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Hot Swap time?
On the All-In podcast, a couple of the podcasters have been making bold claims that Biden would be "hot-swapped" out for a different candidate (presumably Gavin Newsom) after the first debate. I thought their claims were pretty outlandish, but after last night they are seeming a lot more, um, inlandish.
I concur with a lot of the Mottizens below that Biden's performance was not that bad. I thought he landed some decent punches and fought Trump mostly to a draw. But expectations matter. Like most people here, I am well aware of Biden's state of decline, whereas perhaps the average voter is not. I was not expecting vigor, so was in no way shocked by Biden's lack of it. Furthermore, Mottizens tend to actually listen to the words that are said. Normies react more to feels. Biden's blank-eyed stare and gaped mouth said more than words ever could. If this was your first exposure to Biden in the last 4 years, it would be unsettling.
What I was shocked by was the immediate consensus by CNN's post-debate panel that Biden's performance was a disaster, and the immediate speculation about a new candidate. I had expected them to rally around their leader. There was a plausible argument to be made that Biden did okay. Instead, they threw him under the bus.
The timing of the debate certainly seems a bit suspicious. This was the earliest Presidential debate in some time (ever?). Conspicuously, it comes before the convention, but after the primaries. If Biden can be pressured to resign, the DNC will be able to handpick their preferred candidate without the pesky need for voters.
As Bill Ackman and others have pointed out on Twitter, everyone in Biden's inner circle knew that this was Biden's ability level in 2024. They didn't have to agree to a debate. Why did they send him out there to get slaughtered?Seen through this lens, Obama "helping" the elderly Biden off the stage a couple weeks ago take on a darker tone.
Shares in "Biden 2024 Democratic nominee" crashed during the debate and now trade at just 63%. Newsom is at 22% and Harris at 13%.
I don't know. All of this seems very conspiratorial. The real world is messy and boring. I doubt that the DNC are sitting around in a smoke-filled room, twirling their mustaches. But, however it shakes out, odds of Biden being replaced are shooting up. This seems very undemocratic. There was a time to replace Biden, and that was during the primaries. However it shakes out, the election season just got a lot more interesting.
This line going around today feels like a motte-rat ingroup circle-jerk. Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance! It's a presidential debate, there is little substance, the words have always been made-up and meaningless. Does Biden debate Trump to a draw because, although he looked horrible, and although nobody is persuaded by anything he said, he did manage to say things? I feel as though people have always been a little disingenuous about debates. Everyone pretends that there is a reified debate format, where people say things like, "Well, Biden's answer doesn't convince me, but it's an objectively-strong argument and might move somebody else." But there is no imaginary modal voter. There are not actually rules for deciding who won. It becomes an exercise in imaginary terms that nobody is actually thinking in, but everyone assumes everyone else is thinking in. This is all a little too self-congratulatory for me.
Nobody is impressed with the substance of Biden's answers. Nobody even really cares what they were. Obviously, we all already know what Biden's policies are and what his candidacy means. For that matter, nobody cares what the substance of Trump's answers was either. It's an intellectual exercise. I don't care what Trump did on January 6th, you do care what Trump did on January 6th, so does anybody care that Trump gave this answer instead of that answer? Is there some hypothetical voter who does?
The style is much more important. Bring back the smashing and yelling and interrupting and crass. I actually want to see Trump walk all over the other guy kicking and fighting. Show me that Jeb actually can't stand up for himself when called out and attacked. Give me the Hillary who glowers but doesn't back down. What did Andrew Yang say in the first 2020 debate that showed how impressive his policy credentials were? Who even knows. I do remember Chris Christie decimating Marco Rubio over repeating the same canned stock phrase on three separate occasions. I don't remember a damned policy argument Amy Klobuchar ever made, just that she was boring, and uninspiring, and lacking the actual qualities of a leader.
Imagine how boring politics would be if we all went back to this frame: Biden tied Trump because, when you strip away how he spoke, how he looked, how he stood, how he argued, and how he lead, his stock canned prepared statements were just as technically sensible as Trump's, or maybe better. No, Biden lost, because he looked like an old man who didn't even know what room he was in. He froze up. He couldn't get the words out. He made uncomfortable faces when he wasn't speaking. He sometimes didn't know what he was saying. He looked old. Trump lightly bullied him and except for a few moments he couldn't fight back. This is how politics works, this is literally what matters. The motte-rat insistence on some sort of Nixon-Kennedy radio interpretation of disembodied words floating in space actually feels deeply anti-rational, because it is obviously not how things work. Nobody cares. The exercise in imagining that we can care about "the words that are said" but also imagine the mindset of "the average voter" is vanity. No!, actually. Those things literally do not exist. They are endless rationalizations. If you live in this plane of unreality, you could completely swap Trump and Biden's policies and ideas and visions, and it wouldn't matter.
Thinking about these policy wonk ideas isn't a more elevated form of politics stripped from emotion and chance. It's actually a degeneration. Because this is what people care about. A robot could make the words, it's the emotions that count.
Relative to the general public, we probably do. I don't think it's circle-jerking to say this forum is, on average, more intelligent, more educated, and more political aware than the average American (or the average redditor or Twitter poster). That doesn't mean we're a bunch of geniuses or that people here don't fall into the same predictable mindkilling partisanship as everywhere else, but yeah, the entire point of this forum is to try to make discussions more than exchanging insults and memes. The majority of the flack we mods get is because someone just wants to shit on his opposition and then feels mistreated when told he can't.
To answer your real question:
Yes. The overrated "undecided" or "swing" voter. They exist. They may be less than 10% of the electorate (maybe 5% or 6%?) but they are the ones who decide the election in battleground states. You're right that most people in the general public, and also most people here, are very unlikely to change which way they're going to vote even if Biden shits his pants or Trump eats a puppy on live TV. But there are people who are still swayable, and they're the ones who matter, basically.
You may also underestimate the impact of actually getting the vote out. A lot of people may be unwilling to vote for the other candidate, but if they find themselves thoroughly disgusted and demoralized by their candidate, they can just choose not to vote. Speaking personally - I do not like Trump, and do not want him to win (although I have to admit that if he does, I will feel a tiny frisson of schadenfreude enjoying meltdowns in certain quarters), but I am so unimpressed and unenthused about Biden that I'm almost in the "fuck it" camp myself.
I don't deny the existence of about this level of self-reported undecided, but I'm starting to develop an alternative theory.
I believe it was NBC (could've been CNN) ... after the debate, they had an "instant reaction panel" populated by "double haters." These are people who say the don't like either Biden or Trump, but still, I guess, intend to make up their mind and vote for one or the other. My pre-existing suspicion here was, "what new information are you waiting to see from either candidate?" For a time, the strongest answer to that was waiting to see if Trump got convicted. He did and that is legitimate new information. For those who are still undecided, I am having trouble identifying what new information is even out there for discovery?
But I digress. What came across as incredibly obvious during that "insta-panel" was that 4 of the 5 people there were obviously not double haters and were going to vote for either Biden or Trump. It was plain to see by how they answered the open ended question of "What's your initial reaction to the debate."
And I think there's a sizable about of voters like this. They say they're undecided or a double haters for a variety of vapid, stupid reasons. It get's them attention (in that people will try to convince them one way or the other), they get to demonstrate how "above it all" they are, or how they have these amazing nuanced and complex views that don't fit neatly into blue vs red.
Except that it's all made up and they probably know exactly who they're voting for.
A televised panel is never going to be actually any good. There's way too much "look mom I'm on TV". A well put together focus group is superior, and these actually do tend to reflect actual campaign trends pretty well. Even survey takers are subject to "this is a survey" bias, but we've gotten better over the years at comparing these surveys to physical realities, namely the public vote counts broken down by polling precinct, that most of the time we can figure this out and make appropriate adjustments. And all of these methods have found that yes, swing voters do exist as a small group, and yes, things like enthusiasm do predict turnout.
I believe you are correct.
How many "double haters" would voluntarily show up for a no-cameras focus group? It certainly wouldn't be zero, but I think it would be drastically less than the "10% of likely voters" number I see thrown around all the time.
In my opinion, Presidential campaigns since about Bush-Gore in 2000 come down to 47%/47% Blue vs Red default vote. We know the two big structural variables are the economy and incumbency advantage. Sometimes war is also that, but generally only one the U.S. is fully and obviously involved in and that has some strong immediate emotional saliency (Vietnam in 1968, Iraq in 2004).
Beyond that, it's mostly about the candidates building competing narratives targeted at the most important voter demographics in swing states and a little "get out the vote" party machinery. Therefore, running an effective campaign in the sense of management and execution - almost at a corporate level - isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing. Substance, issues, vision kind of doesn't matter if you can't get it into voters heads, and you do that with a lot of activity that looks more like a corporate marketing campaign than you do with impassioned Patrick Henry level speeches.
The accurate knock against the 2016 Trump campaign was that it was poorly run. It absolutely was. But it was better run than the Hillary campaign that (a) Took off the month of September and (b) routinely dismissed highly reliable polls on the midwest and didn't focus her visits there when it mattered.
So when I look at Trump vs Biden in 2024, I'm looking at who's running a better campaign like an investor looks at the operations of a logistics company. Obviously, I can't get into the various war rooms on a day to day basis, so I have to use public appearances and general messaging as a proxy. The debate on Thursday showed me that with a full week of preparation and multiple months of "he's cognitively sharp!" messaging, the Biden campaign couldn't turn in the basics. This is like my analogous logistics company failing to print shipping labels. It's a failure at such a basic level.
Whatever the recovery plan might be - Biden stays in, but Harris becomes more visible, a ticket flip (Harris-Biden instead of Biden-Harris) - it doesn't matter. The ops are broken. The basics aren't in place. Certainly not at the level to achieve an insanely high risk stunt that they now have to do because of the Debate.
There is a reason why focus group participants are paid. How many double haters would explain just how much they hate both candidates in front of a sympathetic audience for $100? Quite a lot.
The point of a focus group isn't to get a large enough sample for statistically meaningful results - it is to listen to what people say. You only need 5-15 people to hear all the common opinions, so you can afford to pay them.
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I imagine there is more movement in who votes than in changing votes.
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The price of gas in late October, cynically. Optimistically there are always a few candidate specific issues we can learn more about as time goes on, although the biggest one in this race is probably 'how senile is Joe Biden, exactly?' and normies are taking last night as a definite answer.
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I think there are probably very few people who are genuinely so undecided that it's a coin flip which way they'll go. But I think there are a fair number of people who lean towards one or the other but might still be convinced (by a disastrous debate performance, by some new breaking scandal, by an emerging crisis) to go the other way.
That said, I agree that a lot of "undecideds" just like to pretend they're open to being persuaded so people will fawn over them.
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