Model Update: The Biden Campaign Taught Me It Was Okay To Be Weird
In the immediate aftermath of the debate, my initial reaction was that it was far too premature to declare its impact on the polls. The key takeaway from those 90 minutes was that President Joe Biden, being in his eighties and having a stutter, no longer commands the ability to speak eloquently off the cuff. This either proves, or at least gives the appearance, that his age and corresponding mental/physical fitness make him unsuitable to continue in this job through the end of 2028. However, this perception has been baked into the polling all cycle. Most people already thought he was too old, which was a key contributor to concerns about his rematch against a guy who's basically the same age and arguably more prone to speaking in word salad—but he's a lot less self-conscious about it, so it's fine.
What I failed to mention, and should have, is how public opinion often flows downstream from elite signals. When confronted with new information, most engaged voters take their cues from trusted political leaders and news personalities. You can't piss on people and tell them it's raining, but when public sentiment is plastic, a coordinated messaging strategy delivered by credible, recognizable messengers can significantly shape how we think about “the current thing.”
So while the debate itself may not have swayed many voters, it seems the ensuing debate about the debate has — and will continue to do so — until Joe Biden decides to leave the race, if not the office of the Presidency itself.
Given how fluid and unprecedented this situation is, and will continue to be, I want to stay non-committal about what might happen next. Instead, I'll lean into the "uncertain" part of our motto. Here's what I do know:
It only took The New York Times a few hours to tell Joe Biden, and the entire population of highly-engaged Democratic Party voters, that he cannot win, and if you will allow me to say the quiet part out loud, they will shape their coverage from now until November to ensure that he doesn’t.
Biden has lost the confidence of rank-and-file members of Congress and their staff.
There is nothing to be done that can turn this election back into a choice between two candidates. Despite being a felonious, treasonous weirdo, Donald Trump might as well be an abstract hypothetical. The race is happening within a media environment where the battle is between Biden and himself.
I don’t know if President Biden sees the writing on the wall, but Kamala Harris certainly does. So do Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Jim Clyburn. Among the many brain worms duking it out for supremacy in my brain, the one that looks and sounds a whole lot like Aaron Sorkin wants to believe that Biden made the decision to step aside during the car ride from the debate to Waffle House, where the man clearly felt more comfortable and in his element than we’ve seen him in a long time. As his running mate and the presumptive nominee should he bow out is famous for saying, he appeared unburdened by what has been.
On the subject of Kamala, I’ll be collecting polling data on a hypothetical matchup between her and Trump as it becomes available, and will deploy an election forecast for this scenario as soon as the need for one exists. Currently, our limited data doesn't seem to provide much value quite yet. Perceptions of the VP remain superficial, and it's reasonable to expect substantial, unexpected changes to those perceptions if she becomes the candidate.
While she wouldn't be my first choice in an open convention scenario, I believe she's uniquely suited to this moment in a way she wasn't in 2020. Her most noted flaw as a politician is being overly message-disciplined—ask about the weather, and she'll launch into the party's climate talking points. But for a 90-day campaign blitz against a guy who's skating by on being out of sight, out of mind for swing voters while feeding absolutely crazy bullshit to his base through a right-wing media echo chamber? I can't think of anyone more capable of relentlessly arguing that Trump is attacking our democracy and our reproductive freedoms, and if that’s not a winning message in 2024, then there isn’t a winning message in 2024.
She is a prosecutor. He is a criminal. Can I make it any more obvious?
But I digress...
The last official forecast prior to the June 15th debate gave Biden a 51% chance of winning the electoral college. This had already dipped slightly to 49% in a snap model run just an hour before the June 27th debate. In the ten days since, Biden's odds have steadily declined to 41%—the most rapid change in the race since I began collecting data for the model in December 2023.
Even so, this represents a decline of just about two points in the national popular vote, which aligns with historical expectations for polling shifts after a Presidential debate. These numbers typically revert to the mean, which is likely why Biden hasn't immediately thrown in the towel. The winds could shift in his favor. This could all be a blip.
They won't shift in his favor. This won't be a blip. Rather than rallying around their guy, capital-D Democratic institutions have decided this is the straw that broke the camel's back. I have every reason to believe this story will continue to worsen, optically, as the off-the-record knife fight currently unfolding becomes increasingly on-the-record.
This is why I hope and pray that Joe Biden ends up being more like LBJ (yes, I know that ultimately did not turn out well) and less like Nixon, and that the stage of grief we're currently in as a party and a country is one of saving face. I hope Biden accepts that he will need to step aside, while continuing to understand how terrible it would be if a President was capable of being bullied into submission by a fucking Ezra Klein op-ed.
If he needs to rally key players in the party behind him to make his exit from a position of strength rather than weakness, that's probably for the best. But by God, there better be a point to all this. Biden has been in politics for more than 50 years—he didn't just fall out of a coconut tree.
