No. of Recommendations: 5
True - although there's not really any change between those positions.
It remains true that the party has no mechanism to force Biden not to be the nominee, that there are political costs to switching Harris for Biden, and there are catastrophic political costs to switching someone other than Harris for Biden. So as long as Biden was a "replacement level" candidate - not any better or worse than a typical Democratic presidential candidate - there would be no gain to trying to switch. Something Biden knew, so he wasn't going to step aside.
Now we know that Biden is a worse than replacement level candidate. His debate performance end up having a catastrophic impact on his candidacy even if it was an aberration caused by some other factor than his age and cognitive abilities. That doesn't change even if the immediate post debate polls don't show a big change - the real damage lies in handing the GOP and their PAC's the equivalent of an h-bomb for their attack ads in September and October. And given how unlikely it is that this was wholly unrelated to his age and cognitive abilities, there's a non-zero chance that he just doesn't have the tools to be a good candidate any more.
That is actionable information. It shifts the analysis in the first paragraph by a lot. Now that Biden's a worse-than-replacement level candidate, switching to Harris is not necessarily a no-gain scenario. Harris probably won't win - she's not a great candidate and even a great candidate would find it nigh-impossible to win in this circumstance. But there's a good chance she'd perform better than Biden would, which might make the difference in some down-ballot races. And Democrats can probably allocate resources a little more with an eye towards downballot races - you might put a little more money into California House races and the OH/MT Senate races, even though they'll have no impact on the Presidential races, rather than aiming for a top-of-the-ticket win.
Yes, I see Trump getting elected. Biden destroyed his candidacy on Thursday. He basically confirmed, on national TV, that voter doubts about his mental acuity are justified and that his political opponents weren't manufacturing those concerns out of whole cloth. "Only" about 50 million people watched the debates, and many (most?) of those are political junkies whose opinions won't be changed much, so the immediate impact on polling won't fully reflect the damage he's done. But once there's a hundred million worth of attack ads showing voters that Biden "finally beat Medicare" - in that voice with that visage in that affect - he's going to have lost any chance of convincing on-the-fence voters he's up for the job.
