Biden Debate: Media Bellwethers and Bed-Wetters

 

Personal attacks overshadowed policy discussions between former President Donald J. Trump and President Biden during the debate. (New York Times photo by Kenny Holston).

U.S. media punditry following the Biden-Trump debate reveals an extraordinary divide between commentators advocating for President Biden’s replacement as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and those arguing against panic-driven decisions by Democrats.

This debate about the debate has through an evolution, with near universal condemnation of Biden even by left-leaning pundits on the MSNBC cable channel Thursday night moving to a New York Times editorial on Friday calling on Biden to quit to a current revisionist interpretation whereby several prominent independent analysts are publishing data suggesting that Biden’s poor performance is no reason for him to quit and that many of those seeking his resignation are slipshod analysts at best.

As one who has evolved in this way personally although not written about it until this column, I thought it would be useful to excerpt the arguments about this voiced by prominent pundits, primarily those self-identified as Democratic or otherwise left-learning.

Given what I now regard as the compelling arguments of the pro-Biden analysts, who included Seth Abramson, Heather Cox Richardson, Thom Hartmann, and Wayne Madsen, this report identifies them as “bellwhethers,” a name arising in English medieval eras from the practice of attaching a bell to the lead sheep in a herd (as shown at right with such a sheep once known as a “weder”) so that shepherds could determine where the sheep are headed. In modern political discourse, the term refers to those who set or influence trends.

We need not define the term “bed-wetters” here, beyond noting that the current list includes the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post and a number of their prominent political reporters and opinion columnists.

For those readers here who read the excerpts below as well as the original stories, you may find it shocking, as did this reporter, to see how few of those writers advocating for Biden’s renunciation of his hard-won primary victories to achieve an overwhelming majority of delegates for the August Democratic National Convention address in their column’s the logical consequences of any renunciation. Those consequences include, of course, the identity of a successor nominee, the process by which such a nominee might be selected, whether nominee would be as popular as Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris (not according to current polling) — and whether current campaign funds and state ballot positioning could be transferred (perhaps not, some argue!).

Without such answers, that kind of punditry is so unprofessional that the term “bed-wetter” is more charitable than deserved.

We begin this comparison with excerpts from the “Bellwethers,” starting with an extraordinary series of investigative reports by Seth Abramson, a best-selling author, attorney and professor who alleges shocking errors in polling on the debate as well as clear-cut logical lapses by what he describes as a mainstream pundit class afflicted by the mentality of a panicked herd.

Whatever the case, events are assuredly moving fast with many more developments likely.

Note to Readers: A number of the excerpts below are longer than normal given the high stakes for the nation and world regarding this debate about the Presidential race. In nearly every excerpt, important information is not being published and is available only via the original article. We encourage readers to consult the originals, ideally as paid subscribers, as we have done with virtually all of the outlets quoted below.

June 30

Bellwethers

Proof, Investigative Commentary: Donald Trump’s Shocking Box Score: 602 Lies in Just 40 Minutes, Seth Abramson, left, author, attorney, professor, June 30, 2024. An Unprecedented Tsunami of Deceit That Is Disqualifying.

The debate performance Trump just turned in was the most shameful in U.S. political history. It doesn’t matter who’s running against him because he’s nonviable. And now some breaking news confirms it.

Yes, Mr. Trump lied every 3.9 seconds he was speaking in Thursday night’s debate in Atlanta.

But we’ll get to that shocking—and wholly unprecedented—revelation in a moment.

We begin, instead, with major breaking news that’s being reported exclusively here at Proof: a new poll by a U.S. pollster with an “A+” rating for accuracy from ABC News reveals that Trump voters who’ve told pollsters they’re “Democrats” are leading the charge for President Biden to end his campaign—with Democrats uninterested in the idea.

This shocking revelation is buried in the cross-tabs of a new Survey USA poll that no one in major media has reported on, possibly because it goes against the narrative being pushed by most major-media editors: that everyone wants Joe Biden to retire.

Here (below) is the relevant cross-tab; after the image(s) I’ll explain what they show us.

What we find is that 78% of “Democratic” Trump voters—yes, you read that oxymoron correctly—want Joe Biden to drop out of the race, which is not surprising because they have already decided to vote against him (and lest you wonder if in fact these Democrats became Trump voters after the debate, wonder no further: the CNN Post-Debate Poll showed us that a maximum of 5% of all likely voters in America changed their vote in any way—to include switching from a Trump vote to a Biden one—because of the debate).

Among Biden supporters—the group major media is trying to convince us desperately want President Biden off the Democratic ticket—only 1 in 4 want a new candidate.

But even this is misleading, and not just because the poll was taken in the immediate aftermath of the debate, when emotions were still running high. Yes, we might expect that 26% number to drop to 18% or 20% once emotions cool, but isn’t that still higher than would be ideal? No, it’s not—not if you followed the 2024 Democratic primaries.

How to explain this gross dereliction of major-media’s journalistic responsibility to fact-check national leaders competently and comprehensively? Well, it’s difficult, but one explanation is that corporate media—odd as it is to say—has far fewer resources available to dedicate to any individual story than a media outlet like Proof does. This author can commit hours and hours and hours to writing the report you’re reading now, whereas corporate media needs to squeeze all the value it can out of a quick fact-check of Trump’s debate performance simply by getting the article up and getting it up quickly. The author of the article might wish to say and do more with his or her topic, but his bosses need their employee to move on to the next revenue-raising report.

That’s not so for Proof. Proof can afford to be—shall we say—rather obsessive about the truth. Proof has no corporate overseers, no hard-and-fast publication schedule, neither a need nor a desire to have a single fact-checker working both political matters and everything else, too.

At Proof, I write about the topics I’m an expert in and do not feel the need to stretch myself to becoming (as CNN might require) a fact-checker on (say) tech and science matters as well. Proof can specialize and move at its own pace, which is candidly the benefit of independent journalism and why celebrated Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote that one reason that independent journalism is thriving is because of how corporate media covered the Atlanta debate: “Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, media continues to let him call the shots.”

Perhaps this is why an emerging debate—one far more important than the quickly-becoming-listless-and-directionless teeth-gnashing about the Democratic ticket—is about the decision by CNN to, as the Washington Post puts it, do “no fact-checking” in Atlanta on Thursday.

A buried lede in the Post report on this subject seems relevant to the Proof report you’ve just read above: the fact that one of CNN’s leading political commentators, the normally excellent John King, opined after the debate that the merely thirty lies CNN had been able to account for “broke the fact-check machine more than I can count.”

So what are we to think—and what would we expect King to be saying—given that the total number of lies told by Trump in Atlanta was actually 602?

If thirty lies broke media’s capacity to fact-check a politician “more than I can count,” what does 602 lies do?

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: For the Good of the Country, It’s Time for Some Pundits to Retire, Ron Filipkowski, right, June 30, 2024. Why calls for Biden to step down now from pundits are counter-productive.

The political punditry class, largely ensconced in their New York City and DC enclaves, continues to demonstrate that they are out of step with the issues that concern most Americans.

Many of them have been at it for decades.

While experience and expertise is often valuable, so is the ability to understand the mood and concerns of different segments of the population. Rural, suburban and urban. Black, white, hispanic, asian, and the kaleidoscope of places of ethic origin that make up the most diverse nation on the planet. Gen Z, millennials, Gen X. Too often, Boomers in the wealthy, urban northeast simply fail to understand what concerns, troubles, and motivates people in the rest of the country.

Some in the elite pundit class have distant roots outside the places they have inhabited for the past several decades. But their reference points to those places stretch back to the 1970s and 80s, and the people they grew up with have either moved away like they have, or their current views passed onto the punditry class consist of a random text from a geriatric uncle or a conversation at a 50th high school reunion.

Assessments on the tenor of the country derived from anecdotes used by the out of touch. Not useful.

The reason why I stopped watching cable news last year is because I found that I was being subjected to the opinions of the same people day after day, month after month. I watched many of these very same people when I was a political junkie in high school and college in the 1980s and 90s. They are still there, and still in Boston, NYC, and DC, while I have lived in urban, suburban and rural areas in the northeast, west coast, and deep south.

I stopped watching because I didn’t want my judgment, which is shaped from a lifetime living in so many diverse communities across the country, to be influenced in any way by what I was hearing from a TV set from the pundit class. The herd mentality and GroupThink was obvious, and I didn’t want to place myself anywhere in proximity to it out of a fear of infection. Call it my own Covid-era six foot rule from urban establishment consensus.

When I listen to them now, I see the clear and obvious disconnect between the talking heads on TV and the pulse of the people they claim to be reading.

I also saw the pack or herd mentality that easily and quickly drives some of them in a particular direction. So few of their opinions were original. A consensus would form sparked by thought from an analyst who managed to come up with a witty and semi-original take. News content took the form of a herd consensus versus a small handful of contrarians, but too often packaged for entertainment purposes only. None of it felt real or authentic, nor did it reflect my experience of the views of people in the hinterlands.

And the polls.

Where would they be without their polls? Polls are their lifeline. Since their daily lives don’t put them in contact with the views and opinions of the various communities in this incredible diverse country, they depend almost entirely on the polling industry and the occasional text from Uncle Larry in Omaha. So much of political punditry is based around the latest poll results generated by a media company, with analysis based entirely on those results.

But what if the polling industry is wrong?

What if their traditional and time-tested models for reading the true opinions of the public has become irrelevant in the social media online age, where people either shun them or are unreachable from the methods they use? Increasingly, the polling industry over-samples older segments of the population that utilize traditional means of communication. Political pundits who rely on polls to provide them accurate information on the views of the electorate are stuck relying on data that has been demonstrably more flawed with each passing year. Until pollsters figure out how to accurately measure the views through more sophisticated modeling, the punditry class is forced to work with imperfect tools.

Which brings me to the last presidential debate.

Biden was bad. There is no sugarcoating that. Whenever people said to me that Biden should not debate Trump this cycle because that conferred legitimacy and normalcy on a criminal, my response was always that perhaps another incumbent president in this situation would be able to get away with that, but not Biden. That is because the main concern undecided voters had with Biden was his ability to do this for four more years. Ducking debates would only worsen that perception. He had to debate and show those voters that he had what it takes to do the toughest job in the world for four more years.

On that score he failed.

He looked old, tired, and struggled to maintain focus and to express himself forcefully and coherently. It was certainly cause for serious concern, and I don’t completely dismiss those who expressed theirs. But there is a vast difference between expressing disappointment, frustration and concern, and calling for an incumbent president to drop out of the race after he has secured the nomination. Those are the people I am talking about right now.

While I don’t agree with some Biden supporters that this was an aberration (he had had some moments like this before at campaign events), it is also worthy to note that at the majority of events – including critically the State of the Union speech and his speech in North Carolina the day after the debate – he was energized, focused, and put on a strong performance.

We also have to consider the wretched performance of Donald Trump. While he certainly had more energy and vigor during the debate, he also spewed a firehose of lies, racism, and hate. He failed to answer one policy question after another. His response about climate change was to talk about hordes of mentally ill migrant criminals living amongst us. His response to every policy question was to either conjure up images of future migrant terrorist attacks or to talk about his golf game. The frustrating part was that the debate format did not permit live fact-checking from moderators, and Biden was largely incapable of doing it himself.

Did Biden fail to capitalize on Trump’s psychosis, lack of knowledge about policy, and serial lies? Yes, he did. And he was rightly criticized for that. But there has been almost no reporting on the fact that Trump also failed to garner any new votes from Biden’s failures because his performance only reinforced concerns those same voters have about him.

But that story is not being told by the pundit class.

With all of that said, what would be the pathway forward to replacing Biden at this point? When you game out scenarios, none seems entirely satisfactory. All will fracture the Democratic base. So you make a seismic, panicked move to assuage the pundit class and small group of fickle undecided voters who may not like the replacement any better? In what way is that productive? It would also cause a number of serious issues for Democratic candidates in critical House and Senate races across the country.

Fear of Trump has caused this overreaction.

I get that completely. I don’t agree with the Biden Campaign referring to people who have called for him to step down as the “Bedwetting Brigade,” as they did in a recent fundraising email. They should not dismiss the concerns or personally attack supporters expressing them. That is also not the right path forward. The bottom line is that once critics realize that Biden is not going to drop out, they will come back into the fold. That is because a Democratic Administration led by an octogenarian who had lost his fastball is infinitely preferable to a criminal malignant narcissist who left office in disgrace after an unsuccessful coup attempt.

The other point to make is that Joe and Jill Biden are not going to drop out of this because of the opinions of pundits, editorial boards or TV talking heads.

I included Jill in this sentence for a reason. While many correctly viewed the Clinton presidency as a partnership between two people who shared ideas and common beliefs working together, the public and punditry class have failed to understand that the Biden presidency is exactly the same – although in a less formal or publicized way than the Clintons, who openly owned that their Administration was led by partnership. The idea (yes, I also wish Biden hadn’t started every debate answer with that phrase) that Jill is going to bow to the whims and wishes of the pundit class is laughable. Not happening.

When you understand that, you understand how counterproductive calls for Biden to drop out truly are.

They are being made to each other. It has become group therapy with social media platforms as the therapist couches. But, while talking this through and venting may provide an outlet to rage against the machine, this ship has sailed long ago. A small handful of the current critics expressed these same concerns when the primaries began, but no serious Democrat stepped forward to challenge the president and the vast majority now calling for him to step aside now said nothing then. If they had concerns in private, which I’m sure that many did, they failed to express them publicly using their large platforms. Why?

They weren’t willing to take the heat.

They didn’t want to say what they thought when they knew their opinion would be deeply unpopular. But now, after Biden’s debate performance, it seems safe for them to come out of the closet. This is politics turned inside out. They believed that Biden was too old when it was possible and practical to effectively do something about it – primary season. But they failed to speak up because it would cost them personally. Now they will do it because they feel it is safe because there is safety in numbers – at a time when it is not possible and practical to effectively do something about it. That isn’t what the campaign, the party, or the country needs right now.

I am not Biden apologist.

I posted a thread right after the midterms in November 2022 stating that I did not want him to run for a second term. Sure, age was factor, but the main reason why I didn’t want him to run again was because he inherited a mess from Trump. A disaster. I knew Biden was going to do what had to be done to clean up those messes. I also knew that he would get the blame from the public for all of it. That is why he was the first Democrat I voted for in my entire life. Biden is blamed for what he inherited in Afghanistan as well as global inflation and so many other things. That is why I thought a new, younger candidate would be better in 2024 who didn’t carry that baggage.

But once Joe made the decision to run again, that was it for me. I was fully on board because that is what was required to defeat Trump. Now the pundits, almost all of whom said nothing back then, are calling for Biden to step down at the worst possible time.

Profiles in courage.

If Joe and Jill decide that now is the time to step aside, they will come to that decision on their own after listening to the small handful of people they trust completely. It should be obvious to anyone that their circle of trust is very tight, and includes few people. While we can’t know for certain what the discussions amongst that tight circle is with the Bidens right now, none of them have joined the public chorus of critics.

So what is the point of the 11th hour calls from the punditry class to attempt to influence a president to step down using their very public platforms? While it may not be their intent, the point is that it will only divide, dishearten, and alienate activists and donors who badly need to rally around their candidate right now. When Donald Trump was indicted and later convicted, his supporters and right-wing media circled the wagons and backed their guy stronger than ever. As reprehensible as that was given the cause, from the perspective of winning an election it was smart strategy.

What the pundit class is doing right now is not smart strategy.

So I end where I began. It is time for many of these elitist, urban northeastern dinosaurs to retire. Or take a sabbatical to spend a few months in diners and shops on Route 66.

Or just realize that your role in American society isn’t to replace a president, no matter how much you wish you had that kind of influence.

Ron Filipkowski is a former federal and state prosecutor. A Marine and former Republican, Filipkowski has amassed a massive following for his reporting exposing those who threaten American democracy. Filipkowski is the editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch.com and co-hosts the hit podcast ‘Uncovered’ on the MeidasTouch Network.

Hopium, Pro-Democracy Democratic Advocacy: A reminder that here at Hopium we do more, worry less, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 30, 2024. And yes there is much to be worried about right now, but that’s why this community and all of you need to lead us through this rough patch for the campaign.

In my long career I have been through moments where it felt like we weren’t going to make it, that it was just too hard; and then we put our heads down and kept doing the work, the sun rose in the morning, and we got through to the other side.

This is one of those moments. A moment where you need to make the call – cut and run, or stand and fight. I am standing and fighting, and hope all of you will join me in doing so in these critical days ahead.

Many of you already have. The fundraising on this site these last few days and over the past month has been incredible. For here at Hopium we are a community of doers, and man have you all been doing these last few days. We’ve blown past our ambitious goals for Biden-Harris and our 12 House candidates, are within reach of hitting almost all of our remaining fundraising goals – which were all stretch goals I wasn’t sure we could reach – and my goal for paid subscribers here at Hopium. Honestly, I am bit stunned at what’s happening here. The power of the community we are building together is remarkable, inspiring, so so welcome in this time of cynicism, of darkness, of Trump. Together we need to lead our party, our friends, and our country forward though this challenging time. Let us not just DO in the coming days, let us summon our collective courage to LEAD.

Yesterday I shared with you early data that has found no damage to Biden. Part of my understanding of what happened on Thursday is that we continue to be in a media dynamic where Democrats are held to a different standard than MAGA.

Where our strength is underestimated, theirs overestimated; and while many in the media may have become inured to Trump’s bat-shit crazy extremism voters have shown us in election after election, particularly since Dobbs, they aren’t inured – they are horrified, disgusted, repulsed by MAGA and Trump. And while the media may be focusing on Biden’s struggles on Thursday night, many voters who watched the debate were deeply unhappy with what they saw with Trump – and for good reason.

It was in my mind the craziest and most disturbing performance we’ve seen from Trump on the national stage since he began his candidacy in 2015. He is deeply unwell, unfit, extreme, dangerous.

Choose you words. A rapist, fraudster, traitor, felon. So yes, let’s keep talking about us and our challenges in the coming days but LET US NOT FOR ONE MOMENT STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS HISTORIC THREAT DONALD TRUMP IS TO EVERYTHING WE HOLD DEAR AND HOW CRAZY IT IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS RALLIED BEHIND THIS HISTORICALLY TERRIBLE MAN.

Not talking about him is doing MAGA’s work for them.

Bed-Wetters

New York Times, Major Democratic Donors Ask Themselves: What to Do About Biden? Theodore Schleifer, Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher, June 30, 2024 (print ed.). Some floated interventions and wondered about how to reach Jill Biden. Others hoped the president would bow out of the race on his own. Many came to terms with the low chances that he will do so.

The Democratic Party’s perennially nervous donor class descended into deep unease on Friday, as some of the wealthiest people in America commiserated over President Biden’s weak debate performance and puzzled over what, if anything, they could do to change the course of the race.

There were discussions with political advisers about arcane rules under which Mr. Biden might be removed from the ticket against his will and replaced at or before the Democratic National Convention, according to a person familiar with the effort.

In Silicon Valley, a group of megadonors, including Ron Conway and Laurene Powell Jobs, were calling, texting and emailing one another about a situation they described as a possible catastrophe. The donors wondered about whom in the Biden fold they could contact to reach Jill Biden, the first lady, who in turn could persuade her husband not to run, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

A Silicon Valley donor who had planned to host an intimate fund-raiser featuring Mr. Biden this summer decided not to go through with the gathering because of the debate, according to a person told directly by the prospective host. Another major California donor left a debate watch party early and emailed a friend with the subject line: “Utter disaster,” according to a copy of the email.

In group chats and hushed discussions, some wealthy Democrats floated interventions, others hoped Mr. Biden would have an epiphany and decide to exit on his own, and still more strategized about steering dollars to down-ballot candidates. The most optimistic donors wanted to wait for polling to see the scope of the fallout.

The crisis in the donor class — outlined in interviews with almost two dozen donors and fund-raisers, many of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss their private conversations — could not come at a worse moment for Mr. Biden. Former President Donald J. Trump has outraised him in each of the last two months, erasing the president’s once gaping financial advantage and opening one of his own.

By Friday evening, many donors were coming to terms with the unlikelihood of finding a viable alternative, even as some acknowledged diminished enthusiasm and grumbled about the Biden team’s lack of communication to major fund-raisers in the 24 hours after the debate.

Compared with small online donors, major donors require more maintenance, but those personal relationships can yield big dividends in pivotal moments, like the one Mr. Biden is facing as he confronts a wave of worry from Democrats about his political strength. The donor class is being closely watched for signs of whether he can ride out the doubts.

While the Biden campaign briefed some members of its national finance committee on Friday morning in Atlanta, other members were aghast that they had received almost zero outreach from campaign headquarters.

Reid Hoffman, one of the Democratic Party’s most influential donors, wrote in an email to friends on Friday evening that he had been inundated.

News Reports, Analysis

Politico, Biden’s family privately criticizes top advisers and pushes for their ouster at Camp David meeting, Jonathan Lemire and Lauren Egan, June 30, 2024. They also urged the president to stay in the race.

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.

Among the family’s complaints about the debate practice: that Biden was not prepared to pivot more to go on the attack; that he was bogged down too much on defending his record rather than outlining a vision for a second term; and that he was over-worked and not well-rested.

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.

“The aides who prepped the President have been with him for years, often decades, seeing him through victories and challenges. He maintains strong confidence in them,” Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said in a statement.

A senior Biden aide also pushed back, saying it was “not true” that frustration was directed at Dunn, Bauer and Klain.

Biden allies and staffers have sought to blame a variety of factors in the aftermath of Biden’s dismal debate performance, including that the president was ill, was over-prepared and that the CNN moderators failed to fact-check former President Donald Trump. But as the crisis continued into a third day, the finger-pointing has turned inward toward some of Biden’s closest advisers.

The focus on the staff, however, also allowed the family to overlook Biden’s own failings in Atlanta, one of the people familiar noted.

These people said the Biden family wanted the president to continue in the campaign rather than end his career with a calamitous debate performance against Trump, whom they all loathe. First lady Jill Biden and his son Hunter Biden were the loudest voices urging the president to stay in the 2024 contest.

The Biden family also expected to huddle to discuss the best way to reassure Democrats that staying in the race is the right decision. The president himself was calling around to hear what his confidants thought. As Biden boarded Air Force One on Saturday, he chatted on the phone with Jon Meacham, according to photographs of the caller ID.

Additionally, Biden’s campaign staff only grew angrier at CNN as to how the debate was run, according to several people familiar with the conversations. Their complaints were lengthy, including that the moderators should have fact-checked Trump more often, that Biden was not told which camera he’d be on when not speaking and that the makeup staff made him appear too pale, according to the three people. Biden did, however, agree to the terms of the debate before it was held.

Since the debate, Biden’s family has publicly and privately rallied behind him. Granddaughters Finnegan and Natalie Biden traveled with the president and first lady for a slate of fundraising events on Saturday in New York and New Jersey. Although the family had long planned to spend this weekend together at Camp David to take a family portrait with photographer Annie Leibovitz, the gathering offered an opportunity for them to sit down together in the days following what is shaping up to be a low point in the president’s decades-long political career.

Before Biden even walked off the debate stage on Thursday evening, he was already facing heavy criticism from members of his own party about his rocky performance, with some suggesting that he couldn’t adequately compete against Trump and that his performance exposed long-simmering concerns that he’s too old to campaign and lead the nation. His raspy voice, trailing answers and deflated stage presence during the 90-minute debate set off panic among top Democratic donors and strategists about the viability of his candidacy and opened up a debate about whether he should be replaced at the top of the ticket.

He did better in subsequent days with stronger performances at a rally and fundraisers — but those, unlike the debate, allowed him to use teleprompters.

Washington Post, Biden aides plotted debate strategy for months. Then it all collapsed, Tyler Pager, June 30, 2024. The Biden team gambled on an early debate and prepared intensively at Camp David, but advisers could not prevent the candidate’s stumbles onstage.

In the sessions, the president still spoke haltingly. He sometimes confused facts and figures. He tripped over words and meandered. Debate prep would not fix his stutter or make him appear any younger, aides knew.

But as Biden boarded Marine One to leave the rustic Camp David presidential retreat for Atlanta, they sought to reassure anxious allies. The president, they said, was prepared and would perform well. Some said the debate might even be boring.

This story is based on conversations with eight individuals involved in or briefed on the president’s debate preparation, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings. The Biden campaign declined to comment.

For a full week, the president sequestered himself at Camp David with more than a dozen aides to prepare for Thursday’s presidential debate with former president Donald Trump. He rehearsed answers, met with policy aides and participated in mock debates, with his personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, playing the part of Trump.

Every topic he was asked about Thursday, he had practiced answers for — including the final one about his age.

So aides were bewildered by his performance. Many felt they had never seen him collapse so dramatically. After all, Biden was a veteran of numerous debates — as a senator, vice-presidential nominee and presidential candidate. And they did not understand why he gave an entirely different answer on the age question than the one they spent more than a week perfecting.

The president did not just stumble over words. He appeared to lose his focus and often was unable to finish sentences. His voice was raspy and thin, and when the debate concluded, first lady Jill Biden appeared to help her husband down the stairs.

His performance sent shock waves through the Democratic Party, resulting in calls from some Democrats for him to step aside. In the 48 hours after the debate, Biden campaign officials sought to reassure supporters and donors, blaming the debate on “just a bad night” and vowing that the president would remain in the race. The president should be judged by his 3½ years in office, they argued, not 90 minutes onstage.

But with another debate scheduled for September — a Biden campaign spokesman said the president would not withdraw from it — aides and allies are scrutinizing the president’s preparation for last week’s debate to figure out if they missed signs of what would unfold in CNN’s Atlanta studio.

Biden’s aides over the years have developed a tested formula to prepare him for debates, a process overseen by Ron Klain, his first White House chief of staff and longtime debate guru for Democratic presidential candidates. Early in the process, Biden will often meet with Klain one-on-one or with a small group of aides to practice answers, sometimes writing his favorite responses on notecards — his way, aides say, of clarifying his thinking.

Aides who work on specific topic areas, such as national security or the economy, will join the prep for sessions focusing on those topics. Finally, Biden will partake in mock debates, designed to mimic the actual event as closely as possible.

At Camp David, Biden participated in several such mock sessions, held in a movie theater and airplane hangar outfitted to resemble the CNN studio. They were held at various times of day, including at night when Biden sometimes seems to flag and when the debate was to be held, officials said.

Some Biden officials speculated that the president was overprepared by days of lengthy prep sessions and got inside his own head. Others lamented that too many aides were part of the preparations, noting that the White House distributed a list of 18 officials who accompanied the president to Camp David, and that did not even include everyone who was involved.

Not all of these people were in the room with Biden at all times, people familiar with the preparations said. But they still noted that there is a risk in having too many opinions, which can be contradictory and confusing.

When the debate began Thursday, Biden’s top aides, gathered in a hold room at the CNN studios, knew immediately the president had gotten off to a rough start, stumbling on answers about the economy and ending remarks about the national debt with a gaffe: “We finally beat Medicare.” Trump seized on the flub.

Early in the debate, Biden officials started telling reporters the president had a cold and a sore throat, an effort to explain why his voice sounded weak and raspy.

“We were asked about his hoarse voice,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday. “We shared that he had a cold, we shared that he tested negative [for covid], and then we moved on. That’s it. It was from his — his voice as he was speaking during the debate, obviously.”

Still, at a feisty campaign rally the next day, Biden’s voice showed no sign of the previous night’s raspiness.

Biden’s aides and allies had worried for months about whether he should take part in the traditional presidential debates. Some vigorously argued he should not participate, concerned that he was not up to the task and that Trump would dominate the encounter with his shouting and bluster.

Others thought skipping a debate would make Biden look weak. And they predicted that he would perform well, pointing to the forceful delivery of his State of the Union address, when he engaged in a rapid-fire exchange with Republican lawmakers who heckled him.

The Biden campaign ultimately agreed to two debates, insisting the events would be on their terms: There would be no studio audience, and each candidate’s microphone would be muted when it was not their turn to speak. Some allies speculated afterward that those rules may have actually helped Trump by reining in his impulse to interrupt his opponent and play to the crowd, moves that appeared to turn off television viewers in previous debates.

And Biden’s aides demanded an unusually early date for the first encounter, in hopes that a strong performance would turbocharge the president’s campaign — and calculating that it would give Biden time to recover if he floundered. Rather than turbocharging the campaign, the event has prompted a surge of renewed calls for him to reconsider his candidacy.

On Thursday night, after Biden left the debate studio, he stopped by a Waffle House and told reporters he thought he “did well.” But in the following hours, the campaign scrambled to control the damage. Officials worked to reassure donors, allies warned against overstating the effect of a bad night, and Biden himself debuted a new line to address his age.

“I don’t walk as easy as I used to,” he said Friday at a boisterous rally in Raleigh, N.C. “I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth.”

At a fundraiser later Friday, the first lady told donors her husband had admitted something went wrong.

“After last night’s debate, he said, ‘You know, Jill, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t feel that great,’” she recounted. “And I said, ‘Look, Joe, we are not going to let 90 minutes define the four years that you’ve been president.’”

By the end of his three-day swing, even the president was acknowledging publicly that the night did not go his way.

“I understand the concern after the debate. I get it — I didn’t have a great night,” he said at a fundraiser Saturday night in Red Bank, N.J. “But I’m going to be fighting harder.

Who What Why, Analysis: Polling 202: Reason for Hope? Jonathan D. Simon, right, author of the voting analysis book “Code Red,” June 30, 2024. It’s quite possible that the most reliable pollsters — “correcting” for their big collective misses in 2020 and 2016 — are significantly overestimating Trump/GOP strength now in 2024.

Early last November, a poll came out that jaw-dropped just about everyone I know. It was from the highly regarded New York Times/Siena College shop and it showed Donald Trump beating Joe Biden by meaningful margins in five of six swing states surveyed, as well as a growing and potentially fatal weakness for Biden among key Democratic constituencies: voters of color and the young.

The dropping of that first shoe occasioned my initial column in what I promised would be a series: “Polling 101: Clearing Up Some Misunderstandings.” I hope you can take the time to review that piece, as it will provide important background and context for this next, long-delayed installment, which goes in a different and, as you’ll see, more controversial direction.

To summarize very briefly, in “Polling 101” I explained the surprising predictive power of statistical sampling; looked into some of the non-statistical factors that contribute to polling error and are difficult to quantify; described how pollsters use weighting protocols to address and mitigate such problems; cautioned against over-reliance on any given individual survey; and gave a (partial) vote of confidence to polling in the aggregate (i.e., the running averages you get from such as FiveThirtyEight and RealClear Politics), especially when the component polls are vetted, graded, and given weight accordingly by a trusted aggregator.

The upshot was a warning not to dismiss polling showing Biden’s weakness and Trump’s strength — if that pattern persisted over time, and in surveys from many different reputable shops.

Well, it has persisted — as of this week, pre-debate disaster, Nate Silver’s sophisticated Silver Bulletin model gave Trump a roughly 2 out of 3 chance of winning the Electoral College, and the latest Times/Siena dropped shoe had Trump up 6 points nationally among registered voters — and the “How is this effing possible?!” hand-wringing among Democrats, media, and all who fear the acid bath into which a second Trump presidency threatens to plunge our democracy has intensified accordingly.

But at the same time, Democratic candidates and progressive ballot measures did very well in last November’s off-year elections, as well as in the scattering of special elections held in 2023 and so far in 2024. We have seen Democrats underperform in the opinion polls and overperform at the polling place, in a pattern that has been remarkably consistent.

Which must lead one to ask: What is behind this divergence? What, if anything, can it tell us about the validity of the polls? And what, if anything, does it mean for what to expect this November?
The Science and Art of Modern Polling

I spent some years as a polling analyst and know the profession and a few of the mad fools who practice it. It is a science, but there’s also quite a bit of art to it. Because you can’t now, if you ever could, just go out and take a perfectly random sample of a target population (e.g., residents, registered voters, likely voters, etc.), the way you could, say, of a box of a million different colored marbles. Too many things get in the way, including differing levels of access to different demographic groups and a problem known as response bias among those survey participants you do reach.

As I detailed in “Polling 101,” pollsters deal with such problems by weighting their samples, which entails counting the responses from certain demographic groups more heavily (i.e., greater than 1.0) and others less heavily (i.e., less than 1.0).

That is where the art comes in. Because weighting a sample by such factors as race, age, gender, education level, geography, and partisanship comes down to a highly informed guesstimate of what the electorate will ultimately look like — that is, who will turn out to vote.

This is, as you might imagine — and even with the aid of Big Data and lots of computing power — tricky. Errors and unintended biases are inevitable. And if your weighting factors are off, odds are your poll will be off.
Fighting the Last War: Error Correction and its Pitfalls

One very important thing to recognize about the polling industry is that honest pollsters (i.e., those without an agenda) are fanatical about error correction. Their business model more or less precludes being chronically wrong, especially if it’s consistently in the same direction.

Which means, in a sense, that they’re always fighting the last war. They base their “corrections” (i.e., new weightings) on a lot of factors (i.e., data), but prominent among these factors are the vote counts for the previous election and how “off” from those percentages they and other pollsters were.

This makes all kinds of sense: If your last shot hit the front rim, you give it a little more; if it clanged off the back rim, a little less.

But it also means that if there was an unacknowledged “problem” with that election (or the ones preceding it) — say, the effects of voter suppression, or mistabulation or, god forbid, foreign interference — such that a significant number of voters thought they were voting one way or intended to vote one way (which they expressed to pollsters) but the vote counts strayed from that collective intention, then, next time around, the pollsters will be unknowingly correcting to a distorted baseline. As if someone had moved the basket.

One reason Trump’s odious Stop the Steal caught on is that we really don’t know for sure what’s happening in the pitch dark of cyberspace where our votes go to be counted, so there have long been grounds for skepticism about that part of the process, a legitimate skepticism finally weaponized with bad intent by Trump.

Of course we understand that all pre-election polling, even the best, can do no better than to reflect intentions, of which it is said the road to hell is paved (I will examine exit polling in this series’s next installment).

When a registered or likely voter responds to a poll, they are expressing their voting intentions — at the time. A lot can happen to those intentions before they finally vote, those votes are tallied, and the results take their place as factual record.
The Impact of Voter Suppression — and Worse

Of course the respondent — that is, the voters he or she is representing — can change their mind, move, die, be incapacitated, or decide not to vote (that’s one reason why polls months out should be taken with at least a grain of salt).

But they may also try to vote as intended and be thwarted. Because there are a lot of black holes their good intentions may fall into — especially if they are Black. And especially where they are vulnerable to targeted voter suppression tactics (virtually all of which are GOP specialties).

New York Times, 48 Hours to Fix a 90-Minute Mess: Inside the Biden Camp’s Post-Debate Frenzy, Lisa Lerer, Shane Goldmacher and Katie Rogers, June 30, 2024. With countless calls and a rush of campaign events, the president’s team began a damage-control effort to pressure and plead with anxious Democratic lawmakers, surrogates, activists and donors.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, not long after President Biden had walked off the stage from a disastrous debate, his campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, acknowledged in a series of private calls with prominent supporters that the night had gone poorly but urged them not to overreact.

Later on Friday, top White House aides worked the phones, with Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, calling the Democratic leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer, to check in, according to a person familiar with the call. And by the afternoon, the Biden campaign had transformed its weekly all-staff call into a virtual pep talk to dispel any doubts creeping into the campaign offices in Wilmington, Del., and beyond.

“Nothing fundamentally changed about this election last night,” said Quentin Fulks, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager, according to a recording of the all-staff meeting. “We’re going to get punched. We’re going to punch back. We’re going to get up when we get punched.”

The 48 hours after the debate were a frenzied campaign within a campaign to save Mr. Biden’s suddenly teetering candidacy, a multiday damage-control effort to pressure and plead with anxious Democratic lawmakers, surrogates, activists and donors to stand by the president, the party’s presumptive nominee.

After a frenetic run of seven campaign events across four states since the debate, Mr. Biden himself is taking a pause for a preplanned family gathering at Camp David. He arrived late on Saturday and will be joined by his wife, Jill Biden, the first lady, as well as the Biden children and grandchildren, according to two people familiar with the scheduling.

The gathering, for a family photo shoot, was scheduled in the spring, according to those people. But the timing and circumstances of Mr. Biden being surrounded by the very family members who have been crucial in his past decisions to run for the presidency — or to sit out a race — have heightened the stakes and scrutiny surrounding the Camp David retreat.

For now, the divide between the party’s most active supporters and its voters, who for more than a year have voiced concerns about the 81-year-old president’s fitness for another term, remains as large as ever. Some Democrats are bracing for a drop in polling after his shaky debate performance that could, they say, reignite calls to replace Mr. Biden.

The all-hands efforts, from Wilmington to Washington, showed the depths of the damage Mr. Biden did to his re-election campaign in a mere 90 minutes. His campaign has been criticized as insular and insistent, so the burst of activity signaled that the debate fallout had turned into a real crisis that spun those in his orbit into a frantic battle mode.

June 29

Bellwethers

New York Times, Opinion: Democrats: Stop Panicking, Stuart Stevens, June 29, 2024. Mr. Stevens, right, is a former Republican political consultant who is an adviser to the Lincoln Project.

As a former Republican who spent decades pointing out flaws in the Democratic Party, I watch the current Democratic panic over President Biden’s debate performance with a mix of bafflement and nostalgia.

It’s baffling that so many Democrats are failing to rally around a wildly successful president after one bad night. But it does remind me of why Republicans defeated Democrats in so many races Republicans should have lost.

Donald Trump has won one presidential election. He did so with about 46 percent of the popular vote. (Mitt Romney lost with about 47 percent.) The Republican Party lost its mind and decided that this one victory negated everything we know about politics. But it didn’t.

One debate does not change the structure of this presidential campaign. For all the talk of Mr. Biden’s off night, what is lost is that Mr. Trump missed a great opportunity to reset his candidacy and greatly strengthen his position.

Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by a margin of seven million and needs new customers. He could have laid out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure. Instead, he celebrated his tax cuts for billionaires.

He could have reassured voters who are horrified, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, by the stories of young girls who become pregnant by rape and then must endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations. But Mr. Trump bizarrely asserted that a majority pro-abortion-rights country hated Roe v. Wade and celebrated his role in replacing individual choice with the heavy hand of government.

He could have said he would accept the outcome of the next presidential election. He refused.

For 90 minutes, Mr. Trump unleashed a virulent anti-American rant. The America he lives in is a postapocalyptic hellscape of violence, with people “dying all over the place” — more “Mad Max” than “morning in America.”

Is this how Americans see themselves? When we watch the American flag carried at the Olympics in Paris, are we to feel ashamed, not proud? When Ronald Reagan was president, he believed that to be born in America was to win life’s lottery. Now, in Trump’s America, are we victims, chumps, losers?

I don’t think so. Mr. Trump has difficulty expanding his base because most Americans are still proud to be Americans. Most Americans do not wake up mad at the world, fearful to go outside their homes. What is it that you are supposed to hate the most — the record-high stock market or low unemployment?

At the Lincoln Project, we found that one of the most effective weapons against MAGA was asking voters, “Is this who you are?” Hold up a picture of Marjorie Taylor Greene, red-faced and screaming. Is this how you see yourself? Do you want to be the guy in the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt storming the Capitol? Do you want your kids to think that being found liable for sexual abuse and being a felon are presidential qualities?

Proof, Investigative Commentary, By Obsessing Over TV Visuals Rather Than Listening to Word s, Voters Just Got Conned By Donald Trump—Again, Seth Abramson, left, best-selling author of a investigative trilogy about Donald Trump, author and professor, June 29, 2024. This report analyzes what President Biden actually said at the debate, rather than how he looked saying it. What we see in doing so—in focusing on how to govern rather than how to perform—is stunning.

There’s a reason Donald Trump slathers on cheap Swiss bronzer daily—often missing key spots on his face, most commonly around his ears—and why he allows a bizarre hair confection to sit atop his head which (semi-regularly-applied neon yellow hair dye excepted) takes hours daily to arrange and keep arranged, time some feel might be better spent on substantive matters.

There’s a reason Trump wears an absurdly long red tie every day that makes him look clownish; it’s intended to cover his gut, which is the same reason the onetime leader of the free world is the only world leader known to tape down his tie with Scotch tape: the alternative would be revealing his belly. And that belly would of course belie the many doctored medical reports—some written, incredibly, by Trump himself—that he has foisted on the American voting population as supposed proof of his robust health.

While all of America watched Joe Biden running shirtless on a beach or biking with friends, the morbidly obese Trump was driving illegally on golf-course fairways to avoid carrying his clubs, or strategizing with a soon-to-be-stiffed-on-tip caddy over how to ignore his many drives into the woods and give himself yet another secret mulligan. While Biden was racing up and down steps at events to the point that his penchant for doing so became a meme, Trump was holding onto the arm of a soldier like a British grand dame to walk down a wheelchair-accessible ramp at West Point.

Biden got perfect bills of health from real doctors while Trump used sycophants with borderline medical degrees to deceive Americans about both his height and his weight, producing medical reports that read like North Korean hagiographies and that no one took seriously.

And why did Trump do all this, at the risk of being called a “fat liar” by any leftist willing to wade into the sort of rhetorical mud MAGAs throw with such ease online? Simple: Mr. Trump did these because he believes Americans are obsessed with image and care little about substance or truth. And you know what? He’s right. 

Hopium, Commentary: Lawrence On Getting Back Up, Simon Rosenberg, right, June 29, 2024. Early Data Shows Little Movement In The Election.  I am grateful for the spirited debate we are having in our paid subscriber chat about Joe Biden’s struggles this week and Donald Trump’s epically bat-shit crazy debate performance.

Many of you have commented that yesterday in a campaign event in North Carolina we saw a strong, fierce, energetic, compelling Joe Biden. I think the best way to watch the video that’s been making the rounds is to watch this 20 minute segment from the great Lawrence O’Donnell last night which includes an extended clip of this now famous Raleigh rally. In a time of challenge for the country, Lawrence has really stepped up, and has become one of our valued and important commentators. The time I get to spend with him on MSNBC a few times a month is the part of my work these days that I look forward to most. I always, always learn from him. So set aside 20 minutes today and watch this video. It is likely to be the most important thing you do this weekend (other than help make June count!):

As Lawrence mentions, we know about 30% of those likely to vote this fall watched or streamed the debate on Thursday night. The historically small audience that checked in was likely very hard partisans on both sides, particularly given that CNN allowed Fox to run a simulcast of the debate on its network, giving Trump supporters a safer way to watch. That so few undecided or persuadable voters checked into the debate could explain why a new 538/Ipsos poll taken yesterday, entirely after the debate, found almost no movement (and well within margin of error) from a previous poll of the very same people. Note Biden leads here today by 3.2 pts, 47%-44%.

Other early data suggests the debate did not hurt Biden. A new Morning Consult poll – a credible, independent pollster – taken entirely after the debate has Biden leading 45-44, which is a 1 point gain for Biden since their last poll earlier this week.

Emptywheel, Analysis: NYT 2016: “But Her Emails” NYT 2024: “But His Debate,” Rayne, June 29, 2024. Welcome to NYT’s 2024 election FUD operation: “But His Debate.”

Remember back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s emails were all The New York Times could write about? Flooding its front page instilled FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a well-known and frequently used tactic to undermine opposition.

We’re watching a reprise of a FUD flood right now, this time with NYT’s uppermost management in on the effort. It was so bad it became a joke memorialized in a meme.

That was then, this is now. Welcome to NYT’s 2024 election FUD operation: “But His Debate.”

Meanwhile, the one-man crime spree goes on. Former Assistant AG for New York State and MSNBC commentator Tristan Snell nailed it:

Two stories. That’s it. Nothing the day before about the trial. NYT’s Editorial Board published an op-ed – Donald Trump, Felon – in which the NYT made no call for Trump to step down as the GOP candidate.

That’s it. It’s on us, the voters. Don’t expect the NYT to sully itself with informing voters about candidate’s policy positions, they’ll be too busy trying to tank Biden’s candidacy for re-election.

It’s nearly impossible at this point to come to any conclusion except that the NYT has been and remains in the tank for Trump based on its history of coverage of Trump and his opponents Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2024.

Now we may lose a candidate for re-election who’s managed to fix many of the fuck-ups Trump generated, who’s ensured the U.S. economy has thrived in spite of pandemic pressures.

It’d be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. Trump’s engaged in criminal behavior which included not only trying to overthrow an election but the willful unlawful retention of classified materials including national defense information?

NYT: *yawn*

Trump says he wants to be a dictator on Day One, ordering a concentration camp for undocumented immigrants?

NYT: *bigger yawn*

Biden, suffering from a cold, has a poor showing at the first debate?

NYT: Oh we can’t have that! Biden must step aside!

I really thought it was the Washington Post which was racing to the basement with its hiring of Will Lewis and abortive hiring of Robert Winnett. Nope. WaPo has nothing on the NYT.

 

Jill Biden, the first lady, and President Biden after the presidential debate on Thursday. She understood he had performed poorly but told him that they had been counted out before (New York Times by Kenny Holston).

New York Times, Jill Biden Could Make or Break Biden’s Campaign. She Says She’s All In, Katie Rogers, June 29, 2024 (print ed.). If President Biden seriously considered departing the race, the first lady would be the most important figure other than Mr. Biden himself in reaching that decision.

President Biden knew immediately after stepping off the stage in Atlanta on Thursday night that the debate had gone wrong. In those first stricken moments after a raspy, rambling and at times incoherent performance, he turned to his wife, Jill Biden.

Whatever was going to happen next in Mr. Biden’s last presidential race, after perhaps the worst moment of his long political life, was always going to come down to her. His wife of 47 years had entered his life all those decades ago, reluctant to get into politics but fully embracing his dreams and his belief that he would one day reach the White House.

Now, her 81-year-old husband looked at her after a disastrous 90 minutes onstage.

The first lady’s message to him was clear: They’d been counted out before, she was all in, and he — they — would stay in the race. Her thinking, according to people close to her, was that it was a bad night. And bad nights end.

“To say they’ve been in foxholes together doesn’t even begin to explain their bond,” said Elizabeth Alexander, the first lady’s communications director, who has been with Mr. Biden since his Senate days.

So Dr. Biden spent the 24 hours after the debate putting her decades as a political spouse to the test, projecting confidence and normalcy while effusively praising her husband. But, like the president, she is an intuitive political messenger who can sense the mood of a crowd. She knows that along with the cheering supporters, there are legions of people suddenly accusing her of forcing an old man to put one weary foot in front of the other.

If Mr. Biden were to seriously consider departing the race, allowing a younger candidate to replace him, the first lady would be the most important figure — other than the president himself — in reaching that decision.

“Jill is the final and most important voice. She knows him and loves him with a passion. She also knows everything about him. Most big decisions are made with Valerie and Jill in the end,” said John Morgan, one of Mr. Biden’s top donors, referring to the president’s younger sister, who has run nearly all of his political campaigns.

Indeed, as major Democratic Party donors connected Friday, by text, by phone or in person, one of the most immediate questions they asked one another was whether any of them knew how to get a meeting or a conversation with the first lady.

After nearly a half-century in politics, the Bidens view themselves as long-game people. And right now, neither wants the story of the president’s long political career — one defined by tragedy, resilience and unceasing ambition — to end on a stage in Atlanta, across the podium from former President Donald J. Trump, a man they both revile.

“He wants to win and she wants that for him, and for the country,” Ms. Alexander said. “She’s his biggest supporter and champion, because she believes in him, and she fears for the future of our country if it goes the other way.”

In front of supporters on Friday, the first lady embraced the talking points espoused by Democratic Party leaders, including the vice president, Kamala Harris, that Mr. Biden’s bad performance did not erase years of successful legislating.

News Reports, Analysis

The Hartmann Report, Commentary: Should Joe Biden Be Replaced? Thom Hartmann, June 29, 2024. “Freakout at the highest levels”: Monday of this past week the Daily Mail, a British rightwing rag with a history of both breaking stories and pushing less-than-credible articles to get clickbait style headlines, ran a piece saying that Democratic insiders (specifically, the Clintons, Obamas, and Nancy Pelosi) were looking at a replacement for President Biden in advance of the debate if he did poorly. And, sure enough, he did.

June 28

Bellwethers

Philadelphia Inquirer, Editorial: “To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race, Editorial Board, June 28, 2024. Biden had a horrible night Thursday. But the debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump.”

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Extremely Simple Reason MAGA Wants President Joe Biden to End His Campaign, Seth Abramson, left, best-selling author of a investigative trilogy about Donald Trump, author and professor, June 28, 2024. If you’re a Democratic or independent voter who’s been suckered into the idea that Biden ending his campaign would do anything but ensure a second Trump term, it’s time to awaken from the fever dream.

Let’s cut to the chase: President Joe Biden is not going to end his 2024 campaign over a single poor debate performance, any more than Donald Trump did in 2020 after a first-in-the-cycle debate performance that voters conclusively told pollsters was worse than the one yesterday by this sitting president.

President Biden will stay in the race not simply because he’s already the nominee; not simply because there’s no mechanism to force him to exit; not simply because major media’s and politicos’ hyperventilating response to his debate performance yesterday—about 40% of voters appear to think he won the debate, and only 5% said it changed their vote (a sentiment unlikely to survive beyond a day in any case)—fails to take into account that the president had a cold, is a lifelong stutterer, performed much better as the debate went along, told a fraction of the number of lies his rival did, and saw his intermittent “old man” optics repeatedly belied by his conspicuous command of facts, policy, and history (check the transcript of the debate if you doubt this); no, Joe Biden will not step away from the 2024 election cycle because it would hand the presidency, beyond any doubt, to a confirmed rapist, serial sexual assailant, active insurrectionist, convicted felon, pathological liar, malignant narcissistic sociopath, gleeful adulterer, career criminal, unrepentant con man, traitorous would-be U.S. dictator, misogynist, antisemite, racist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, and budding war criminal.

Why would a Biden exit ensure a Trump victory? Let us zoom through some reasons: 

(1) Nobody now polls, or has ever polled, better against Trump than Biden. Rightly or not, it appears that at present American independents prefer one particular old white man to Donald Trump over any other option available to them. It is true now, and it was true in 2018 when Joe Biden first floated a presidential run and behind the scenes Trump and his team concluded that Biden was the biggest threat to his re-election. Team Trump thought so then—and turned out to be right—and it thinks so still. Why?Because all the polls say so. No poll has anyone else close to Trump, and Republicans are well aware of this.

(2) Biden has beat Trump before. Even if we ignore polls, we cannot ignore results. Joe Biden beat the pants off Trump in the popular vote and Electoral College in 2020, and the results weren’t that close. Biden picked up states Democrats thought they couldn’t get, more than doubled Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin over Trump, and did all this while, well, old. Was he less old in 2020 than today? Yes, of course. But he was still a stutterer who sometimes loses his train of thought, misspeaks, and underperforms in many debates and interviews. Nevertheless, voters decided that they liked him, trusted him, and believed he’d surrounded himself with great advisers. Which he did.

(3) Biden has had—unlike Trump—a successful presidency. Nonpartisan historians now universally rank President Biden in the Top 20 presidents ever. Yes, really; feel free to Google it. They do this because the Biden administration has gotten results, even when and as they have not been widely reported by the media. But the results are there even if you’re not a historian: inflation is easing, the economy is healthy, crime is down, COVID-19 is under control, we’re out of Afghanistan, NATO is stronger than ever, and the Executive Order the president just signed on the border has clearly had a major and immediate effect on reducing border crossings. Unemployment’s low and Biden has avoided any major scandals. Foreign leaders like him and trust him. By comparison, nonpartisan historians universally rank Donald Trump among the worst five presidents in American history due to his rank incompetence, deceit, corruption, and moral depravity. Why would the Democrats trade a Top 20 president for some as-yet unnamed pol who is untested on the national stage and has no POTUS track record?

Emptywheel, Analysis: Joe Biden: Three Weeks and Four Months, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, June 28, 2024. When Biden was asked whether he would drop out earlier in the year, he responded by saying he believed he had the best shot of beating Trump. He also responded that his age was not hindering his ability to do the job. Even given his low poll numbers, those claims were nevertheless true, in part because everyone’s poll numbers suck and he has had surprising success, as measured against recent Presidents, in his presidency.

But at that point — in the weeks leading up to the State of the Union, for example — he was largely doing one job, that of President.

In the past three weeks, during a period that (Republicans have gloated) he was largely holed up at Camp David, Biden has been engaged with four really stressful efforts:

• At the G7 he had to play leader of the liberal world at a time when US power (and democracy generally) is waning, in large part because Americans are abandoning it, for good and ill

• He had to be President at a time when state and Congressional Republicans and SCOTUS MAGAts have pursued US failure rather than permitting any Biden success

• He did a lot more retail campaigning than he had been doing, adding not just to his physical stress, but exposing him to a far greater soup of germs than he normally is

• His kid was convicted in a trial that not only laid bare what a cost Joe’s political career has been on his family, but that would, without question, never have happened if his son were not the son of President Joe Biden

I raise this not to offer excuses. Biden had the stamina to fulfill what the Presidency required of him leading up to the SOTU. But the last three weeks have added a number of additional stresses. I would be unsurprised if, in ten days or ten years, we learned the cold offered as an excuse last night by some Biden supporters was revealed to be something more.

Still, such a haystack of stresses is the job of being US president. The extremism of Republicans is different, in degree, than in the past, but they’ve been hyper-partisan since Reagan. And only the decades-long effort to target the Clintons the campaign rivals the unrelenting campaign against his son. But it’s a stressful job and the last three weeks have been particularly stressful, politically, physically, and personally.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: America is fortunate to have a senior statesman and not a tyrant in the White House, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 24 books and former Navy intelligence officer, June 27-28, 2024. Trump is a horrible blemish but Biden provides a ray of sunshine on American history.

The founders of the United States in their infinite wisdom crafted the U.S. Constitution to bar an uncompromising tyrant like King George III from ever occupying the U.S. presidency.

The constitutional guardrails were not perfect as demonstrated by the foolishness of the Electoral College, which enabled an incompetent fool with a deity complex to become president in 2016 by winning a mere 77,000 in three states that put him over the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.

The ship of state was heading into dangerous waters in 2020 but the course was altered with the election of a senior statesman, Joe Biden, as president. Biden took the ship’s wheel amid a mutiny directed by Donald Trump. Now, Trump and his party of mutineers are trying to grab the ship’s wheel to carry out a course correction that will steer America into the authoritarian waters where Russia, China, North Korea, Hungary, India, Argentina and other dictatorial regimes have dropped anchor.

Senior statesmen have been historically linked to democracies. In fact, they have been the guardians of human rights, the rule of law, and constitutional governance. The United States has been fortunate in having a wealth of statesmen, not all of whom have been presidents. But very few Americans have served in federal office since the age of 30 and risen to the presidency.

With Biden rescuing the American economy and forcing out a would-be dictator, every American is better off now than they were four years ago.

With Trump threatening to become a dictator on January 20, 2025, with a rubber stamp Congress and Supreme Court at his disposal, Biden’s debate performance against a vile liar is the very least of our nation’s issues. Once a dictator takes command of a nation, any hope of ejecting them from office comes at the expense of a great deal of bloodshed.

As a two-term president, Biden, who has been the most consequential president for average Americans since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, can ensure the United States leaves MAGA, Trumpism, and corporate greed in the ash heap of American history. Rest assured, Biden will join other American and world statesmen in the pantheon of history. Regardless of his age, history will treat Biden as among the greats: Churchill, De Gaulle, Gandhi, Mandela, Carter, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, both Roosevelts, Disraeli, Bolivar, Bismarck, and going as far back as Demosthenes and Cicero.

Letters from An American, June 27, 2024 [Biden-Trump Debate Commentary], Heather Cox Richardson, right, historian, June 28, 2024. Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events.

Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness.

Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.

In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.

Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.

There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie. As Jake Lahut of the Daily Beast recorded, he also was all over the map. “On January 6,” Trump said, “we had a great border.” To explain how he would combat opioid addiction, he veered off into talking points about immigration and said his administration “bought the best dog.” He boasted about acing a cognitive test and that he had just recently won two golf club tournaments without mentioning that they were at his own golf courses. “To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way,” he said. “I can do it.”

Bedwetters

Semafor, Liberal commentators turn on Biden, Max Tani, June 28, 2024. Prominent liberal media voices turned hard on Joe Biden as he stumbled through Thursday’s debate.

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof called on Democrats to “fix this,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid said panicked Democrats are circulating rules for replacing the nominee at the convention, and The New Republic went with “Ditch Biden” as their lead story.

Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker, meanwhile, took a victory lap for a controversial story on Biden’s mental acuity, saying her team “took a lot of grief for covering a story that needed to be covered and that no other mainstream publishers were willing to touch.”

CNN’s Mark Thompson told Max that the debate was a success, and dodged a question on whether the hosts should have fact-checked the candidates.

The Hartmann Report, Commentary: Should the Democratic Party Reconsider Joe Biden as their 2024 Presidential Candidate? Thom Hartmann, June 28, 2024. This election is too important to indulge one man’s desire to hang onto his office. It literally will define the future of democracy as a form of governance both in America and worldwide

Last night, I ghost-wrote this for the editorial board of Raw Story at their request; they made a few changes and expanded it somewhat as you can see on their site.

This morning, I would add that Trump told over 30 massive and consequential lies last night, again demonstrating his lack of fitness for the presidency and CNN’s inability to honestly moderate a debate. It’s doubtful, though, that anybody in the Republican party will be discussing replacing him today.

There are massive possible downsides and upsides to replacing President Biden on the ticket at this late date. The upside is that the publicity and national curiosity around the new candidate could swamp Trump and his BS and reinvigorate the campaign.

The downside is that the possible infighting, and the possibility of the Democratic Party picking a weak candidate (including the vice president), could produce the opposite effect and hand the election to Trump:

When you’re president, your main job is to make good decisions and keep the country running smoothly and safely, both domestically and internationally.

When you’re running for president as a candidate, though, your job is quite different: your new job is to be the best communicator in the nation. And President Biden — as great and brilliant as he’s been on policy — failed in that in last night’s debate and has thus made America incapable of trusting him to lead this country forward in the 21st century.

It’s vital to acknowledge that President Biden has led the country through an extraordinarily difficult time in American history. He inherited the worst mess from a predecessor since FDR took over when Republican President Hoover crashed the country into the Republican Great Depression.

He’s shepherded the biggest infrastructure and climate accomplishments in the history of the country. He was the first Democrat since LBJ to openly repudiate neoliberalism and put America back on the progressive track that FDR defined for the nation.

He’s helped out student borrowers (in the face of GOP lawsuits), and taken on giant monopolies, big banks, dysfunctional airlines, and big polluters. And he’s defended democracy valiantly in Ukraine and around the world, which now, again, respects America.

He has presided over, and arguably created, the best economy in some ways since the 1960s and in many ways since the 1930s. More Americans have opportunities and jobs than any time in American history.

President Biden has nominated some of the most diverse and brilliant judges and agency heads in the history of our nation. He’s been a spectacular president in every regard; perhaps the best and most consequential in the lifetime of many of us, even boomers.

But whoever made the decision to put Joe Biden — an 81-year-old introvert with a lifelong stutter — head-to-head against the guy NBC spent over a million dollars and 14 years training as a TV personality should never again darken the doors of a Democratic campaign.

More importantly, because CNN licensed last night’s debate to all the other networks so it will almost certainly turn out to have had the largest presidential debate TV audience in American history, it’s time for the Democratic Party to reconsider Joe Biden as their 2024 presidential candidate.

This election is too important to indulge one man’s desire to hang onto his office. It literally will define the future of democracy as a form of governance both in America and worldwide.

It’s not like the Democratic Party is lacking in talent. There are some superstars and some sleepers, but the decision about the Democratic Party’s nominee isn’t real and official until the Party meets in August.

Making a change is a mind-boggling responsibility, but the Party has faced similar ones in the past, from asking LBJ and Harry Truman not to run for re-election to revisiting FDR’s vice-presidential candidate (among others).

It’s time for serious soul-searching. The Democratic Party is not without resources, and certainly has the ability to decide on a replacement for a candidate who’s done a wonderful job in his role as president but now needs to retire from the campaign with the gratitude of the nation.

News Reports, Analysis

New York Times, Former President Trump’s attacks were frequently false, lacked context or were vague enough to be misleading, Michael Gold, June 28, 2024. For most of Thursday night’s debate, former President Donald J. Trump verbally pummeled President Biden, painting his political opponent as an ineffective leader with a torrent of attacks that were frequently false, lacked context or were vague enough to be misleading.

Mr. Trump went directly after Mr. Biden’s personal character, calling him “weak” and little respected by global leaders who were “laughing” at him.

He tried to accuse Mr. Biden of corruption, dubbing the president as a “Manchurian candidate” who was “paid by China,” a nod to frequent accusations of undue influence for which there is no evidence.

He directly blamed Mr. Biden for a wave of immigrants “coming in and killing our citizens at a level we’ve never” seen, a hyperbolic claim that is not backed up by available statistics.

And in a wild misrepresentation of facts, Mr. Trump claimed falsely that Mr. Biden “encouraged” Russia to attack Ukraine, even though Mr. Biden has consistently tried to rally support for Ukraine and his administration took active steps to warn President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia not to invade.

New York Times, For U.S. allies, the debate renewed concerns about America’s stability, Motoko Rich, Updated June 28, 2024. Across Asia, there was little talk about winning, and more concern about American stability — both domestically and on crucial foreign policy issues.

During Thursday night’s debate, President Biden told former President Donald J. Trump that the United States is the “envy of the world.”

After watching their performance, many of America’s friends in Asia beg to differ.

In Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and beyond, the back-and-forth between the blustering Mr. Trump and the halting Mr. Biden set analysts fretting — and not just about who might win.

“That whole thing was an unmitigated disaster,” wrote Simon Canning, a communications manager in Australia, on X. “A total shambles, from both the candidates and the moderators. America is in very, very deep trouble.”

Countries that have hoped the United States could balance a rising China and deter North Korea’s nuclear ambitions spent the past four years trying to rebuild ties after Mr. Trump’s first term deeply rattled alliances in the region. The debate on Thursday night immediately resurfaced serious questions about how U.S. politics might affect stability across Asia.

Chan Heng Chee, who served as Singapore’s ambassador to the United States from 1996 to 2012, said the quality of the debates has deteriorated compared with previous ones. Mr. Biden’s disjointed performance and Mr. Trump’s repeated attacks and factual inaccuracies unsettled those who rely on the U.S. to act as a trusted global partner.

“Now everyone is watching for visuals,” Ms. Chan said. “Do the candidates look like they are able to do the job, or is age a problem? Facts do not matter now, and civility has totally gone out of the window.”

In Japan and South Korea, analysts detected a shift in the political winds toward Mr. Trump, and it prompted renewed questions about Mr. Biden’s age and ability to project strength.

“It was clearly a Trump win and a nail in the coffin for the Biden campaign,” said Lee Byong-chul, a professor at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul. “Trump looked healthy compared with Biden, who came across as an old, stammering hard-to-hear grandfather. We must now brace ourselves for a second Trump administration.”

New York Times, President Biden brushed off concerns about his performance: “It’s hard to debate a liar,” Peter Baker, Updated June 28, 2024. During brief remarks to reporters after his showdown with former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden said he felt he “did well” but noted that he had a sore throat.

President Biden brushed off Democrats’ complaints about his performance at the debate with former President Donald J. Trump and indicated that he had no plans to rethink his candidacy.

“I think we did well,” he told reporters during a stop at a Waffle House in Atlanta shortly after midnight. Asked about Democrats’ concerns about his showing and calls for him to consider dropping out of the race, he said: “No. It’s hard to debate a liar.”

He indicated that his raspy voice stemmed from a minor ailment. “I have a sore throat,” he said. His aides said he had been fighting a cold.

Mr. Biden then headed to an Air Force base for a late-night flight to Raleigh, N.C., where he plans to hold a rally on Friday.

New York Times, Who Won the Debate? Biden Stumbles Left Trump on Top, Alan Rappeport, Updated June 28, 2024. A halting debate performance by President Biden left Democratic strategists reeling, raising questions about his fitness to stay in the race.

In the first presidential debate of the year between the leading Democratic and Republican candidates, President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump clashed on inflation, taxes, Ukraine and the future of democracy.

A halting performance from Mr. Biden and a relatively steady and measured delivery by Mr. Trump left Democrats deeply concerned about Mr. Biden’s prospects. Personal attacks overshadowed discussions of policy during the debate, with the candidates sparring over who had a better golf game, their respective cognitive abilities and their legal problems.

On cable news and social media, strategists from both parties wondered if Mr. Biden could continue in the race against Mr. Trump. Few Democrats could muster an upbeat assessment of the president’s performance.

Here is a sampling of the reaction.

“It was a really disappointing debate performance from Joe Biden. I don’t think there’s any other way to slice it. His biggest issue was to prove to the American people that he had the energy, the stamina — and he didn’t do that,” Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Biden’s former White House communications director, said on CNN.

“Biden is even whiffing on his easy pitches — abortion and Jan. 6. I mean, my God,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser to the presidential campaign for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

“Look, I debated Joe 7 times in 2020. He’s a different guy in 2024,” Andrew Yang, a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, said on the social media platform X, adding the hashtag #swapJoeout.

“Former President Trump stuck to his factually incorrect messaging points tonight, but President Biden wasn’t capable of counteracting them in real time in a convincing way,” said Henrietta Treyz, managing partner and director of economic policy research at the consulting firm Veda Partners.

“The silver lining is that Trump provided a metric ton of problematic sound bites tonight and we can expect those to be used in ads on every medium from here to the moon over the next four months. Every woman in America will see ads on TV, mobile and on mailers reminding them of Trump taking credit for overturning Roe v. Wade,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“Joe Biden lost the country tonight, and will not get it back. If Trump is a threat and democracy is on the line, then Biden must step aside. His duty, oath and legacy require an act of humility and selflessness,” said Steve Schmidt, a former Republican political strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

Washington Post, CNN moderators didn’t fact-check. Not everyone is happy about it, Jeremy Barr, June 28, 2024 (print ed.). The network’s political director said a debate “is not the ideal venue for a live fact-checking exercise.” Jake Tapper and Dana Bash stuck to that.

Earlier this week, CNN’s political director said not to expect much fact-checking, if any, from moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash during Thursday’s debate.

“The venue of a presidential debate between these two candidates is not the ideal venue for a live fact-checking exercise,” David Chalian told The Washington Post.

That was borne out during the debate, when the two veteran anchors chose not to correct any misstatements made by either President Biden or former president Donald Trump. Instead, the moderators largely stayed out of the fray, only interjecting a handful of times.

June 27

Bellwethers

Palmer Report, Analysis: So that debate was… something, Bill Palmer, right, June 27, 2024. President Joe Biden got off to slow start in tonight’s debate, suffering from some kind of laryngitis and seemingly initially unsure of how to hit Donald Trump. But debates aren’t decided by their totality.

They’re decided by the handful of moments that end up going viral. As the debate went on, Biden seemingly managed to make a few of those moments happen.

At one point Biden managed to get under Trump’s skin by bringing up the fact that Trump called fallen U.S. soldiers “suckers and losers.” Trump took the bait and made the quote the focus of the debate for a few key minutes, thus putting the story back in the minds of the public.

At another point Trump inexplicably claimed that “everybody” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. This is a moment that Biden and the Democrats will use against Trump in TV ads for months to come.

But this was an ugly, messy crapfest of a debate – and the fault for that lies with the people who were running it. Trump told literally hundreds of lies during this debate (and it’s still not over as I’m writing this), and at no point did the moderators pushback against a single one of them. Trump falsely claimed that Democrats want abortions performed after babies are born, and the moderators did nothing. Trump falsely claimed that Nancy Pelosi confessed to being at fault for January 6th, and the moderators did nothing. The debate was halfway over and the moderators still hadn’t brought up the fact that one of the two candidates is a recently convicted felon awaiting trial.

Source: https://www.justice-integrity.org/2057-biden-debate-bellwethers-and-bed-wetters