Death By Cheerleader

What will it take to get Joe Biden to step aside? Probably bad polling numbers. Really bad polling numbers.

Right now Biden, his family, his campaign and the leadership of the Democratic Party are all rallying around him. Whistling past the graveyard seems like a weak analogy. It’s more like the grave has been dug, Biden’s name and “President 2021 to 2025” has already been etched into the tombstone while Biden stands on the edge — and yes, there’s a banana peel under his shoe. And yet, the party leaders are telling us there’s nothing to see here, folks. Let’s get behind our candidate, kids!

Today the AP reported on a conference call conducted over the weekend by the Democratic National Committee chair and Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon. It was all happy talk with Biden’s disastrous debate performance barely mentioned. This so infuriated DNC members who were on the call that they went to the press — they had to because their voice buttons were muted by the DNC during the call. They were literally shut up. Apparently, my party leaders and the Biden clan will brook no dissent.

But there’s plenty of dissent out there. Anybody with half a brain can see that Biden’s performance was disastrous. A candidate who was already trailing in every swing state, a candidate who was already running behind with almost every demographic group that supported him last time, a candidate who 86% of Americans thought was too old for the job even before the debate, came off as no where near up to the job.

But instead of recognizing that Biden — far from being the only candidate who can beat Trump as perhaps he was in 2020 — is now probably one of the few potential candidates who can’t, top Democrats cling to the fantasy that he’s our best chance and that even if he wasn’t it’s too late to change horses.

So, after this weekend it’s now clear that Biden will not graciously do the right thing for his party and country and step aside with dignity. He’ll have to be forced out and those in the best position to do the forcing are committed to going down with his ship. They’re not just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They’ve formed the Titanic Pep Squad. “C’Mon Titanic! You can beat that old iceberg!”

What could happen to change this dynamic? Bad poll numbers. Sometime this week there will certainly be polls showing how the debate impacted the race. The early indications are not encouraging for those of us who want Biden to be replaced. His campaign reports that they raised a bunch of money right after the debate (not unlike the Red Cross getting a windfall in the wake of a hurricane, I suppose) and a quick and dirty poll found no change in his support, even while most people felt he lost the debate to Trump.

Nothing seems to move those numbers. We live in some alternative universe. Trump gets convicted of 34 felonies and the numbers don’t move. In fact, he raises so much money that his website crashes. Now, it could very well be that Biden implodes onstage and confirms what everybody already thought they knew about his capacity and, still, nothing will change in the polling. But in a close race, it won’t take many voters who don’t like Trump, but see Biden as not up to the job, to pick the felon and seal the deal for him.

So, I’m not particularly optimistic about this, but if the dead heat among voters were to move to, say, a five point advantage for Trump, that would be outside the margin of error and so I’d call that significant. On top of that the money would have to dry up. Big donors would have to close their wallets and their garden parties and demand a better bet.

And even then the cheering squad in the Biden camp is prepared to brush it off. “If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls,” said O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager. And, by the way, the debate debacle calls into question her competence and that of the whole Biden brain trust. After all, it was their bright idea to push for this early debate in the first place and they spent a full week “preparing” their boss for this performance.

So the polling numbers can’t be just bad. They have to be awful in order to have any chance at all to unseat Biden and give us a real chance in November. Barring that, get ready for Trump 2.