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So, by now everyone has heard about Biden's lackluster performance in the debate.
I don't want to talk about Biden. I want to talk about the fact that everybody has heard about it. There has been very little effort to suppress it.
If CNN, the NYT, and Time Magazine, and the rest had all held ranks and denied everything, this would probably have blown over. Most people didn't even watch the debate. Those who did could be persuaded to remember it differently. The general public isn't reacting to the debate, they're reacting to the reaction to the debate. Let's face it, this isn't the first time Biden has had a senior moment in public. This was unusually public and unusually difficult to edit around, but it's just a difference in scope, not a difference in kind. The media could easily have put the spotlight on Trump's deranged rambling about abortion clinics murdering babies, or that time he said that under his Presidency America had all the H2O.
Instead, CNN started openly freaking out the moment the debate was over. Prominent Democrats were apparently sending frantic texts to prominent journalists even before it ended. The NYT is openly speculating about replacing Biden. Time Magazine's new cover shows Biden wandering off the page with the caption: 'panic'. They didn't have to do this.
What I find interesting about this isn't the fact that Biden made his biggest gaffe yet. What I find interesting is that everyone broke ranks at once.
That's not necessarily surprising. Nobody wants to be the last person trying to hold the line after everyone else has run away. Still, it was so fast it almost looked coordinated. Were prominent figures prepared for something like this to happen? Were certain powerful individuals thinking to themselves, 'If Biden really acts his age during the debate, we might get the chance to replace him'? Could this perhaps have been the reason that this debate was scheduled unusually early - scheduled, in fact, before the convention where Biden is expected to be formally nominated by the party? Perhaps to give them a reason to nominate someone else?
Even if it wasn't, I think it's obvious that a lot of people have been thinking about this for a long time. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have all suddenly found themselves on the same page.
This will be less obvious as time goes on so it's important to make explicitly clear: the betting markets didn't have Biden's probability of winning the election drop until after the debate.
I saw some headlines partway through the debate and immediately pulled up Manifold Markets to see if it was really as bad as the headlines made it sound. The red line was indeed spiking upward at that point. So I watched the debate later that evening.
So I guess it depends on which betting markets you were watching. Manifold in particular seemingly moved in realtime.
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No? I'm pretty sure it dumped after the, "if... we finally beat Medicare," line.
I read glassnosers comment as meaning "the drop didn't happen before the debate" not the difference between during/after.
I had that idea too, but it didn't seem to make any sense. No one would think the big swing in odds on June 27 occurred before the debate, but it is conceivable that one would think that it happened as a result of the debate reactions, not the debate itself. Indeed, this thread seems to be about the distinction between the debate itself, and the reaction to the debate.
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