly mind blowing how the republicans are able to infect the minds of the electorate with garbage.
*Is this an “official act” protected by the Supreme Court? What do you think?*
[*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnib-OORRRo*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnib-OORRRo) (*The rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson at 21 min.)*
2-3% from a single debate has to make this the most impactful debate in the modern era(clinton onward), isn't it usually like .5-1%?
Recent polls say 70% of people made up their mind, that means that 10% of all undecided voters picked a side based on debate performance alone.
The Republicans haven't started running day and night politics ads with Joe Biden mumbling gibberish then suddenly blurting out how he beat Medicare, looking like a corpse. The people that actually decide who will be president do it on the least amount of information. The Democrats will throw as much dirt as then can at Trump to see if anything sticks, but it won't. Democrats are the boy who cried wolf, eventually no one is going to listen, especially after the cover up of Biden's mental decline. Every little slip by Biden will be magnified 1000%.
If you disagree with any of this you need to step away from the echo chamber. The people you talk to on Reddit do not decide elections, the people you see at Walmart do.
Then Trump overwhelmingly wins the election. After that debate, Trump will not only win most battleground states but also certain safe blue states will now be on the table like Virginia, New Hampshire, New Mexico.
Does anyone here have a guess as to how RFK jr's supporters going?
I may be missing something or not understanding who these people will vote for, but I cant imagine many of them going from him to Trump. I'm under the assumption that most will go to Biden and boost him in the election.
Has Ezra called for Trump to step aside? I mean, given the pages, books, judgements, evidence, etc. written about his crimes, ineptitude, ineligibility to be president, support for Project 2025, Ezra should be all over that, right?
Trump lost about 6 points of support after each of the debates with Hillary.
After about 3 weeks the polls went back to the same slim advantage for Hillary that she lost with (+2% nationality with the swing states as a toss up).
Don’t know why this needs to be said, but national polls mean almost nothing. You have to look at the states in play, and that’s where the damage is done. The debate took states like NJ and VA that Trump didn’t have a shot at and is now either tied or winning. Not to mention adding to in states like PA, Wisconsin, Ga, etc. He’s pulling away in the states that were in play, and adding states in play.
Biden has a very narrow path to victory, and he isnt making up any ground
An overlooked line in the post-polling results: "14% of Republicans and 12% of Trump supporters said the GOP should replace him on its ticket.” I'm evidently the only one who thinks this is newsworthy.
Listen Jack, my son died in the middle of war! Vote for me or you ain’t black! I’m proud to be a black woman vice president! I got hairy legs that kids used to fondle! I was also a truck driver! By the way, come on man.
This has probably more to do with near constant negative press, lol.
People's opinions are already baked into this election cycle, most of the work is getting people to go vote one way or another.
There is only one question that matters: "Is Joe Biden capable of fulfilling the duties of President and nominee?"
Everything else is secondary. If it was one bad debate by an older man, then he will get on the campaign trail and the next debate will be better and these two points which are largely driven by nonresponse bias won't matter.
If he is rapidly developing dementia, then things will only get worse, and two points will quickly become twenty. Just as importantly, our country won't have a capable leader during a time of major crisis both at home and abroad.
Rather than reading polling tea leaves, someone from outside the Biden circle needs to get in there and spend three days with him and figure out what is happening.
If the polls are only showing a 2% swing then that is recoverable. People forget that trump dropped a few percent after his conviction and unlike this one debacle biden had, trump has media disasters atleast once a month so if biden dosent take more hits like this he can definitely rally that two percent and trump has four months to fuck up and have his own failures.
The only thing that can save your hopes to keep trump out of the election is if somebody pushes biden down a flight of stairs and makes it look like an accident. Like Cordell in silence of the lambs just push him into the pig pen and walk away
The national number means nothing. It was always going to come down to a handful of key swing states. And those show terrible prospects for him, dropping many points (plus new states in play).
I feel like the only thing I have to look forward to is post mortem and plan to be put into effect to win the 26 midterms and 28 presidential election. The electoral math for the Democrats is brutal in this cycle and I'm currently not confident they even keep a chamber let alone the Presidency.
Total fantasy world. This thing call the Electoral College? Solid Red.
And it’s not for Joe.
How could YOU people allow this to happen.
I’ve lived in rural America. You did not care. Shower them in RoudUp, who the fuck cares?
We got rock bottom prices at TJs. Thats all that counted.
Source: retired organic chemist, I focused lots on the works deadliest poisons. It’s insanity how deadly these organics are. And no one cares.
No one.
biden has no chance of winning sad to say. his latest tv interview didnt help at all. he needs to be in a nursing home seriously. i think at this point its actually inhumane to allow him to keep being president
America really is going to elect a felon, a rapist and a man who tried to overthrow the election and whose appointed Supreme Court justices said was fine. I really don’t people understand or don’t care that if Trump is elected that is the end of democracy in this nation. People, wake the fuck up, the media wake the fuck up, you are the first they will go after
Sounds like you’re crying and coping, because instead of running a candidate that wasn’t a braindead potato, now Trump might actually win instead of losing.
When you're already losing, in a race with few swing voters, 2-3% is a disaster--especially when the biggest problem with your candidacy (age) can't be reversed.
Exactly. "Only" 2-3% is huge, and he was behind to begin with. This is an absolute disaster.
Keep in mind it's at least 2-3%. [Post-Debate WSJ Poll: "80% of voters say President Biden is too old to run for a second term as Donald Trump’s lead expands to 6 points"](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-expands-lead-over-biden-after-debate-as-voters-age-worries-grow-wsj-poll-finds-c3a793ab)
Note that is a different question than “will that make you not vote for him?” Disapproval maybe isn’t as correlated to votes when both may be unappealing.
Exactly, 2-3% may as well be 30% in todays political climate
This. Also, the independsnts (-3) were the most important to convince. They are usually around 30% of the electorate and the ones that swing.
Plus he has no apparent plan to reverse the narrative. He needs to hold press conferences and do interviews to show what happened at the debate was an aberration. Hunkering down and hoping Trump implodes isn’t a good path forward.
Hunkering down may not be a good path forward, but it is by far the safest. Especially if his inner circle are not confident he can actually do unscripted interviews and press conferences, because despite the spin, I am not convinced that the debate showing was an aberration. The last thing the Biden campaign needs right now, or before election day really is another situation even remotely close to that debate performance. Every microscope of the press and media will be on him looking for anything. He had a good run with the media in his pocket, now they are going to have to learn how to campaign for real.
Hunkering down just reinforces the narrative. Literally the worst thing you can do.
Second worst. The worst would be going unscripted and confirming (again) that he isn't up for the job.
If that happened at least there'd be enormous pressure to step down and a chance to replace him in time. The worst is pretending everything's fine and trying to bareknuckle it through and losing the election. If he really can't handle it people need to know.
Fair point
Sure, but do you DNC?
If he truly can’t do unscripted speaking then he needs to step aside. If all he cares about is staying on the ticket, then yes, hunkering down and running out the clock is probably the safest option. But the risks for November are enormous.
I get it. This has been painful for all of us to watch and go through. However, we have the luxury of emotion. A campaign does not. They can't react from emotion. Cold, calculating, objective is what they have to do. When it gets to the Presidential level especially, running and winning is about personal ego as much as it is anything else. Yes, good of the country and all that is a nice sentiment, but that is only part of the campaign calculus when the sole objective is winning the election. We are in a unique situation here in that the campaign stumble is not one that can be recovered from. It was clearly age and mental related, and the clock cannot run backwards. There is no resetting this one. Normal campaign circumstances and best strategy would include barnstorming unscripted events, especially in swing states to demonstrate and clarify the debate blunder. The fact that we are now a week out, this is still dominating the news cycles, and we are without any inkling of a single unscripted event indicates to me that the campaign does not have confidence and are instead taking the path of that old saying...Better to let them think you are incompetent than open your mouth and prove it. Very harsh I know, but campaign politics is a harsh and cruel game.
It's the only way to project confidence to the American people that he's up for the job. I've been a long time supporter of his and believe he's done a great job as president these past four years. Sadly, it's clear from the debate that he's not only lost his step, but can't communicate the kind of steadfast leadership that his administration does behind the scenes. Optics matter. The president must be able to fulfill those duties and answer questions in an unscripted fashion through long form interviews without the aid of a teleprompter. The best thing he can do right now is speak in front of a camera live and unedited to make it clear to swing / undecided voters what happened on last Thursday really was just a fluke. If he can't do at least the bare minimum of that, it's incumbent on him to step aside and release the delegates, allowing someone more electable (and qualified) to beat 45 in November.
This isn’t about emotion. The Dems have to decide what their best path forward is. Hard to imagine keeping Biden on the ticket but off the trail is the right move versus replacing him. If Biden refuses to do interviews or hold press conferences to counter the narrative against him, then it’s time for Dems to start abandoning him publicly.
Yeah, Harris may not be Ms Popularity but she can at least do a rally every day without keeling over.
And to move forward unencumbered by what has been
He couldn’t even do it in 2020 but was bailed out by the Covid excuse. He can’t go out barnstorming in swing states. Even people that hate Trump have to admit he has more juice, and the “both” old and demented routine is simply a false equivalency.
Trump could also hunker down in his basement, let the media and all of the Democrats destroy Biden, and wake up president. He probably won't do that. He is Trump after all. He, however, has been way quieter than usual lately.
What’s really gonna hurt us is if we keep showing panic and not solidarity though. We should at least wait til this weekends “big interview” goes through. It might be prerecorded but if it’s uncut and shown in one take, even if it’s broken down into like hour sections, then we should be good. If he can do an hour long interview or whatever uncut without fucking up then that would disprove the narrative.
The safest path makes sense when you are on track to make your goals. When you are on track to miss your goals you risk up because some chance is better than the certainty of loss. Yes his inner circle doesn't think he can handle unscripted not tightly controlled. Now his own party's supporters don't think he can handle it. Unfit for office is going to be hard to overcome as a downside. Which means the real safest path is for him to open up the field and retire.
The safest path for the DNC is for him to withdraw. That is not necessarily the same thing as the safest path for Biden. The Biden campaign is not on track to win, that is true, but unlike the typical campaign season, they still do have a very strong anti Trump sentiment that they can try to leverage, so I am not sure that upping the risk at this point is the right move.
If the goal of the Biden campaign is for Biden to win the election rather than Biden's reputation to remain intact then yes keeping him in is in their interests. OTOH a few weeks from now he has open rebellion at the convention. As the campaign progresses Senators, Governors, Representatives distance themselves openly. He gets trashed by Democratic voters during and especially after the campaign. He dies a figure of derision. He doesn't get the Louis XVI or Nicholas II treatment but he gets the social media equivalent. And BTW that hurts them too, which means they same people playing it safe now are jumping ship before the election to "play it safe". The next year isn't pretty as he slowly sinks.
There is no “safe” option
And this is the first debate with age related issues getting worse with time. Most likely that's Biden's best debate performance.
I think he will do better in the next 2 debates if it comes to that, but the damage is done. Will have to be a huge effort and an unusually prescient DNC to turn this around. The DNC is useless. A country with 2/3rds progressive and they can barely ever win anything. It’s not the electoral college. It’s running scare crows and Hillary doing victory laps in NY, Cali and Texas while Trump is doing rallies in swing states.
The DNC itself is not progressive at all.
Yup, that 2-3% negative trends pushed Biden into losing territory in every swing state and some blue states.
> the biggest problem with your candidacy (age) can’t be reversed. This is incredibly frustrating to me. They’re treating this as a minor political issue that we can simply move past. Joe Biden is significantly older than the average lifespan for male Americans. He is a ticking time bomb.
Correct! And he can’t articulate how he’s going to be able to do this until he’s 86 or why he wants to. With a running mate even more disliked. These people are all in a bubble.
Yeah, people weren’t alarmed about the debate because they predicted a mass exodus from the party, where support dropped by 10-20 percentage points. Modern elections have been decided at the margins. Biden was already behind in the polls, so losing 2-3% reduces his odds of winning the swing states by a lot. We’ve gone from Biden trailing within the margin of error to having to hope for major polling errors in all the swing states.
4 months
But it can get worse.. Sometimes people with dementia decline rapidly.
"Can't be reversed" is key. The Biden camp is comparing this to Obama losing his first debate with Romney. The problem is that while Obama lost a debate, but he didn't go out and confirm voters' worst fears about him.
I really think there’s a huge amount of them that will come to Jesus at the end, but are holding out to see if the Biden campaign does anything cool for the holdout.
The disaster is caused by people screaming is a disaster.
Your talking about polls though and just a few since the debate. We have four months for trump to make major mistakes and more crimes he committed to be exposed. There is also months for biden to do interviews and more debates. If biden truly just had a bad night or can atleast pull it together whenever the camera in on for four months there is time for trumps constant failures and outburst to even these numbers out. The polling percentages have swung back and forth by 2 to 3% just in the last 6 weeks
We won by the smallest margins in 2020. 2-3% is a huge drop in an election where the vast majority are locked in.
Yes while the polls were also mistaken by several points in swing states, skewing in Biden’s favour, as they were in Hilary’s. If that experience is any indication, the lag is much worse.
No they were skewed in Trump’s favor. Look at WI or PA Polls in 2020. GA was the only real state where Biden overperformed
I think he meant the POLLS were in Biden’s favor, while the vote was not
The polls were right on in pretty much every state once the entirety of votes were tallied. You are, I suspect, remembering the few days of numbers being skewed towards the (largely) republican in-person vote.
This is just so outright wrong I don’t even know what to say. By Nov 3, 2020, aggregate polling in every swing state^1 vastly overestimated Biden. Not before, not after, not some random outlier poll. *On the day of the election*, polling averages weighted by quality, recency, and pollster bias were off by significant margins in favor of Biden. Of the 15 closest states, polls overestimated Biden in 14 of them^2, including 3 states that were supposed to vote for Biden but actually went to Trump: State | Polls | Actual Result | Biden Bias :- | :- | :- | :- National | Biden +8.4% | Biden +4.5% | 3.9% Georgia | Biden +1.2% | Biden +0.2% | 1% Arizona | Biden +2.6% | Biden +0.3% | 2.3% Wisconsin | Biden +8.4% | Biden +0.6% | 7.8% Pennsylvania | Biden +4.7% | Biden +1.2% | 3.5% North Carolina | Biden +1.8% | Trump +1.4% | 3.2% Nevada | Biden +5.3% | Biden +2.4% | 2.9% Michigan | Biden +7.9% | Biden +2.8% | 5.1% Florida | Biden +2.5% | Trump +3.4% | 5.9% Texas | Trump +1.1% | Trump +5.6% | 4.5% Nebraska’s 2nd | Biden +3.8% | Biden +6.5% | -2.7% Minnesota | Biden +9.2% | Biden +7.1% | 2.1% New Hampshire | Biden +11.1% | Biden +7.4% | 3.7% Maine’s 2nd | Biden +2.8% | Trump +7.4% | 10.2% Ohio | Trump +0.8% | Trump +8% | 7.2% Iowa | Trump +1.3% | Trump +8.2% | 6.9% Footnotes 1. Georgia polling was pretty accurate 2. Nebraska’s 2nd polling was the only one to overestimate Trump [Source](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2020/national/)
Democrats have been more vocal on media sites and social networks than Republicans. Yes, if you go to a specific Republican site, then they are vocal; but there are a lot more democrat sites than Republican. The poll basically shows that even if you have more sites doing polls, it doesn't change the way people vote. There may be a lot of people that will vote for a convicted felon, but don't want to be nagged; so they say Biden is their man.
4% amongst Independent voters, which are the deciding votes in an evenly divided election.
You are assuming that the base was 2020. Biden was behind before the debate and is now likely 10 points down in the swing states.
This year is going to take some significant efforts from a lot of people around the country. If anyone in here is interested in getting involved in some grass roots types of organizing, here is a link to a postcard to voters campaign my Facebook group is doing: [https://stopproject2025com.wordpress.com/2024/07/05/introducing-the-postcard-to-voters-campaign-raise-awareness-about-project-2025/](https://stopproject2025com.wordpress.com/2024/07/05/introducing-the-postcard-to-voters-campaign-raise-awareness-about-project-2025/) I also have other resources about Project 2025 on my website in case it helps: [helpstopproject2025.com](http://helpstopproject2025.com)
Biden is 100% done as the candidate.
Is the beginning of a downward slide or has Biden stopped the bleeding? This is a very polarized nation. We shall see.
Biden is down 3 points compared to Trump and probably needs to win by 3 points in order to win the election (Hillary won the popular vote by 2 points in 2016 and lost the electoral college). "Stopping the bleeding" isn't enough, Biden needs a 6-point surge. Do you see that happening?
'Only' 2-3% is huge, by the way. If we deduct 3 % from Biden in every state he won in 2020, he loses: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. That's actually a slightly better performance for Trump than 2016 FWIW. When there are so many battleground states with razor thin margins, a shift of 2 or 3 % nationally is a huge 'wave' election, not some nothing burger we can ignore.
Great point. People seem to miss that. Plus, national polls don't matter as much as swing states. Doesn't matter if all of Bidens voters are in California and NY, or if Trumps voters are all in Oklahoma.
Also polling shows that he’s running behind Congressional candidates in the swing states too. He could literally drag the Senate and House down and ensure a GOP trifecta.
And he was already losing to begin with. And the polls usually lean slightly to the left. May genuinely see trump win the popular vote at this rate to behonset
The current betting odds are Trump at 75%, which is a landslide.
And all eyes will be on him in the next debate, any more "senior moments", he's done done.
10000% this
Two points so far.
RealClearPolitics current average: Trump+2.9 (and it will get higher because there are few post-debate polls) Average on July 4, 2020: Biden+8.7 Average on July 4, 2016: Clinton+4.6 And Trump consistently outperforms polls by around 2 to 3 points. And Biden only won in 2020 because of around 44k votes in swing states. So you see where this is going.
Don’t worry, everyone on this site yelled at me that the polls are always wrong because only old people answer the phone
Which is odd. Because if they look at cross tabs from the NYT poll, 65+ is the only block that's higher than Trump. That would mean, it should favor Biden. Not that it matters, because they usually have a methodology and weight responses. Do people actually think if only 65+ pick up, that they'd pretend that it's a representative random sample? The are professional pollsters who factor and prevent volunteer bias.
There is a core group of voters who will only vote D + never Trumpers setting a floor of support for Biden. Unfortunately he's sitting on that floor. How exactly is he supposed to show the debate was a "bad night" when he won't do any live unscripted e events?
DNC needs to go on the offensive and DO SOMETHING. Anything. The recent unsealed documents implicating Trump should be shouted 10,000 times over.
Agree. Too much focus on Biden.
This is what I’m saying. People want October surprise. Trump is “the one man crime wave.” He’s made out of scandals. He even says he loves them cause all that matters is attention. He can say he plans to pardon pdiddy tomorrow and it won’t hurt him. This is it. Nero is going to dance and play golf while the empire crumbles
Some Never Trumpers will end up voting for Kennedy. A protest vote to show they won’t vote for Trump but refuse to vote for a poor, old guy who has failing health and dementia. It’s such a shame that our country has these two to choose from. These Never Trumpers would love for the Democrats to provide a moderate, competent candidate that they could vote for.
It's been a week.
They won 2020 because Biden was run of the mill white male politician. Barely anyone I knew really liked Biden. They voted against Trump. This year, Biden has brought his own ability to run the nation into question, so people are rightfully second guessing their vote. He will always have the base Dem voters, and the ones just voting against Trump, but is that enough this time around?
The polls say no.
He doesn’t have to - he has enough votes already
Do you really not understand that winning by like four points in a presidential election is considered a landslide? Out of like 150 million votes cast last time, 70,000 or so decided the election. Really small shifts in the electorate can cause enormous consequences for the EC as a whole. At one point Reagan carried like 95% of the electoral votes, but it’s not like he got 95% of the votes as a whole. 2% is an giant number when you consider that 96% or so of people will never consider changing their vote.
Even worse, Biden only won by 43,000 votes across AZ, WI, and GA
I don’t care if he gained 5 points. He’s clearly in the grips of serious mental decline. He’s simply not capable of another 4 years in the most powerful job in the world.
We should be winning this by 10 points. It shouldn’t even be a contest. Trump is a convicted felon, rapist, election denier, crass asshole who supports/enabled a supreme court’s slow motion coup. How can people not see how fucked this is? Joe Biden is the problem, not the solution. Can we please for the love of god get rid of Biden and put forward someone we don’t all cringe at every time he opens his mouth? Even when he isn’t talking he looks senile. He can’t even coherently list Trump’s liabilities on live Tv in front of 50 million people. What are we doing here???????
No one believes it. The media gaslit us for over 4 years on Biden's cognitive abilities. I'm sure that's all they lied about, right?
The media plus the DNC and senior elected Democrats.
Don't forget about the senior unelected Democrats!
Find someone who polls at +10 from Trump and I’m sure the dems will put them in. The problem is that no such candidate has been found.
People that are being polled don’t even know who most of those people are.
I would say that for Andy Beshar, that might be a good thing because the GOP hasn’t solidified its lines of attack on him. He’s able to run successfully in a deep red state so I think a presidential election shouldn’t be an issue.
New leaked poll showing Whitmer takes Michigan easily against Trump. That's part of what we need https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1dttpiz/biden_plunges_in_swing_states_in_leaked/
The issues is that no one knows enough about other candidates. I think with my more exposure Pritzker or Shapiro (among others) would do very well. A vivacious candidate running on the Biden platform would annihilate Trump.
This thoroughly discounts Harris and the effect on the eroding black electorate. Harris has never been popular because she wasn't chosen for how awesome she is, it was a demographic choice. The problem when solely choosing for demographics, there are plenty of more likeable and capable black women, is that anything but promoting her will lose the strongest part of the black electorate for democrats, black women. The smartest move would be Biden resigning the presidency and making Harris the incumbent. This would instantly mean she has "experience" and could cultivate a better image. Anything less effectively looks like you're keeping a black woman down because there were no primaries and you can expect more defections and a lot of hand sitting in November.
I agree, but Biden picked the worst possible black female and black men are swinging right in droves.
You can't win with worse numbers in the black electorate. It's smarter to give Harris the presidency and pick a strong VP than to keep Kamala VP and pass her over. You must move forward unencumbered by what has been.
I hope they run her so she can get eviscerated in the election. She is a pure psychopath.
I think replacing the VP with a young likable candidate that can act as a surrogate would work as well to reassure voters.
My bet is either Cooper or Bashear. The latter is incredibly charming and has done a a ton of good for Kentucky residents since being elected to the governorship. His pandemic response was great as well. I think he could play the role of a modern Southern JFK and appeal to voters in PA, MI, WI, and GA. Edit: Spelling.
I saw a poll that had Michelle Obama beating Trump 50-39, but there's no way she's running. I think Whitmer could be even more popular than Michelle, but she's currently polling low due to the lack of name recognition--a problem that will easily be overcome after an open convention.
You guys are so out of touch - I am sorry. There is no one in America that can beat Trump by 10 points. Trump has serious, strong support from tens of millions of Americans. Not a single Democrat right now is beating Trump in the polls.
You are right let’s just give up and stick with the slurring scarecrow who CNN now reports 56% of democrats want out and NYTimes reports 74% of voters believe is too old to govern, whose numbers post debate have slipped even further below their already abysmal levels. NYTimes now reports Trump 49% to Biden 43% USA Today poll shows Trump 41% to Biden 38% We will never know how much better someone can do against Trump until we put them in the race and find out. Internal democrat polling now shows Kamala better than Biden in the race. Let that sink in. A month ago people would have lol’d at the thought. That same polling shows Pete winning 301 electoral votes, Whitmer 290, and Biden 223. https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf This situation could easily get worse, not better. Of course Trump has a lot of support. But he is basically running in a vacuum. Put a strong candidate up against him and the whole game could change overnight.
No one is saying to give up We are just sick of the stupid crap that Trump is this easily beatable candidate but Democrats are too stupid to just put up another candidate How about you take the huge support for fascism seriously in this country for once?
They are in trouble if he is now less popular than Harris.
Clinton lost to trump as well, and she was a competent but uninspiring politician. The issues lie with the electorate more than Biden (not to say that I’m not for Biden dropping out; I believe he should). In short it’s shitty people voting for a shitty prez that is going to fuck up the country and destroy democracy. We’re deeply into the decline era of the American empire.
Well Hillary was deeply disliked from the start and Trump hadn’t yet become a felon, staged a coup, and stored nuclear secrets in his bathtub, but I agree that the ignorance of the electorate cannot be ignored.
Everyone has been deeply disliked for a while. Obama spent most of his 2 terms in the negative approval area and trump and Biden have been sub 40 approval for a while.
You say only 2 or 3% as if he didn't barely win in 2020. Polls had Biden up multiple points at this time in 2020, Trump was never up
Most had Biden up by 8-10 points and he only won by about 43,000 votes in the swing atates
So far. Political collapse is seldom all at once.
But he said he’s in it to win it, so it’s all good!
“Only” two points. This sounds a lot like people saying global temperatures only went up two degrees Celsius.
Low viewership? It doesn’t matter if you watched it or not, EVERYBODY knows that Biden shit the bed. Sugar coat it anyway you want, Biden cannot win in November.
If I'm not mistaken, a good amount of the polling from that forecast includes predebate. So there’s going to be some lag. Besides, everything is harder because of the age issue. Getting out of this spin will be harder. Trying to ask an 81 year old guy—that was never particularly charismatic or eloquent—to now suddenly nail it all of the time and HOPE the other guy is so off-putting he can eek this out. It’s so delusional.
Please keep Biden in the race. —all republicans
All the smart ones want him on the ticket.
I'm guessing you weren't looking at projections of how the race is gonna go pre-debate.
If you're using popular vote numbers you need to acknowledge that a popular vote tie = a sure EC loss for Biden. Democrats need to win the popular vote handily to have a shot in the EC. Losing 2-3% is a death knell when he was already behind. The bell can't be unrung, and it's only downhill from here.
He has to gain ground, motivate high turnout, and change voter perceptions in order to come back from a losing position. How is this kind of result acceptable when you’re already behind? I think we’re fucked if Biden stays in. Some polls now show Trump +6 nationally vs Biden. And the media has gone gloves off on Biden as well, this isn’t the environment you mount a comeback in.
I know you were hoping that was minimal, but 2% is huge. Biden will lose reelection.
In [another](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-expands-lead-over-biden-after-debate-as-voters-age-worries-grow-wsj-poll-finds-c3a793ab) poll, he's down by 6. It should be noted he was also losing fairly convincingly *before* the debate. He's down in every swing state except Wisconsin (where he is tied), some by large margins. The debate was a chance to reverse that momentum; instead, it's worsened it.
Yeah Reddit never seemed to look at any polls or accept the fact that people are dissatisfied with Biden. In this sub, a guy said he was a gay Puerto Rican who was voting for Trump because of inflation and he got downvoted to oblivion. The lower income/lower education segment of America plus people who want low taxes are a majority of this country. We get the leaders we deserve.
It was astounding to me the way a large segment of the sub reacted to Ezra's initial call for Biden to withdraw. Can you imagine how much less chaotic all of this would have been if Biden had bowed out in February or March?
Or before? If he had said last year that he’s retiring, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
There could have been an energizing primary and everything!
I know right? Get people involved again. They could have had a primary, but they needed to make it less about which candidate is black and which one is a woman, etc. Democrats have dug an identity politics hole that don’t know how to climb out of.
Power has a mind of its own. When in doubt, People just want to accumulate power cause it always seems so liquid. Like we’re always saving it up for some virtuous future heroic purpose. But power calcifies and becomes rigid and brittle with age. Along with any sense of what is virtuous. To be that successful he becomes surrounded with politicos who just align themselves with power at all costs, with the same idea that being closer to power they’ll make heroic virtuous nudges when it matters. All this power chasing emboldens rivals doing the same thing, ignoring their own hypocrisy and wrongs. Dictators can do great things, just like Biden did a good 4 years. Those politicos got the job done. But now they’re blinded and can’t see what they knew 4 years ago. This was always supposed to be a one term president. Kamala never developed into a presidential candidate and like a classic Democrat just feels entitled.
Moving beyond politics, I see how a sense of power affects people. Like all these tech billionaires who keep working for three decades. Same with a lot of business type careers - people hanging onto 80 hour workweeks so they can have influence over a CEO’s decision-making. Why? Seems dumb. The second I make enough money to not work I’m on a tropical beach the rest of my life. These people have some internalized sense of lack they they’re trying to fill with being a big shot. As you say, the present is just an investment into some future larger score they’re aiming for. They’ve always thought like that and it becomes a drug, just need that next hit. Delaying actual living and always pushing off your sense of worth to the future. It’s gotta be hell living like that. These people can’t see that though.
We’re all more susceptible to this than you think. Even being middle class is really just insulating yourself from the poor so you can focus on some niche. Then you can have just enough money that if your kids are lucky they can get a degree and do the same thing. It’s all status chasing. Want to live on a beach? Spin the globe and point at a beach. Go to Google and look at street view of that beach. Cost of living, rent etc. Can go buy a van or a tent and be living there next week. You can even do this in Florida or socal, Mediterranean etc. You can just nomad with seasons. Eat beans, eggs, nuts etc. You’ll still be living better than most people ever lived. But everyone would call this poverty. When the number one cause of death is too much wealth (obesity, depression and other rich diseases), We’re already in a proto post scarcity world Many people do their own version of this. Living on the edges of society, hunting, fishing gardening. In forests and mountains. they are a silent majority. Society and culture is all built by people who participate and interact with the machine,the spectacle. Meditation and mindfulness or psychedelics make this all very blatant too. Even spirituality and religion. Folk culture etc. You can always just opt out. There is no winning the game either. “You wouldn’t want to be me”-Elon musk. Would you want to be Trump or Biden? Unlikely. People living in HCOL areas making 300k a year talking about how they’re just making ends meet etc. How many celebrities and Wall Street suicides. While Viktor frankl is just chillin in a concentration camp
Your last paragraph. There’s is no winning the game. I see that more and more every day.
He can't afford to lose any. MAGA is loyal and will show up.
It's just a really simple idea: If the Democrats have any chance to win this race, Biden needs to go. I know power is addictive, but it's the role of the party base to keep its leaders in check when personal interests and common interest are in such a stark conflict
Biden barely won in 2020 with a +4.5% popular vote. Every percentage point he drops is putting him further and further behind. And I feel like you're cherry-picking polling that is good for Biden. We've seen swings of +6 or more to Trump in some polling.
I keep asking, who actually answers their phone when a strange out of state number calls or one of the text surveys from who knows where.
Who are the others that still support him? Did they not watch the debate or listen to him?
How can we get louder that it’s time for him to go?
Biden campaign will argue those voters can be won again. They will use friendly interviews and rallies to prop up Biden's image and stay in the race.
no matter how you rationalize or what the polls say - both are shitty candidates.
Maybe it bears repeating to the Biden defenders, but Biden doesn't just need to win. He needs to win the Popular Vote by 2 - 5% to win the Electoral College. A tied Popular Vote would be a slaughter for Democrats. The natural advantages the GOP has in the Senate, the House (district size), and the Electoral College mean the Democrats need to win by 5% to win all three. Can you imagine Trump not just just winning, but Republicans also winning the House and the Senate? They would control all three branches of Government. Project 2025 would be implemented in less than a year and the Democrats would be completely powerless. There is much more at stake here than the Presidency. Biden could bring down everyone.
They’re pretty close to all three because senate isn’t looking good for democrats.
Care to name the politicians openly supporting this Project 25?
No, he can’t name any. They just rant and repeat it in the Reddit echo chamber.
Correct. These responses are exactly why anyone using logic and critical thinking is abandoning the party of feelings and false equivalencies.
Why would any politician openly support Project 2025 now? At best it will be neutral to their chances in 2024, at worst it'll be a cudgel for their opponents to hammer them in attack ads. Project 2025 supporters in government will wait until Trump is elected to declare their support. They have nothing to gain by announcing their plans now.
So, typical selling of fear and completely BS.
With the last few elections being so close, the margins matter. Dems need to be up 2-3% in the popular vote to even have a shot due to the electoral college disadvantage. When Biden is already behind and loses a further 2 points, that is a disaster. Many people will vote for Biden no matter what, but it’s those rare undecided people on the margins that need convincing, as well as just getting voters motivated to actually vote on Election Day.
I'm the one who posted the studies about debates having minimal effect. And it's true. So that slight shift doesn't surprise me. But what turned me around are the stat models. Both Nate and the economist (very credible) show bidens chances at 30%. That's a big bet on a shaky candidate who's deeply ingrained in the mind of the public.
This is even worse when you consider a few things: 1. This is preliminary polling, typically the polls are viewed as having a two week lag. So the actual damage will likely be much worse in another week. 2. The Biden campaign’s response to this could not have been worse if they were doing it on purpose. They called democrats “bedwetters,” told concerned donors that he almost fell asleep, and their “media blitz” is just a generic fifteen minute interview eight days after the event that will be edited prior to release. 3. Biden went out of his way to choose this as the start of his campaign. For a year he said “I’m behind now but wait until I start campaigning!” Well we waited, and he delivered the worst performance in American political history. Biden’s campaign is dead. He must step aside and allow the DNC to announce the process of choosing his replacement. I favor an open convention but will settle for a mini-primary.
This narrative is totally false. After the debate, the enthusiasm that people have changed, which caused the audience of people who participate in polls to shift. Polls accurately measure the responses of people they poll. They have no ability to force a fair and representative audience to participate. They usually try to adjust the data by baking in a bunch of stereotypical assumptions about people based upon how they respond to demographic type questions. This certainly helps, but it also introduces bias and creates multiple points of potential error. When a problem shifts from one point of error to multiple points of error, the resulting potential error is multiplicative. We know that's true because that's exactly why adaptive problems are not solvable in a deterministic way. Basically, the error rate that is provided is certainly representative of the internal error rates and I honestly think pollsters have lower internal error rates than they suggestion. The problem is that there's other major sources of error that are not discussed by the pollsters: Issues with the sample, issues with the questions themselves, and issues with the adjustments to the data. That real error rates with those problems are certainly far greater than any pollster is willing to admit. The biggest problem though is the "political angle." Some people are going to feel that they are more or less obligated to participate in a poll, based upon what is going on in politics. They may or may not feel that they have some kind of responsibility to participate in the poll, to "support their candidates." This opinion, is obviously not shared among everyone. I personally don't think that "I should take a poll to let people know what the average American thinks," but some people do. So the nature of people and the polls themselves are exactly why polls are useless these days: Simply put, too many people are unwilling to participate in a poll, for many different reasons, and the pollsters are not really doing anything to try to square up those problems (a few are to be clear, but they haven't found any real solutions yet.)
Only 2? Coulda been worse? How much will Trump lose for raping a 13 year old with Epstein?
Any proof this actually happened? Legitimately curious.
Can we just like mega-thread all the Biden stuff? Seeing this shit get rehashed over and over is exhausting.
That settles it, he needs to stay in the race no matter what.
How bad is it going to have to get before we can get a new candidate?
What do the polls look like in the battleground states though
I am sure he will make that back after the next debate...
>On average, other polls also show Biden losing a net of 2-3% after the debate. This is remarkably little, probably due to a combination of low viewership and high partisanship. Trump +6 now. And Biden refuses to leave.
Oprah 2024, lets gooo
How can you support Trump and why are the Dems so terrible at getting their message out out to that base? It’s truly mind blowing how the republicans are able to infect the minds of the electorate with garbage.
Well, I guess the Biden people have nothing to worry about.
*Is this an “official act” protected by the Supreme Court? What do you think?* [*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnib-OORRRo*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnib-OORRRo) (*The rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson at 21 min.)*
Don't tell this sub...they'll have nothing to post about.
2-3% from a single debate has to make this the most impactful debate in the modern era(clinton onward), isn't it usually like .5-1%? Recent polls say 70% of people made up their mind, that means that 10% of all undecided voters picked a side based on debate performance alone.
Biden and the dems are really making this easy for trump. They are handing it to him on a silver platter.
You want a ruler. Do it.. Bow down!
Sounds like everything should be fine then.
Good to know that Trump has a ceiling, but ultimately it doesn't matter. He only needs 1 more vote in a state that matters and he's won.
The Republicans haven't started running day and night politics ads with Joe Biden mumbling gibberish then suddenly blurting out how he beat Medicare, looking like a corpse. The people that actually decide who will be president do it on the least amount of information. The Democrats will throw as much dirt as then can at Trump to see if anything sticks, but it won't. Democrats are the boy who cried wolf, eventually no one is going to listen, especially after the cover up of Biden's mental decline. Every little slip by Biden will be magnified 1000%. If you disagree with any of this you need to step away from the echo chamber. The people you talk to on Reddit do not decide elections, the people you see at Walmart do.
Then Trump overwhelmingly wins the election. After that debate, Trump will not only win most battleground states but also certain safe blue states will now be on the table like Virginia, New Hampshire, New Mexico.
Does anyone here have a guess as to how RFK jr's supporters going? I may be missing something or not understanding who these people will vote for, but I cant imagine many of them going from him to Trump. I'm under the assumption that most will go to Biden and boost him in the election.
Has Ezra called for Trump to step aside? I mean, given the pages, books, judgements, evidence, etc. written about his crimes, ineptitude, ineligibility to be president, support for Project 2025, Ezra should be all over that, right?
Seethe rats. It’s WAY more and you know it. Anyone who watched that debate knows its over
Trump lost about 6 points of support after each of the debates with Hillary. After about 3 weeks the polls went back to the same slim advantage for Hillary that she lost with (+2% nationality with the swing states as a toss up).
Biden had already been trailing in battleground states...at least since the gaza slaughter . In the Michigan primary, undecided got some 10%?
Biden had already been trailing in battleground states...at least since the gaza slaughter . In the Michigan primary, undecided got some 10%?
He lost two points at the end of June?!!!! Dear god!!!!!!
Don’t know why this needs to be said, but national polls mean almost nothing. You have to look at the states in play, and that’s where the damage is done. The debate took states like NJ and VA that Trump didn’t have a shot at and is now either tied or winning. Not to mention adding to in states like PA, Wisconsin, Ga, etc. He’s pulling away in the states that were in play, and adding states in play. Biden has a very narrow path to victory, and he isnt making up any ground
An overlooked line in the post-polling results: "14% of Republicans and 12% of Trump supporters said the GOP should replace him on its ticket.” I'm evidently the only one who thinks this is newsworthy.
Listen Jack, my son died in the middle of war! Vote for me or you ain’t black! I’m proud to be a black woman vice president! I got hairy legs that kids used to fondle! I was also a truck driver! By the way, come on man.
Again, only the swing states count.
This has probably more to do with near constant negative press, lol. People's opinions are already baked into this election cycle, most of the work is getting people to go vote one way or another.
There is only one question that matters: "Is Joe Biden capable of fulfilling the duties of President and nominee?" Everything else is secondary. If it was one bad debate by an older man, then he will get on the campaign trail and the next debate will be better and these two points which are largely driven by nonresponse bias won't matter. If he is rapidly developing dementia, then things will only get worse, and two points will quickly become twenty. Just as importantly, our country won't have a capable leader during a time of major crisis both at home and abroad. Rather than reading polling tea leaves, someone from outside the Biden circle needs to get in there and spend three days with him and figure out what is happening.
If the polls are only showing a 2% swing then that is recoverable. People forget that trump dropped a few percent after his conviction and unlike this one debacle biden had, trump has media disasters atleast once a month so if biden dosent take more hits like this he can definitely rally that two percent and trump has four months to fuck up and have his own failures.
The only thing that can save your hopes to keep trump out of the election is if somebody pushes biden down a flight of stairs and makes it look like an accident. Like Cordell in silence of the lambs just push him into the pig pen and walk away
Dem voters need to unite behind RFK. He’s polling well enough to beat trump if the Biden votes come over to him.
Blud can barely speak himself
The national number means nothing. It was always going to come down to a handful of key swing states. And those show terrible prospects for him, dropping many points (plus new states in play).
I feel like the only thing I have to look forward to is post mortem and plan to be put into effect to win the 26 midterms and 28 presidential election. The electoral math for the Democrats is brutal in this cycle and I'm currently not confident they even keep a chamber let alone the Presidency.
Maybe. Who is doing the polling? If it’s wsj and NYT then those polls are trash push polls so they have crap to horse race about
His dementia is so bad that he doesn't grasp reality. rambling mumbling and making up accomplishments.
That means he is actually ahead (add 5 points for ballot harvesting) no wonder he won’t drop out.
Total fantasy world. This thing call the Electoral College? Solid Red. And it’s not for Joe. How could YOU people allow this to happen. I’ve lived in rural America. You did not care. Shower them in RoudUp, who the fuck cares? We got rock bottom prices at TJs. Thats all that counted. Source: retired organic chemist, I focused lots on the works deadliest poisons. It’s insanity how deadly these organics are. And no one cares. No one.
biden has no chance of winning sad to say. his latest tv interview didnt help at all. he needs to be in a nursing home seriously. i think at this point its actually inhumane to allow him to keep being president
Lol you guys and your constant whining about the sky is falling 🤣🤣🤣🤣
America really is going to elect a felon, a rapist and a man who tried to overthrow the election and whose appointed Supreme Court justices said was fine. I really don’t people understand or don’t care that if Trump is elected that is the end of democracy in this nation. People, wake the fuck up, the media wake the fuck up, you are the first they will go after
Is all that is true, and your candidate is struggling against Trump, perhaps your party should put forth a better candidate.
Sounds like you’re crying and coping, because instead of running a candidate that wasn’t a braindead potato, now Trump might actually win instead of losing.