The Washington Post does the fall from grace of one Joseph R. Biden…..
The first week after the debate had not gone well. No one, not even Biden, contested that. He needed to get out more, to prove his mettle, to replace the images of the doddering debate night in everyone’s mind. History will record that as things got worse, Biden fought harder.
A long interview with Complex magazine, another with BET, a third with Lester Holt of NBC News. Over a 48-hour period, he had calls with the Congressional Asian American Pacific Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition, the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, whose political arm endorsed Biden on Friday. Lawmakers confronted him repeatedly to ask him to reconsider.
The White House circulated a list of about 20 other elected leaders or union officials the president had spoken with on the plane or while traveling. About 75 members of Congress have reiterated their support for him. He rallied another raucous crowd in Detroit. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) closed ranks.
“Can you hear the helicopter in the background?” Biden shouted through the phone to the Rev. Al Sharpton as he boarded a plane for Nevada, according to Sharpton. “We’ve got to keep going, Al.”….
…
“He believes he can still win,” this person said. “I don’t think he is even spinning. He really thinks that everyone has always counted him out, and he has a chip on his shoulder, and he thinks he can win.”
Trump advisers and operatives in key states began discussing how they could help keep Biden in the race, believing he is a weaker candidate than other options for Democrats. “If Democrats want to win Georgia, they’d be better off with a potted plant at the top of their ticket,” said Cody Hall, a top adviser to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), describing the current environment there.
At the White House, officials stoked the fires they could control. The policy shop began to fast-track plans that had long been in the works, including a blueprint to create term limits for the Supreme Court and impose new ethics rules on the justices — catnip for the liberal base. Propeller heads finalized a plan for legislation to take away tax rebates from corporate landlords who increased rent by more than 5 percent a year, a potentially massive new federal intervention to reverse a major driver of inflation….
…
Access to Biden, in calmer times, had been a stove-piped affair. Now people worried to each other that the future of the world order could be at stake. White House senior staff let it be known that their doors were open to underlings if anyone needed to talk through the difficulties.
White House staffers did not contest that Biden was spending more time with two of his longest-serving, most loyal advisers: Mike Donilon, senior campaign adviser, and Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president. They argued that their expertise was more in demand. Both had argued that polling had become less meaningful.
Some advisers traded accusations, without evidence, that top aides had misplaced loyalties, selfish interests, personal ambitions. Those aspersions even made it onto MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the president’s favorite cable talkfest, days later.
“The anger I hear are at the people that are keeping him in a bubble or who may have their own interests, some financial, in keeping him in the race,” co-host Joe Scarborough said, laying out for the world the ugliness growing in Biden’s world….
…
“I thought he bought us some time with the NATO news conference,” one campaign adviser said. “There was a sigh of relief that night. If that had gone poorly, I think we all thought it was over within 24 hours.”
Like others, this person said there had been lots of mistakes: Jill Biden’s Vogue photo shoot, a family meeting at Camp David, defensive Zoom calls, a sometimes polarizing communications strategy. There were increasingly dismal polls — and a sense the campaign might not last.
“The polling isn’t good, and it feels like things are just getting worse every day,” the campaign adviser said.
Political polling and analytics deal in probabilities, not absolutes like “No way.” They create snapshots in time, out of focus. Biden won in 2020 by 4.5 percentage points nationally, but he now trailed Trump by about 2 points, according to a Washington Post average of polls. Public surveys since the debate showed him down slightly in the must-win Northern swing states and by larger margins in Western and Southern states he hoped to win.
Democratic House polls showed him significantly behind his 2020 margins in key districts. Senate polls showed him trailing statewide Democrats by double digits in battleground states.
The campaign has been comforted by internal data showing that most of the people Biden has lost since the debate are unlikely to vote for Trump, suggesting they may come back. Most of them had not even watched the debate. But polling matters little when your party infrastructure is not behind you….
…
The campaign budget had been built on the assumption that tens of thousands of people who are not yet engaged would give millions of dollars. There is no survey data to say whether they will show up in September with $10 or $25 checks. There is no poll to predict whether the party comes back together. Trump remains unpopular, opposed by large shares of voters. But at the moment he is more popular than Biden…..