Still Working Toward Acceptance

Two big items turned up in yesterday's news that tell me last week's debate wasn't all that much of a game changer for the election. The first was Politico's report of a call from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to Jen O'Malley Dixon, Joe's campaign chair:

She used the call to reiterate her commitment and willingness to help the president but also voiced her concern about how much more difficult the campaign would be now for Biden, I’m told by a person familiar with the call.

Even more revealing is how word of the call reached me: from someone close to a potential 2028 Whitmer rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. This person said Whitmer had phoned O’Malley Dillon with more of an unambiguous SOS: to relay that Michigan, in the wake of the debate, was no longer winnable for Biden.

Whitmer herself has walked back the SOS attributed to her that Michigan is no longer in play, but it rings true to me. First, she says she won't be a candidate to replace Joe if he withdraws, because this is actually a realistic view, a little like Ted Kennedy turning down George McGovern's offer to be his 1972 running mate. Kennedy saw there was no route for that ticket to win that election, and it would lose badly and brand him as a loser for any future run.

By the same token, Whitmer understands that by trying to push Joe out, she'll simply be on the top of a losing ticket while burning a lot of bridges in the party with people whom she might need in a future run. And she knows it's a losing ticket, because she's just told Joe's campaign chair he isn't going to carry Michigan.

Let's put this in context: last week, the day before the debate, Nate Silver said:

[I]f Biden loses Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — and he trails badly in each — he’ll need to win all three of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and not just one of them.

In other words, if we assume Whitmer is a halfway savvy politician, she knows that if the ticket, any Democrat ticket in 2024 including one with her on it, loses Michigan alone, it's probably all over, and the orange man is going to call her a loser. In fact, he'll call her a loser months before the election, he'll turn out to be right, and that will end her career. This morning's Real Clear Politics aggregate for Michigan has Trump up 1.2, and that probably understates things by maybe 3%.

As David Strom wrote this morning at Red State,

Now Whitmer is walking back, or rather outright denying, the claim that Michigan is lost to Democrats if Biden remains on the ballot.

. . . The problem with Whitmer's denial is that it is transparently false. There is zero doubt that she would have called the White House to reassure the campaign that she wasn't lobbying for the job because openly doing so is political death.

But there's a whole 'nother cloud on the horizon, which I pointed out the morning before the debate: the movement in the polls was already away from any augury this is going to be a close election. Nate Silver pointed out last week,

Biden also has to hold on to states like New Hampshire and Virginia (and New Mexico and Minnesota and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District) in the Blue Wall-saves-the-day scenario, and that’s not quite a sure thing given Biden’s mediocre polling elsewhere in the Northeast.

Even before the debate, the conventional wisdom, like the states considered to be "battlegrounds", had already begun to acknolwedge that Minnesota and Virginia are in play, making even the least optimistic estimate, that Biden might still barely win an Electoral College vote of 270-268 by holding onto Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, less and less likely. Adding to the list of states in play as of late last week is New Jersey:

A new poll released on Thursday conducted by co/Efficient shows Trump leading Biden in New Jersey with 41 percent versus Biden's 40 percent, with 13 percent undecided and 7 percent supporting independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or another third party candidate. The poll, with a sample of 810 likely general election voters in New Jersey, was conducted from June 26 to 27 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.42 percent.

And as of yesterday, New Hampshire:

A new poll shows President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among New Hampshire registered voters by two points.

The Saint Anselm College Survey Center polled more than 1,700 registered voters in the first two days after the recent presidential debate.

In the poll, 44% said they support Trump, compared to 42% who said Biden was their choice. Another 4% said they planned to vote for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

There have been few campaigns in the modern era of polling where the eventual loser was so consistently behind in the polls. The 1972 election seems at this point to be the closest parallel, when George McGovern didn't have the delegates to secure his nomination before the Democrat convention, leading to extensive floor battles, which he eventually won -- but this left the vice presidential nomination still open:

Most polls showed McGovern running well behind incumbent President Richard Nixon, except when McGovern was paired with Ted Kennedy. McGovern and his campaign brain trust lobbied Senator Kennedy heavily to accept the bid to be McGovern's running mate. Much to their surprise, he continually refused their advances[.]

. . . Thereafter, a number of high-profile Democrats, including Kennedy, Senator Walter Mondale, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Senator Edmund Muskie, Senator Abe Ribicoff and Senator Birch Bayh turned down offers to run on the ticket.

It's plain that the political instincts of all these figures, from Kennedy on down, told them to avoid the slightest association with McGovern, who was marked as a loser from the start. This makes me skeptical of current estimates that potential replacements for Joe like Governors Whitmer and Newsom are actually all that anxious to step up -- like the prominent Democrats who turned McGovern down, they don't want to turn themselves into sure losers.

Whitmer's dilemma on one hand was that she didn't want to become a loser, but on the other, she now doesn't want to have the imputation that she doesn't want to be a loser. She can't win for losing.

But again, McGovern hadn't even secured the delegates for his nomination by the time of the convention, July 10–13, 1972, and it took more than two weeks for the Eagleton debacle to work itself through, culminating in his withdrawal on August 1. This slow-motion train wreck, however, took place in the current scheme of things over a month after this Biden debacle, which is taking place in the context of a very early first presidential debate and almost two months prior to the Democrat convention.

Nevertheless, it involves a very similar controversy centered on a candidate's medical fitness in the middle of the party's bleak prospects for the November election. And not since 1972 have Democrat prospects been so bad so early in the game -- but that this is all playing out so early creates its own set of extra problems.