People Are Getting Nervous

There are two aspects to the current crisis. The first, which strikes me as unreaistic, is just about what the Democrats should do with Joe as the nominee, when no course of action is very good -- his potential replacements would likely lose bigger than Joe if he stays on the ticket. The second, which is what actually has people nervous, is that Joe is commander in chief, but he's generally acknowledged not to be available for the proverbial 3 AM phone call:

• The time of day is important as to which of the two Bidens will appear.
• From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours.
• Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.

And that's apparently from insiders putting the best possible face on things. Again according to Axios, which has had the most insightful current reporting from the White House,

Joe Biden's close aides have carefully shielded him from people inside and outside the White House since the beginning of his presidency.

. . . The intermittent access has resulted in many current and former White House aides being shocked at the 81-year-old president's limitations at the debate Thursday night.

. . . Current and former White House aides are feeling whiplash — and now questioning whether Biden could fulfill a second term.

The issue isn't the short-term problem of whether Joe had a bad night and whether he can recover, the issue is what is his real condition, and is he fit not just to run for another term, but should he be in his position now at all?

Yesterday I linked to a report from NBC News that Joe was going to meet with his family to discusss the future of his campaign. Reports as of this morning are that the family insisted he continue, and indeed, some knowledgeable people insisted it wasn't really a meeting:

Camp David: Biden family spent morning not having a summit but in hair and makeup for a shoot with Annie Leibovitz, Vogue photog who shot Biden/Obama/Clinton in March then suggested doing something informal with the Bidens. Family suggested this week, bc Hunter & family in town.

— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) June 30, 2024

If this is correct -- and it certrainly has the ring of truth -- Joe's family is remarkably shallow, self-absorbed, and utterly without situational awareness. But even given the reports that the family is behind Joe, Axios suggests this may not be final:

We're told Democratic congressional leaders are one outside force that could bring pressure on Biden.

. . . "This is no longer about Joe Biden's family or his emotions," said an adviser in constant touch with the West Wing. "This is about our country. It's an utter f***ing disaster that has to be addressed."

It'll take a while for the oligarchy to process the stakes, this adviser argued, "but there will be a reckoning."

. . . "They need to tell him the absolute truth about where he is," said a well-known Democrat who often talks to the president. "Loyalty doesn't mean blind loyalty."

"Candidates for House, Senate, governor, state legislature are going to be in survival mode," the well-known Democrat added. "They're not going to go down with the ship. And the ship is in a bad place."

Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin suggested something like this is under way:

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Sunday on “Velshi” that discussions are taking place about President Joe Biden’s future as the party’s presidential nominee.

Raskin said, “This is what a real political party looks like and this is what a real politcal p[arty does. Obviously, there was a big problem with Joe Biden’s debate performance, and there is also just a tremendous reservoir of love for Joe Biden in our party. So this makes it a difficult situation for everybody, but there are very honest and serious and rigorous conversations happening at every level of our party, because it is a political party and we have differences in point of view.”

Reports from inside the Camp David photo shoot or family meeting, whatever it was, suggest the family isn't entirely in touch with reality:

Members of Joe Biden’s family privately trashed his top campaign advisers at Camp David this weekend, blaming them for the president’s flop in Thursday’s debate and urging Biden to fire or demote people in his political high command.

There is no immediate expectation that Biden will follow through on that advice, according to three people briefed on the family conversations but not directly involved. The three people were granted anonymity to discuss the matter.

. . . The blame was cast widely on staffers, including: Anita Dunn, the senior adviser who frequently has the president’s ear; her husband, Bob Bauer, the president’s attorney who played Trump in rehearsals at Camp David; and Ron Klain, the former chief of staff who ran point on the debate prep and previous cycles’ sessions.

Dunn and Bauer are former close Obama advisers, although Klain is a longtime Biden retainer. Although the White House is distancing itself from those reports, most of the senior people running the Biden 2024 campaign are former Obama staffers, some of whom are reported to have been put on the Biden re-election campaign at Obama's urging. The family's complaints likely reflect a growing rift between the Bidens and the Obamas, reflected as well in this morning's tweet from Tucker Carlson:

From an unusually good source: Obama’s tweet supporting Joe Biden was disingenuous. In private, Obama is telling people Biden can’t win, and he is therefore in favor of an open convention. Obama will not say whom he supports, nor as of yesterday afternoon had he met personally…

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 1, 2024

This suggests that the messages of support from Obama and Bill Clinton on Friday were less than wholehearted:

Both of the former Democrat presidents took a long time to speak up for their guy, Joe Biden, after the debate. While the major freak-out played out at its most intense, they were quiet.

Bill Clinton waited until early evening to post on social media.

. . . Obama's reaction was the important one, though. Many elected officials were waiting to take guidance from Obama. Obama and Clinton hesitated to get into the fray but when they did, they offered Biden a lifeline. The two former presidents knew Biden was too stubborn and egocentric to realize that it was time to leave the race.

Axios has a lengthy piece on the Biden family's strategy that concludes,

Biden's kitchen cabinet sees a recipe for a narrow victory that includes a grand-slam speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago + a strong showing in the next second debate + positive economic news in the fall (maybe a Fed rate cut).

. . . Biden's camp believes voters will give more weight to Biden's judgment and record than to his grandpa gait or fading debate dexterity. It's one of the greatest gambles in the history of politics. Once again, Biden's team is telling Democratic voters: You just have to believe.

The problem is that so far, nothing in the Biden re-election strategy has worked -- in fact, just about everything has backfired, from the lawfare strategy, to the promised comeback after the State of the Union, to what I believe was a plan to look presidential on the world stage in early June, followed by a strong debate performance in Atlanta. They aren't going to sell any strong speech at the convention or a strong performance at the next debate. Those promises aren't going to convince anyone.

The problem is immediate. The failures in the June trips and then the debate show a deeply flawed presidential judgment that goes beyond just Joe's chances for re-election. People are nervous about more than just that.

"I’m Behind Him 1000%"

Tryng to make sense of the current crisis, I've looked at two 20th century constitutional crises, the 1936 UK crisis that led to Edward VIII's abdication, and the 1944 crisis of FDR's perilous state of health leading into the November election and his death the following year only months after his inauguration. Both were resolved largely behind the scenes. But I think a closer and more recent parallel is the problem that was posed by Thomas Eagleton, who was the 1972 Democrat vice presidential nominee who was forced to withdraw his candicacy when information surfaced about his medical history.

George McGovern's nomination for president at the 1972 Democrat convention wasn't assured, and his chances against Nixon in November were never bright. Thomas Eagleton, a US senator from Missouri, wasn't on McGovern's short list for vice president, but after Ted Kennedy and Abraham Ribicoff both turned him down, he had to find a willing substitute quickly. He fell back on Eagleton, and McGovern probably didn't even want to ask too many questions of anyone at that point.

According to NPR, after Eagleton was named McGovern's running mate and nominated by the convention,

Within a few days, rumors started to circulate, beginning with a call to McGovern's headquarters in South Dakota.

"The anonymous caller had said, 'Check into Sen. Eagleton's background; he has a complicated medical background,' " Hart says.

. . . Within hours, the McGovern campaign was getting those details. On three occasions in the 1960s, Eagleton was hospitalized for depression and had undergone electroshock treatment.

. . . McGovern, under increasing pressure, asked to speak to Eagleton's psychiatrists. Eagleton agreed to have McGovern speak with two of his doctors.

"McGovern, based on those conversations, makes the medical decision that Eagleton was too much of a risk to have his finger potentially on the metaphorical button," [historian Joshua] Glasser says.

But according to Wikipedia, before he made that decision,

In response to intense pressure from the media and party leaders that Eagleton be replaced, McGovern announced that he was "1000 percent behind Tom Eagleton, and I have no intention of dropping him from the ticket".

Wikipedia's comment is,

It backfired badly and became a byword for foolish and insincere exaggeration, and today is often used in irony or sarcasm.

There are several parallels between the Eagleton crisis of 1972 and the current calls for Joe Biden to step aside as this year's Democrat presidential candidate. The first is the conundrum that it was expected, up to Thursday's debate, that Biden would be nominated by an online process prior to the Democrat convention August 19-22, and this would be a purely pro forma event. In effect, Joe was already as good as nominated, so this is a very close parallel to Eagleton's position in 1972, potentially forced to withdraw from a ticket after being nominated.

The second parallel is that questions arose about both candidates' medical fitness for office -- as McGovern apparently put it, whether Eagleton should have his finger on the nuclear button. Nobody's put it specifically that way about Joe, but I cited several links yesterday questioning Joe's capability to deal with Putin, Xi, Kim, or the Ayatollahs given what we saw in the debate.

The third parallel is that the critical medical information for both men had or has been concealed. The NPR account makes it plain that Eagleton and his doctors relied on medical confidentialty to withhold specific data until McGovern insisted that Eagleton authorize its release. In Joe's case, it seems very likely that critical medical information about his condition, his medications, and his prognosis is still being withheld, and it's uncertain whether we'll ever get it.

Certainly one aspect of the current scandal is that staff, advisers, cabinet secretaries, and colleagues over recent months have insisted thst Joe is "fine", when it seems less and less likely that this is the case. But even if what we can assess now from Joe's debate performance is all we'll ever learn, we have the incredibly awkward situation that important papers like the New York Times, the Phildelphia Inquirer, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as well as important television commentators on CNN and elsewhere, have already called for Joe to step aside -- I'm not aware of anyone mentioning Eagleton, at least not yet, but the parallel is implicit.

If Joe continues his candidacy, it will be with a good part of even the Democrat-aligned legacy commentariat against him, which will be damaging even if they all eventually recant. In that context, we have this report from NBC News, which the Biden campaign so far denies:

President Joe Biden is expected to discuss the future of his re-election campaign with family at Camp David on Sunday, following a nationally televised debate Thursday that left many fellow Democrats worried about his ability to beat former President Donald Trump in November, according to five people familiar with the matter.

Biden’s trip was planned before Thursday’s debate. He and first lady Jill Biden are scheduled to join their children and grandchildren there late Saturday.

So far, the party’s top leaders have offered public support for Biden, including in tweets posted by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Senior congressional Democrats, including Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Nancy Pelosi of California, have privately expressed concerns about his viability, said two sources apprised of those discussions, even as they all publicly back the president.

The piece goes on to say that there's a cautious wait-and-see attitude, but in the days after the debate, it's hard to avoid thinking everyone is stunned. and the consequences haven't been fully thought through. Among the considerations, though, must surely be that the campaign, in the end a likely loser, has four months still to go, while there will be increasing demands for the release of Joe's full medical records, neither of which developments will be good for Joe or his family. My bet, though, is that right now, everyone is 1000% behind him.

The 25th Amendment?

Let's delve a little farther into the 25th Amendment, or at least the part that's most applicable to the current crisis, Section 4:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide[.]

It goes on to provide that should there be a continued disagreement between the president and the vice president-plus-cabinet-majority, it's to be resolved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. This is an even higher standard than required to impeach a president, which requires just a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. As a practical matter, the 25th Amendment can't be invoked unless it's in the most extreme cases, for which at least for now, Joe's infirmities likely don't qualify.

This didn't stop House Speaker Johnson from trying to start the process:

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that high-level discussions should be taking place in President Biden’s cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment to make him step down after a disastrous debate performance the night before.

“There’s a lot of people asking about invoking the 25th Amendment right now, because this is an alarming situation,” Johnson (R-La.) told reporters. “Our adversaries see the weakness in this White House, as we all do.”

For now, this is just kabuki, but there's nevertheless legitimate reason for concern:

Joe fell apart last night, and he was only facing his American opponent for president armed with nothing but insults. Putin, Xi, Kim, the Ayatollahs, and all our adversaries have real weapons and a desire not just to take away Joe's nice home, helicopter, and the best private jet in the world. They want to reshape the map of the world and are willing to kill thousands or millions to accomplish that task.

Or this:

Put yourself in Xi Jinping's head. Or the Ayatollahs'. Or any adversary of the United States.

What did you see? Did you see an American president that you should beware of? A united America capably led? A country to respect?

Or this:

If I’m China, I’m taking off the shelf the war plans to invade Taiwan. If I’m Iran, I’m breaking out towards a nuclear weapon. If I’m Putin, I’m doubling down on Ukraine and possibly other former Soviet satellites. Can you imagine an emergency situation where immediate military decisions that only a president can make need to be made in seconds or minutes, and the military having to go to diminished Joe for a decision?

This is serious stuff. This is no joke. Biden’s cognitive decline is a national security threat of the highest order.

It doesn't necessarily follow that if Joe isn't fit to run for another term, he isn't fit to continue as president now, but the two issues are nevertheless hard to separate, although either scenario, Joe just drops out of the race, or he quits the presidency now, is pretty much wishful thinking. He won't do either voluntarily, and the possibilities of either selecting a replacement candidate at the Democrat convention or invoking the 25th Amendment are far distant.

In addition, following yesterday's media calls for Joe to drop out of the race, both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have announced their support for Joe, which indicates that at least for now, there won't be any delegations of power players heading to the Oval Office to tell him how it's gonna be.

The reason the establishment is holding off is that the alternatives are still worse. If Joe voluntarily withdraws as a candidate in November but serves out his term, it simply resurrects the problem Joe's nomination in 2020 was meant to solve: I hold with the view that the Democrat establishment allowed his nomination then because the alternative was Bernie Sanders. Sanders's nomination would have split the party, which has been increasingly dominated by the far left, and ensured Trump's reelection.

The problem for the Democrats is that nothing has changed, Joe is still the only figure who can conceivably keep the party, such as it's become, more or less united. If he withdraws as a candidate but serves out his term, the big problem is how they replace Kamala, his presumptive successor, with anyone who isn't at least notionally a person of color. Any attempt to nominate someone who isn't would permanently split the party, and any nominee who is would almost certainly lose.

If Joe leaves the presidency before his term ends, Kamala automatically becomes president, and replacing her as the nominee becomes all the more difficult, so as a practical matter, as long as Joe hasn't literally flatlined, he's going to stay on as president. But all either contingency accomplishes is to defer the bigger questions for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months. Even if Joe manages to be reelected, the Democrats still have the basic problem that the far left is their dominant faction, and Joe is the last figurehead who can conceal that.

It does look as if, now that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have publicly supported Joe, the current panic will subside. But let's keep in mind that, as I've been pointing out all along, this year's campaign is many months longer than usual. The crisis for the Trump campaign in 2016, the Access Hollywood tape, was a classic October surprise that in fact took place in early October. There were calls for Trump to withdraw and be replaced by his running mate, Mike Pence. But however reluctantly, the Republican establishment closed ranks, re-expressed support for Trump, and he went on to win the 2016 election.

But that was October 2016. This is June 2024. Trump was able to overcome one October surprise with too little time left in the campaign for the Democrats to find another one. Now, Biden is struggling to overcome a serious setback of his own making with four full months left in the campaign. It's hard not to recognize that he's already tired, but he has many more months to go in a campaign that's going to do nothing but tire him out more.

He's going to have more bad days, and the campaign is going to have to address each one as it arises -- but at least for now, he isn't going to do anything voluntarily, and the Democrat establishment is unlikely to force him out. For both sides, the alternative is worse.

Should an actual crisis arise, conditions might change, but in fact, there's only four months until the election, and any foreign bad actor would need to contend with, first, the likelihood that any Pearl Harbor-style attack would ensure Trump's election, followed by a response from the awakened US sleeping giant; and second, that Biden's remaining term, irrespective of his weakened state, is too short to let the bad actor consolidate any initial victory, and again, all it would do is ensure Trump's election, now looking more likely in any case, and make him mad. I don't think anyone is going to tickle the dragon's tail at this stage.

As I've Been Saying, We're In A Constitutional Crisis

Back on June 7, I posted about the unspoken constitutional crisis during FDR's third term in which the White House, according to Dr Steven Lomazow, concealed the president's metastasized cancer and severe cardiopulmonary disease that made his death inevitable early in his fourth term. Enough insiders anticipated this that they forced him to drop Henry Wallace and choose Harry Truman as his running mate for the 1944 election. I said in that post,

[I]t was a de facto constitutional crisis that under the circumstances could only be resolved by Roosevelt's death, which insiders fully understood to be imminent in any case.

It's hard to avoid thinking we're heading for an equivalent crisis before the next election, but the additional complication is Vice President Harris. . . . Biden is bad enough, but it's less and less likely he can last another four years, and we'd get Harris sooner than anyone expects.

By at least his final year in office, according to Dr Lomazow, Roosevelt was working a schedule from noon to 4:00 PM weekdays, although this included a 90-minute nap, which according to cabinet members simply wasn't adequate to do a president's job. The saving grace was that insiders had quietly planned for a succession, something they and Truman fully recognized at the time. From what we hear, Joe's schedule is similar now, which doesn't augur well, but as of now, there's no contingency as there was in 1944.

Roosevelt could pass away at any time after the 1945 inaugural and have Truman succeed him, although had he passed away before that date, his successor would have been Henry Wallace. As it happened, the country got lucky. The problem right now is that if Joe Biden leaves the presidency for any reason before next January 20, his successor is Kamala Harris.

There can be no disagreement that Joe's physical appearance alone in last night's debate was frail, pale, and almost cadaverous. His voice was hoarse. He seemed at various times to be fighting down the urge to cough. This leaves aside any question about his cognitive abilities, although at least some observers noticed a strange stare -- that suggests to me that he was under some type of strong medication, whether or not it was a performance-enhancing drug of some sort.

The first issue is a no-brainer. As Mark Leibovich writes in The Atlantic,

President Joe Biden needs to end his campaign. The first presidential debate, held last night, was a disaster. It was clear from the outset that Biden looked old, sounded old, and yes, is in fact very, very old.

This has been rumored for a while. Last night, it was confirmed.

But that's not the real question. Scott Jennings came closer to the point on CNN after the debate:

WATCH: @ScottJenningsKY on Joe Biden's debate performance:

"It is a fair question to ask right now, 'What is going on inside the White House every day?' Is [Kamala Harris] currently making more decisions in the White House than we know? Who is making decisions in the White… pic.twitter.com/mK5628i4DU

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 28, 2024

"Let me just take the other side of this Kamala Harris debate. It is a fair question to ask right now, 'What is going on inside the White House every day?' Is she currently making more decisions in the White House than we know? Who is making decisions in the White House right now? We‘re talking about this in terms of can Joe Biden win an election and serve for four years. I want to know I want to know what‘s happening on a day-to-day basis. To me, she is the big story tonight because her position in this administration, in this campaign, has become magnified by 1,000 right now."

Whether Joe continues his campaign is really irrelevant -- the question isn't even who's running the country, the question is who's been running the country, and who'll be running it until next January 20, because even if the 25th Amendment is invoked, either through Joe's resignation or his removal, the same people will be implementing the same disastrous policies, and they'll likely be doing all they can to keep them in place after either Joe or Kamala leaves office next year.

At minimum, I think it's time for the adults in the room to force the White House to reveal more about Joe's physical condition and begin to ask seriously if he's up to the job. What we saw last night was not a well man. Then I think some serious discussion needs to take place about how we're going to proceed for the next eight months.

This Morning's Polls

I was originally going to post on Nate Silver's Substack yesterday, The presidential election isn't a toss-up, and I'll have a few things to say farther down, but I actually think it's been overtaken by events, namely this morning's Qunnipiac and New York Times/Siena polls.

The Quinnipiac has Trump up 6 points over Biden in a 5-way matchup, while the Times/Siena poll has Trump up 3. Between them, they put Trump up 2.6 points in the Real Clear Politics 5-way aggregate, 1.5 points in the head-to-head aggregate, when only last week, the head-to-head had him up by only 0.5 points. Although as I've been saying all along, the national polls are meaningless, because the popular vote doesn't elect the president, I think the movement in those polls over June does mean something. Quinnipiac minimizes it:

As President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump prepare to face off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, Trump has a slight lead over Biden 49 - 45 percent in a head-to-head matchup, according to a Quinnipiac . . . University national poll of registered voters released today. This is a small change from Quinnipiac University's May 22 poll when the race was too close to call with Biden receiving 48 percent support and Trump receiving 47 percent support.

How is a 5-point shift, Trump down 1 point in May but up 4 points in June, a "small change"? On the other hand, the movement in the Times/Siena poll is in the other direction. In May, it had Trump up by 5 points over Biden 48-43, while today he's up only 3 points. There's probably some statistical chatter in both cases. On the other hand, RCP points out that on this day in history, June 27, 2020, Biden was +9.4; on June 27, 2016, Clinton was +6.8. This suggests we should be adding a significant fudge factor to today's poll results to correspond with the inaccuracies of prior years' polling.

In addition, surfing the web for commentary on these recent polls, I found Dan Pfeiffer trying to deal with trhe May Times/Siena poll:

Before we get into the specifics of this poll, it’s worth remembering that Trump is up by about two points in the overall polling average. Trump may have a slight advantage, but the polling points to a very close, winnable race in November. The defeatism that we hear from some folks with every piece of bad news is disconnected from the reality of American politics in a closely divided election—especially when the other candidate is dealing with a whopping 91 felony indictments.

Notice the mantras: this is "a very close, winnable race". Trump is dealing with "a whopping 91 felony indictments". This brings us to the month of June, following Trump's May 31 conviction in the New York "hush money" trial, which will almost certainly be the only case to reach trial before the election. The conviction simply hasn't affected the polls. On the other hand, the big news as of yesterday was that Nate Silver has announced that the election isn't a tossup, or put another way, it's neither very close nor very winnable.

It seems to me that there are two factors in this morning's polls. Althoujgh one is that the New York conviction hasn't moved them, it's looking like something else did -- and nobody's mentioned it. That's Biden's disastrous performance, especially at the G7. It was so disturbing, and so obvious, that it's driven expectations of his debate performance.

Let's recall that in 2020, the expectation, which he exceeded, was that he'd defeat himself with some relatively minor gaffe, maybe a mispronunciation, maybe substituting one world leader's name with another, maybe referring to all 57 states. In the event, he didn't. This year, driven by the episodes in the first part of June, the question will be whether he can maintain situational awareness, avoid some sort of freezeup, or even remain standing for the entire 90 minutes.

This is a big difference, and it's beginning to move the polls again, and not in Biden's favor.

Silver's Substack essay -- or at least, the lengthy, self-excusing preamble that isn't behind a paywall -- goes to great lengths to support his conclusion. For instance,

[I]f the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied. So if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead or behind in national polls are kind of missing the point. Because national polls being tied don’t make for a toss-up race — but instead one where Trump has a material advantage in the Electoral College. In fact, the race looks a lot like 2012 in reverse, when national polls were often close but the swing state polls consistently favored Obama and gave him the far more robust map.

I ran this url past wordcounter.net and discovered that this preamble, without the part behind the paywall, runs an astonishing 4780 words, when a weekly magazine or newspaper column is normally about 750. It's clear that Silver is deeply troubled by his own conclusions, and he knows his regular audience will find them close to abhorrent. But he also makes an intriguing quasi-confession:

Now that I’m on my own — not tied to some corporate behemoth like The New York Times or Disney — I feel freer to be transparent about my preferences.

. . . Wouldn’t it be suspicious if, in the first presidential cycle where the Democrat has consistently trailed in polls since 2004, I suddenly started telling you that you should trust vibes rather than polls?

Yes, of course. It would be a sign that I’d become a hack.

What he's implying, however indirectly, is that if he were still tied to big corporate money -- as he was with FiveThirtyEight and ABC News until he left last year -- he'd be under heavy pressure, especially this year, to continue with the mantra that the election is a tossup, which as we've seen is something the people at Real Clear Politics still claim, contra their own polling. But of course, this implicitly accuses RCP and the others who continue to claim the election is a tossup of being the creature of corporate money.

Well, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Real Clear Politics Changes The "Battlegrounds"

More than a week ago, I wondered why Real Clear Politics doesn't swap out at least a couple of the states in their list of "battleground" poll aggregates, when it seems like there's really not much of a battle taking place in several of those states:

I briefly thought of suggesting to RCP that, for instance, they revise the list of "battlegrounds" and take at minimum, say, North Carolina and Nevada off the list, since Trump is ahead by over 5 points in both, start running aggregates for Minnesota and Virginia, and place them on the "battleground" list instead. That would give a list that would show the real tipping-point states. Might not that provide more of a horse race?

The problem I saw, though, was that this would effectively put at least two more states in the solid-Trump column while acknowledging that two solid-Biden states are now in play, which changes the whole "close race" paradigm RCP and all the right people have been pushing since 2020.

As of Monday, in a bit of a surprise, RCP did in fact expand its list of "battlegrounds", which it designates with that precise word. Interestingly, though, while it added both Minnesota and Virginia to the list, it removed neither North Carolina nor Nevada, and it went on to add Ohio, New Hampshire, Florida, Texas, and Colorado as well. As of now, Ohio, Florida, and Texas are hardly tossups, they're for Trump, and it's completely uncontroversisal to say that Ohio and Florida haven't been swing states since 2000. The only potential new battleground they've added besides Minnesota and Virginia is New Hampshire.

Beyond that, even the Biden campaign has conceded Florida to Trump. As of yesterday,

Joe Biden’s campaign chairwoman, Jen O’Malley Dillon, has already conceded Florida’s 30 electoral votes to former President Donald Trump.

During a podcast interview with the far-left Puck, O’Malley Dillon was asked if the campaign considered Florida a legitimate battleground state . . . . Her answer was a flat, “No.”

So why is RCP xontinuing the charade when even Biden's campaign doesn't intend to contest Florida? All I can think is adding Minnesota and Virginia to the "battleground" list must have been quite a struggle behind the scenes, and adding the others looks like it must have been some sort of compromise. And even acknowledging the wider list of "battlegrounds", they've made no change to their Electoral College prediction, which is still Trump 219 and Biden 202, with 117 tossups.

But let's look at the mindset of Tom Bevan, RCP's co-founder and president, in an interview with Fox 11 Los Angeles published just this morning:

ELEX MICHAELSON, FOX 11: What is the state of the race right now? Is Donald Trump ahead?

TOM BEVAN, REALCLEARPOLITICS: He is, and you know what? Actually, his lead has been remarkably stable. . . . We take an average of those big seven battleground states and look at that over time, and Trump's lead has been around three points -- it's at 3.2 right now -- for the last eight months. It really hasn't changed that much.

I don't undesatand. If the race is "remarkably stable", how can RCP keep estimating there are 117 Electoral College tossups? But he goes on,

As you mentioned, at the national level, he's up one point. That is a close race. But just to put that in perspective, on this day four years ago, during the 2020 election, Joe Biden was up ten points in that race. So Trump is in a much stronger position this time around than he was four years ago. But again, in this race, there's a lot that can happen between now and Election Day.

Except that the national poll is meaningless, the popular vote doesn't elect the president, the Electoral College does. And if the race is "remarkably stable", isn't there less likelihood that anything will change between now and Election Day? And then we have that question of the disparity between the 2020 polls and the polls now, something like thirteen points when Trump was down 10 then and is up 3 now.

I'm not sure how Bevan makes his money, but it must have something to do with readers going to his poll aggregates to get some sort of insight into what's going on -- except that. with the auguries in just those polls showing Minnesota and Virginia in play, Trump behind by only single digits in New Jersey and New York, and Trump 13 points ahead of his close-race performance in 2020, this is looking less and less like a close race.

So I'm still left with the question of how Bevan makes his money. It really sounds like his customers don't want to hear Trump is winning, and potentially starting to win by a lot. Bevan, co-founder and president of RCP, is staying with the line that it's gonna be a close race, and apparently there are people willing to keep paying for what he's putting out.

Even when he's more or less forced to change his list of "battlegrounds", he does it in the most minimal possible way, adding safe Republican states to the list just to muddy up the pcture. And somebody's happy enough with this to keep buying whatever it is he's selling.

I'm back to Rush Limbaugh's insight that the polls aren't meant to report the news, they're meant to shape it. Real Clear Politics indeed.

Trump Shapes The Battlefield

Another piece of the conventional wisdom that's been puzzling me ever since Trump came on the political scene is the view even among Republicans that he's a narcissist, an immature mental 12-year-old who can't control himself. His own attorney general William Barr said last year,

I'm not his lawyer, generally I think it's a bad idea to go on the stand. And I think it's a particularly bad idea for Trump because he lacks all self-control, and it would be very difficult to prepare him and keep him testifying in a prudent fashion.

Republicans of that ilk, let alone Democrats, continued to wring their hands and furrow their brows over whether he'd take the stand right up to the last days of the New York trial, when in fact he didn't take the stand -- and likely never intended to. Let's face it, Trump is a a shrewd guy. He had one successful career as a real estate developer, another successful career in entertainment, and now a career in politics that right now looks to be about as successful as, oh, I don't know, Benjamin Disraeli, who himslf had a separate career as a novelist.

Nevertheless, all the adults are convinced he's gonna go all James Dean or something, turn into a rebel without a cause, and blow Thursday's debate. Just yesterday, the New York Post editorial board admonished,

You know the first debate in 2020 went awry. You were too angry, too hot, and interrupted too much.

. . . A Trump rally is full of people angry about where the country is today. But most Americans don’t just want someone who shares their anger, they want the promise of a happy future and stability.

They want someone who can deliver a little normalcy. Government that isn’t pushing radical change. An economy that works for them. Optimism.

. . . You have a chance to take the high ground here, and Americans — exhausted by the prospect of an endless cycle of tit-for-tat lawfare — are desperate for it.

. . . You shouldn’t be tough and nasty. We don’t expect you to be nice and calm.

But you know what wins? Calm and tough.

In other words, keep this winning formula in mind, young man: channel Mitt Romney! Luckily, Trump is instinctively an entertainer, not an editorial writer. He knows from muscle memory that people watch hockey games because they want to see fights, they watch NASCAR because they want to see crashes. People are going to tune into Thursday's debate for entertainment, and Trump is going to provide it. He's setting Joe, Jake, and Dana up to be his patsies, and Jake and Dana are going to play right into his hands.

Recent comments from Trump and his supporters make it plain that Trump knows he's debating Jake and Dana just as much, if not more, than Joe himself. Having his mike turned off while Joe speaks will likely raise the tone somewhat, but we're starting to see that's not where the fun will come from. Trump may well insist that Joe can't finish a sentence, and Joe may or may not confirm it himself, but the hockey fight, the NASCAR crash, is going to come with Jake and Dana.

But let's first listen to the conventional wisdom from Brent Baker, vice president of research and publications for the Media Research Center, referring to yesterday's episode when CNN's Kasie Hunt muted Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt's mike during an interview:

Not a good sign for Donald Trump and his supporters ahead of CNN’s debate. If Hunt’s aggressiveness is any guide, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash won’t be reluctant to use their power to kill the podium microphones to silence the candidate who says things they have a long record of denouncing and condemning. Trump may well regret agreeing to allow CNN to host a debate.

Absolutely they won't regret it. If anything, Leavitt's interview was a military-style raid designed to gauge CNN's own debate strategy. As Wikipedia puts it,

Raiding, also known as depredation, is a military tactic or operational warfare "smash and grab" mission which has a specific purpose. Raiders do not capture and hold a location, but quickly retreat to a previous defended position before enemy forces can respond in a coordinated manner or formulate a counter-attack.

Trump's people were already telegraphing over prior days their own likely strategy, which would be to debate Tapper and Bash, if anything more than Biden. For instance, Eric Trump told Maria Bartiromo Sunday morning,

Jake Tapper has compared my father to Hitler before. Jake Tapper is the guy who would yell at his control room, saying, "Turn this man off! I don't want to hear what he has to say!" when my father is giving press conferences. . . . So understand, he's not going to be debating just Joe Biden, he's going to be debating CNN.

Karoline Leavitt, who must certainly be in on that strategy, in effect conducted a raid on CNN via Kasie Hunt's show that simply confirmed what CNN's response would be: more than likely, they'll mute Trump's mike if they think they need to "correct a lie" or even stop a Leavitt-style attack on themselves.

Let's recall that a big part of Trump's 2024 strategy overall is a version of the "Chicago Seven defense", in which Abbie Hoffman and his codefendants, charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democrat convention, recognized that the trial was rigged against them, much like Trump's New York civil and criminal trials in 2023-24. Their response was to turn the trial itself into a circus and win an immediate battle for public opinion, while also baiting the judge into committing reversible errors they could win on appeal.

So far, this part of Trump's overall campaign strategy has been remarkably successful; his comeback over the past year has been characterized as "the greatest in history". In large part, this is because Judges Engoron and Merchan, along with other figures like Fani Willis, Nathan Wade, Joe's son Hunter, Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, have played right into Trump's hands all along by facilitating his Chicago Seven-style tactics.

Trump is going to turn the debate into a circus, or maybe more accurately, he's threatening to do it. He's setting CNN up for a spectacular overreaction. Whatever Joe does, the likely impression with the public will be that Tapper and Bash had to intervene to save Joe.

Not a good look, but this overlooks the possibility that Joe himself will commit his own blunder or blunders -- but that's likely to be a sideshow to the main circus, the flaming car crash with Jake and Dana. That makes Joe a minor player standing feebly on the sidelines. That also says a great deal about Trump.