Polling And The Next Week

 At the moment, Biden is going to stick it out. The literally unbelievable SCOTUS ruling has both pushed off Trump's sentencing and given Biden a powerful campaign issue. Non-partisans do trust Biden more on basic decency than the One Man Crime Wave.

However, Biden and senior Democrats (as opposed to Senior Democrats...heh heh...) will need to see how badly the debate damaged him. The early polling has not shown that it has.

The problem, of course, is that polling has been notoriously fickle for the past few years. Response rates are abysmal; do you pick up calls from strange numbers? So even measuring the impact of the debate has go to be tough.

Secondly, the debate was a debacle, but how much will the coverage of the debate matter more? How much have voters basically baked Biden's age into their calculations already? The immediate polling was basically status quo, but perhaps the non-stop coverage of the debate and the calls for Biden to drop out will add an impact we aren't seeing yet. Or, have voters simply priced in Biden's age and Trump's personality?

There is a whiff of polling suggesting that Harris might be stronger than Biden against Trump. The second impact that polling needs to accommodate is the SCOTUS Six removing legal consequences for a lawless president...like Trump. There could be some people who are uncomfortable with both Biden's age and Trump's character but could talk themselves into "it wasn't so bad last time" and this decision could give them pause.

There's some evidence that the Biden team is dropping opposition info on RFK, Jr. this week that could be a realization that they don't want to lose the overall dissatisfied voter who REALLY doesn't want Trump but also thinks Biden is too old. 

Biden is doing an interview on Friday. The fact is - despite media claims to the contrary - Biden actually does do sit down interviews. He just has contempt for the Times. If he does a good job on Friday, though, I don't really see that having a massive impact on the media voices calling for him to drop out. Many of them - Nate Silver, Ezra Klein - have been calling for his replacement for months. They aren't changing their minds if he nails the interview with Stephanopolous. However, if he has another "bad moment" then you could see the next firewall break. 

It would be clarifying if we can have clear evidence that we could be confident in about whether people were as appalled by the debate as the media and those who follow politics compulsively. I'm not sure we can be confident in anything right now. 

Perhaps that's why it feels like election night 2016. We are staring into the void right now.