Salem Political Snark

Harris has much better chance than Biden of beating Trump, says Nate Silver

Today Nate Silver, who ran the acclaimed 538 web site back when it was part of the New York Times, turned on his proprietary election prediction model (Silver maintained the rights to it after he became an independent analyst) following a hold when Biden withdrew from the presidential race.

Now Silver considers that there's sufficient polling data for him to get the model up and running again with Harris as the Democratic candidate. Here's a couple of key figures from his Silver Bulletin, which I pay $10 a month for a subscription that gets more detail than his free offering.

Silver's estimate of the national polling average shows a virtual tie: Trump 44.5%, Harris 44.1%. Robert Kennedy Jr. has dropped from 15.5% on July 1 to 5.0% now. By contrast, when Biden dropped out on July 21, Trump led Biden 45.2% to 41.2%. So Harris has narrowed the national Trump lead from 4 points to 0.4 points.

This figure actually doesn't show how the chance of winning has changed for Trump and Harris (Kennedy always has been at 0 percent), because the model was activated yesterday and made public today.

Thus it only has one data point: Trump has a 61.3% chance of winning, Karris 38.1%. Elsewhere Silver shows a 0.5% chance of an Electoral College deadlock, with no candidate getting 270 electoral votes. By contrast, Trump had a 72.8% chance of winning on the day Biden dropped out, with Biden having a 26.9% chance of winning.

It'll be interesting to see how the odds change between now and election day, November 5. Well, more than interesting -- political junkies like me will be following Silver's updates with a mixture of hope and fear, given how high the stakes are for our country whether Trump or Harris wins.

My bet, which admittedly is tinged with more than a little hope, since I'm a Democrat, is that Harris will steadily increase her chance or winning, albeit with some ups and downs. I say this for some seemingly pretty good reasons.

(1) Harris is the fresh face Americans have been longing for. Meaning, while she is well-known, her last name isn't Trump or Biden. So those who couldn't stand a repeat of the 2020 matchup now will be able to vote for someone new.

(2) Even more new will be Harris' pick for vice-president. Whoever it is, he (unlikely to be a she) will be a moderate Democrat to better appeal to swing state voters. Trump and Vance are not moderate at all. They're MAGA Republicans, with all that this entails. Mostly bad, except to the Republican base.

(3) News of the vice-president pick in a few days, combined with the four-day Democratic National Convention that starts August 19, will consume much of the media attention during most of August. Typically candidates get a convention bounce in the polls.

(4) Enthusiasm for Harris is surprising political analysts who thought the reaction to her taking over from Biden would be more muted. She's a different candidate than she was in 2020. More sure of herself, more experienced after three and a half years of being vice-president, more willing to take moderate positions on policy issues rather than feeling like she had to kiss up to the far left wing of the Democratic Party.

Lastly, I looked at some of the newest comments on Nate Silver's web site, in part because I wanted to see if other people were as surprised as I was that Harris's chance of winning was only 38% at the moment. 

Several commenters noted that today's Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey had some good news for Harris. I have no idea how much a single poll will change the Silver forecast, but it should increase Harris' odds somewhat. Note that only the most recent blue dot shows Harris; the other dots were polls taken with Biden as the candidate.

Kamala Harris has wiped out Donald Trump’s lead across seven battleground states, as the vice president rides a wave of enthusiasm among young, Black and Hispanic voters, according to the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll.

Harris was backed by 48% of voters to 47% for Trump — a statistical dead heat — in the swing states that will likely decide November’s election. That’s a stronger showing than the two-point deficit for President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race. The Democratic vice president overtook her GOP rival in Arizona and Nevada, and more than doubled Biden’s lead over Trump in Michigan. 

Netanyahu lied shamelessly in his address to Congress today

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's hugely unpopular prime minister, is that country's Donald Trump in this regard: Netanyahu lies shamelessly, seeks to cling to power to avoid being held to account for crimes he's committed, and avoids taking responsibility for his failures.

Today Netanyahu used an address to Congress, which was boycotted by a large proportion of Democrats in the House and Senate, to continue spreading falsehoods about how Israel has been conducting the war against Hamas under his failed leadership. 

I watched most of the speech, then couldn't stand all the B.S. that was flowing freely from Netanyahu's mouth, and fast-forwarded my recording of the speech to the analysis on CNN after he'd finished talking.

That analysis was pretty damn devastating. An Israeli criticized Netanyahu harshly, saying that his approval rating in Israel is dismal, about 30%, and the vast majority of Israelis want an election to be held where they can get rid of Netanyahu.

He added that Netanyahu failed to mention that the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas took place under Netanyahu's watch. Indeed, Netanyahu had harsh words for Iran, American protesters, Hamas, Palestinian leadership, and others, but somehow neglected to mention that he was the one in charge when Hamas conducted its "surprise" attack -- which actually wasn't a surprise, since Israeli intelligence had gotten word of it, but nothing was done to prevent it by Netanyahu's administration. 

Prior to the speech I heard Fareed Zakaria make some great points on CNN that Netanyahu also ignored in his speech. Netanyahu keeps saying that his goal is to destroy Hamas. But that's impossible, as Zakaria pointed out and many others have echoed.

Hamas is a movement, an ideology.

Its weapons and fighters can be destroyed, at least in part, but an ideology can't be destroyed so long as the conditions that make it appealing continue to exist. Israel's wholesale destruction of Gaza and the killing of 39,000 people in Gaza guarantee that Hamas will remain popular among a population that has suffered so greatly from the reckless way Israel has been conducting the war.

So Netanyahu is guaranteeing that Hamas will remain a viable ideology, Zakaria said, by ruling out the possibility of Palestinian statehood, the two-state solution favored by the United States and most of the rest of the world. Further, Netanyahu doesn't want Hamas to govern Gaza after the war is over, but he also doesn't want an alternative Palestinian government to do this.

It's obvious that Netanyahu doesn't want peace, but endless war -- with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with Iran.

That's the only way he can stay in power, by claiming that elections can't be held in Israel so long as the country is on a war footing. What was disgusting was that Israelis recognize what a self-centered liar Netanyahu is, while his mostly Republican audience kept cheering and having standing ovations for him today.

Netanyahu talked about how continuing the war against Hamas was necessary to bring all of the hostages home. But he failed to mention that almost all of the hostages who have been freed so far were released during a cease fire agreement with Hamas. This is why so many relatives of the remaining hostages are angry at Netanyahu for rejecting another ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

Here's some other lies in Netanyahu's speech, according to CNN's Jeremy Diamond.

CNN’s Jeremy Diamond argued many of the claims made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “flew in the face” of facts during his address to Congress.

Netanyahu spoke in front of Congress on Wednesday to discuss the ongoing war in Gaza. Shortly after the speech, Diamond appeared on CNN to fact check a number of things Netanyahu said.

“He talked about big numbers of aid getting in,” Diamond said, “but there is just very, very clear evidence — you talk to any humanitarian organization that actually works on the ground in Gaza, [like] The United Nations — and even when you look at Israel in the way that they have turned on and back off the faucet of aid to Gaza. There is clear evidence that Israel has not always allowed enough aid in, that they have not done enough to deconflict militarily, to provide safe routes for that aid to get in. And you also have to remember that ministers, members of his, Netanyahu’s own government called for starving the people of Gaza in the earliest days of the war.”

Diamond then called it “laughable” that when the prime minister talked about civilian deaths in Rafah, he claimed there were “practically none.”

“I can think of several strikes in which civilians were killed,” Diamond continued. “That just doesn’t even pass the smell test. And then he once again cited this West Point expert, John Spencer, claiming that Israel has the lowest civilian-casualty ratio. [If] you talk to any other expert on the conduct of militaries in warfare, including how the United States has carried out its campaigns, and they will all say that Israel has not taken nearly as many precautions as most modern militaries do in warfare, in Gaza.”

For sure.

As noted above, about 39,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began. Israel has said that about 14,000 Hamas fighters have been killed. This means about 25,000 civilians have been killed by Israel. That's about 1% of the population of Gaza. If the same proportion of Americans were killed, that'd be more that 3,300,000 people. 

Is it any wonder that most Americans disagree with how Israel has been conducting the war against Hamas? We may not be protesting in the streets, but 56% of us don't like what Israel is doing. This helps explain why Kamala Harris and JD Vance both passed on attending Netanyahu's speech. He isn't popular in Israel, and he isn't popular in the United States.

I'm a happy Democrat again, thanks to Harris replacing Biden

What a difference a day makes when it comes to presidential politics. I woke up on Sunday, yesterday, feeling fine about my personal life and crappy about the prospect of Biden refusing to withdraw from the presidential contest, thereby likely guaranteeing a Trump victory this November.

Then, later in the morning, I checked my phone and saw that Biden had withdrawn. At first I couldn't believe it. Maybe it was a sick joke? But a bit more scrolling on X revealed that yes, it was true. I raced to find my wife and tell her the good news. We both became happier Democrats instantly.

More good news followed. Biden, not surprisingly, was endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket. As I'd told a discussion group of eleven fellow Democrats on Saturday, it seemed to me that Harris was the best choice to take on Trump if Biden withdrew. 

Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer Rubin summed up the new mood among Democrats perfectly and succinctly. 

Today I saw Kamala Harris speak at the Harris (formerly Biden) campaign headquarters in Delaware. After her husband introduced her and Harris walked to the podium, I was moved almost to tears by her opening remarks. 

It wasn't what she was saying, which was fine. It was the fact that here was the 2o24 Democratic presidential nominee, almost certainly, who I was truly enthusiastic about. It just felt so good to not be thinking about Biden, "Joe, you've done some great things, but you're too old and too down in the polls to have a decent chance of beating Trump. It's time for you to go."

Which he did, thankfully, showing that while I had my doubts about this, in the end Biden recognized reality and chose to put the country above his understandable desire to persist with his campaign against Trump, who Biden correctly understands is an existential threat to our democracy. 

I can even forgive Biden for taking so long to decide that he should withdraw from the race, even though the need for this to happen has been evident for many months, and especially evident after Biden's horrendous debate performance in late June.

What seems to have happened is that Biden repeatedly proclaiming that he was going to stay in the race acted like the heavy weight on top of a pressure cooker (remember those? only if you're as old as me and Biden). That stifled the enthusiasm of Democrats across the country who desperately want to keep Trump out of the White House, but didn't see Biden as being capable of defeating Trump.

Now that Harris is the presidential candidate -- she already has commitments from enough delegates to the Democratic National Convention to assure this happens -- the pent-up "steam" that until now didn't have any place to vent is on full display among Democrats. This power is coming at just the right time: a bit over 100 days to election day, enough time for Harris to make her case to voters.

The Harris fundraising is amazing. I was one of the first-time donors, since until now I had no interest in supporting Biden's presidential campaign.

Of course, the big question now is whether Harris can overcome the lead that Trump has both nationally and in most of the battleground states. An initial poll has some encouraging results.

Nate Silver has frozen his election forecast for Trump vs. Biden as of yesterday. Here's how it stood when Biden announced he was withdrawing. Trump had a 73% chance of winning, Biden 27%. In a week or so Silver said he will start up the forecast model again once enough Trump vs. Harris polls have been released. Hopefully it will begin to show Harris closing the gap with Trump. 

This is Silver's final national polling average for Trump vs. Biden. Trump has a four point lead. Not good, since given the advantage the electoral college has for a Republican candidate, Silver says that a Democratic candidate has to have a 2-3 point lead nationally in order to have about a 64% chance of winning the presidency. 

BIden will destroy the Democratic Party if he doesn't withdraw

Every day President Biden dithers around, now with Covid clouding his already-suspect thinking, trying to decide whether he should withdraw from the presidential race, he sets the stage for a catastrophic destruction of the Democratic Party if he fails to do the right thing and turn the nomination over to Kamala Harris.

I say this as a (formerly) proud Democrat who always backed my party's candidate for president with enthusiasm.

Now I rejoice in replying "stop" to every text message asking me to donate to Biden's campaign. I have no interest in helping his candidacy in any other way, either, because along with two-thirds of my fellow Democrats, I want Biden to withdraw and do what he said he'd do when he ran in 2020: be a one-term president who sets the stage for a younger generation of Democratic leaders.

Just about everything Biden does now irritates me, because I view him as a massive threat to democracy by his so-far stubborn refusal to heed the advice of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Barack Obama, Adam Schiff, George Clooney, and many other Democratic leaders: get out, because if you don't, you're greatly increasing the chance Donald Trump wins in November.

When I listen to his speeches, I hear an old man with diminished faculties who talks about his prior successes, failing to realize that voters are looking ahead to the next four years, not backward to the past three and a half years.

I hate it when Biden says something like, "Republicans want to make abortion illegal everywhere; we can't let that happen," his audience applauds and cheers, and Biden inexplicably says, "No, no, I'm not joking." Geez, dude, they weren't laughing at you; they were agreeing with you. You've just gotten into the habit of saying things that make no sense, like how you start to make a point, lose your train of thought, then say "Anyway..."

Before I looked on these sorts of utterances as Biden quirks, almost endearing, because I was a Biden backer.

Now I see them as signs that Biden is too old and set in his ways to be either an effective president or an effective candidate. And I say this as a 75 year-old man who recognizes how I've developed some senior citizen weaknesses of my own -- the big difference obviously being that I'm not claiming to be competent to lead our country.

Today my political spirits were lifted by reporting that Biden is finally starting to listen to the calls from Democratic leaders for him to withdraw from the presidential race. I seized on the headline of a New York Times story (even with the caveat in smaller type), like a drowning man thrown a life preserver.

Several people close to President Biden said on Thursday that they believe he has begun to accept the idea that he may not be able to win in November and may have to drop out of the race, bowing to the growing demands of many anxious members of his party.

One of the people close to him warned that the president had not yet made up his mind to leave the race after three weeks of insisting that almost nothing would drive him out. But another said that “reality is setting in,” and that it would not be a surprise if Mr. Biden made an announcement soon endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement.

Some people in Mr. Biden’s camp have told Democratic allies that the president’s resolve to stay in the race has been most shaken by three developments: The decision by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, to weigh in so strongly, new state polls showing that his path to an Electoral College victory has grown far more remote and the boycott of key party donors.

Great news.

It's good that Biden appears to have given up on his absurd statement that the only way he'd leave the race was if polls showed that it was impossible to win the election. If Biden truly believes that a poll in July can predict with 100% certainty an outcome in November, his mind is in even worse shape than it looked to be at his debate with Trump.

Polls don't predict. They are a snapshot of a particular time. But there's such a thing as prediction markets, where people bet on all kinds of things, including whether Biden will withdraw from the presidential race. One such market has the chance of this happening at 90% currently.

I sure hope the traders are correct. Our country can't endure another four years of Trump. Right now Biden only has a 28% chance of beating Trump, according to Nate Silver's website, which uses his successful approach to analyzing state and national polls, taking into consideration many factors that go beyond simply aggregating poll results. 

If Biden stays in the race, then loses to Trump, this will cause a schism in the Democratic Party that will be extremely difficult to repair. People like me will delight in saying "I told you so!" to those who urged Biden not to withdraw.

Biden's reputation will go from being a president with many accomplishments to  "Ruth Bader Biden" -- a stubborn old person who put self above country, just as Ruth Bader Ginsberg did when she refused to step down and allow Obama to appoint a younger Supreme Court justice. Ginsberg hung on too long and died when Trump could appoint her replacement, a tragic mistake that I'll never forgive her for.

I'll never forgive Biden either if he stays in and loses this November. Nor will most in the Democratic Party. Nor should they. Biden has been told by both Democratic leaders and the Democratic electorate that he needs to withdraw. If he doesn't, his place in history will become "the stubborn president who handed the presidency to Donald Trump."

Why I'm a depressed Democrat (it's all Biden's fault)

What a difference a debate makes. Prior to June 27, 2024 I was an optimistic Democrat, looking forward to watching President Biden kick Trump's lying ass face-to-face. 

After the debate, along with many millions of other members of my party, I was deeply disturbed by the inescapable reality that Biden not only didn't do any ass-kicking, he appeared befuddled during much of the debate and at times couldn't express a coherent thought. 

Some three weeks later, my mood hasn't improved. If anything, I'm even more depressed now. Politically, not clinically, thankfully. (I've experienced actual depression; it's way beyond what I'm feeling now, though that's bad enough.)

The basic reason is that soon after the debate, there was such an uproar among Democrats about Biden's extremely bad performance, I held out hope that this would spur Biden to recognize that his already slim chance of defeating Trump now was considerably slimmer, and he needed to withdraw from the race to avoid a catastrophic loss to a man who absolutely must never become president again. 

That was wishful thinking. For it's now looking increasingly certain that Biden is digging in his heels in a reality-defying display of incompetence, egotism, and a disinclination to do what's best for the country. 

I'll list some of my reasons for despair. Hey, maybe this blog post will find its way to a political therapist of sorts, someone who can refute those reasons with such impressive logic and facts, I'll be persuaded to break out of my depression and become an optimistic Democrat again.

Well, I can dream.

(1) At the moment Nate Silver's "Silver Bulletin" gives Biden a 30% chance of winning. The Economist gives him a 22% chance (it was 29% the day of the debate). FiveThirtyEight has the race as about a toss-up, slightly favoring Biden (but the analysis relies in part on economic data that was a good predictor in the past, but seems not so good now).

(2) Biden's approval rating is at 39%. No president has been re-elected with such a low rating.

(3) Rep. Adam Schiff, who I respect a lot, is reported to have said this, according to a New York Times story today, "Biden Circle Shrinks as Democrats Fear Election Wipeout."

Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who is running for Senate, warned during a private meeting with donorson Saturday that his party was likely to suffer overwhelming losses in November if Mr. Biden stayed in the race, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Schiff’s remarks at the meeting.

“I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Mr. Schiff said at a fund-raiser in New York, according to a person with access to a transcription of a recording of the event. “And we may very, very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House.”

(4) The New York Times story cites polls showing Biden trailing in most or all of the battleground states. 

(5) A Vox story today, "Democrats shouldn't use Trump's shooting as an excuse to stick with Biden," starts off with: 

Many congressional Democrats believe their party is hurtling toward a cliff’s edge and shouldn’t even bother trying to turn around.

Late last week, Senate Democrats held a private meeting to discuss Joe Biden’s electoral viability in the wake of his disastrous debate performance and subsequent revelations of his apparent cognitive decline. According to Politico, no more than four of the caucus’s 50 Democrats said they were committed to sticking with Biden as their party’s nominee.

By many accounts, a large majority of Democrats on the Hill believe that Biden has little hope of defeating Donald Trump and that a different candidate would have a better chance. The Capitol Hill reporters Heather Caygle and Jake Sherman claim that they haven’t spoken to a single congressional Democrat “who privately says they think Biden is capable of running and beating Trump at this point.” Unnamed “senior Democrats” have told Politico they’re convinced the president will lose the election.

(6) Nonetheless, in an interview yesterday with Lester Holt, Biden said that he doesn't believe the polls and, when asked who he relies on to give him advice about whether he should stay in the race, said "Me." The White House clearly has a bunker mentality: ignore reality and hope nobody will notice that the emperor (in this case the president) has no clothes, politically-speaking.

(7) Biden keeps talking about how 15 million people voted for him in the Democratic primary, and he has to respect their decision. Well, I was one of those people. There wasn't a genuine primary. I voted for Biden because the only other option was Marianne Williamson, if I recall correctly. And many Democrats voted for "none of the above" in a protest vote against Biden running again. Today polls show that most Democrats want Biden to withdraw from the race, feeling he is too old to run again.

(8) A Washington post story, "Biden allies worry he is not getting complete information about race," shows that his inner circle isn't being honest with him.

Democratic lawmakers and strategists inside the effort to reelect President Biden have grown concerned in recent days that he is listening to a small number of aides who are limiting the data he receives.

....The calls for broader advice come as Democratic lawmakers are raising new doubts about what Biden has been told about his support, after a Zoom call Saturday when Biden argued without evidence that he was leading in national polls outside the typical margin of error. An eight-minute portion of a roughly 45-minute video of the call with the New Democrat Coalition was given to The Washington Post by a Democrat.

So, yeah, I'm depressed. Biden is sinking farther behind Trump, with no prospect of a turnaround. Biden isn't in touch with political reality, choosing to listen to a small number of advisors who aren't telling him the truth about how badly he's doing. 

And the Democratic National Committee wants to have Biden nominated electronically this month, not at the Democratic convention, in order to forestall further efforts to have him withdraw. So much for Biden's vow "challenge me at the convention." This is another sign of weakness. 

Democratic bosses are moving to kill off efforts to force Joe Biden from the party’s presidential ticket by rushing ahead with plans to formalise his candidacy before next month’s convention in Chicago.

The move comes while the rebellion triggered by last month’s debate fiasco – which prompted multiple calls from within the party for Biden to be replacedas the candidate – has stalled following Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

The Democratic National Committee is seeking to exploit the impasse by pushing ahead with a plan that would secure the president’s nomination by arranging for convention delegates to vote electronically in a week-long roll call starting in late July, Axios reported.

If a majority of the 4,000 delegates back Biden, it will make his candidacy technically unchallengeable when the convention starts on 19 August.

It's good Trump wasn't killed. Now let's defeat the S.O.B.

Let's not learn the wrong lesson from yesterday's attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. The biggest problem facing our country isn't toxic political discourse. It is Donald Trump.

To believe otherwise is to deny some evident facts. That's why I disagree with the basic premise of Biden's speech to the nation today. 

President Joe Biden used a rare Oval Office address on Sunday to condemn political violence and plead with Americans to turn down the temperature in the increasingly toxic political system after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

...Speaking from the Resolute Desk, Biden decried that the political rhetoric has gotten “very heated” and urged Americans to “cool it down.” He said disagreements in a democratic system were inevitable, but politics should be an “arena for peaceful debate,” and not a “killing field.”

Biden, along with many other politicians, both Democratic and Republican, are wrongly assuming that the motivation of the 20 year old man who tried to kill Trump (and did kill a member of the rally audience) was political. 

There's no evidence of this. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican. He made a small donation to a Democratic-leaning group. He clearly wasn't a political zealot. A CNN story says: 

So far, investigators haven’t found any evidence on social media or other writings by Crooks that might help identify his motive for the attempted assassination, law enforcement officials say.

But CNN interviews with more than a half-dozen former classmates and neighbors of Crooks painted him as quiet, with classmates remembering him as a good student and something of a misfit in high school. And a review of public records suggests he may have had divergent political leanings, with Crooks registering to vote as a Republican but making a small donation to a Democratic-leaning group.

Since Crooks was killed by the Secret Service, there's no way to know what led him to take an AR-15 rifle to a rooftop near the Trump rally location and fire shots at Trump, narrowly missing him aside from his ear, but hitting several other people in the audience. 

So at the moment it is irresponsible to blame the shooting on toxic political discourse, since there's zero evidence this spurred Crooks to do what he did. There's a much greater chance that even though he showed no sign of mental illness, he struggled with some "demons" that were kept hidden from other people and eventually led him to attempt to kill Trump. 

As others have noted, the man who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, John Hinckley, Jr., apparently was trying to impress actress Jodie Foster with his moment of fame and didn't have anything against Reagan.

Similarly, Crooks, who lived nearby, may have used the Trump rally to act out his own desire -- which unfortunately will always remain a matter of conjecture.

The parade of Republicans who I've heard decrying the vicious attacks on Trump's character and political positions fail to understand the simple reason for this: Trump has a nasty character and dangerous political positions. 

Trump has lied, cheated, and stolen his way through life. It's difficult to think of anything admirable about Trump. The best I can come up with is that Trump is remarkably consistent: he always puts himself first, not his family, not his associates, not his country. 

There's no one in recent American politics who has been more toxic than Trump.

Trump never tires of attacking people who fail to kiss his ass with sufficient enthusiasm. In his first term he caused hundreds of thousands of needless Covid deaths by failing to endorse public health measures that would have saved those lives. His legal problems stem from him doing illegal things. He had sex with a porn star a few months after his wife gave birth to their son Barron, then tried to cover that up shortly before the 2016 election in a fashion that earned him 34 felony convictions. He encouraged the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol and did nothing to stop it.

This just scratches the surface of all the crap Trump has dumped upon our country in his boundless enthusiasm for destroying all that is admirable about our democracy. Republican politicians don't like it when us Democrats call Trump an existential threat to democracy.

But that's the truth, and it needs to be spoken even more loudly after the assassination attempt, because this likely will garner Trump some sympathy points in upcoming polls.

Regarding the Republican convention next week, I suppose if all of the speeches, including the one from Trump himself, are totally respectful toward Biden and other Democrats, focusing only on policy positions regarding immigration, taxes, climate change, foreign policy, and such that the two parties disagree on, then I'll be totally surprised, and possibly even open to changing my highly negative attitude toward Trump and his GOP supporters.

The chance of that happening is extremely slim, though. Hopefully the Biden campaign won't hold back after a few days of post-assassination-attempt halting of campaign activities. It's vitally important that the S.O.B. called Donald Trump be defeated this November. Democrats shouldn't worry about attacking him strongly with words.

It's attacking people physically that's the problem. Something that Trump has encouraged his followers to do, as I well recall from how he acted in 2016. Thus Trump has contributed more than anyone else to the climate of making political violence acceptable.

He's a despicable human being and needs to be shown the trash can of history in the upcoming election.

Here's what I predict will happen with Biden. It doesn't end well.

Everybody deals with stress in different ways.

Being a compulsive writer, now mostly in the form of my three blogs, I feel better when I get things off my mind and onto a computer screen, then into cyberspace.

So that's what I'm going to continue to do with my #1 stressor, President Biden's all-important campaign against Donald Trump for the presidency. 

I can't do what I heard Michael Steele and Joy Reid pontificating about on MSNBC as I drove around this afternoon.

Steele was super annoying, and dead wrong, as he loudly proclaimed that the only people who want Biden to withdraw from the race in favor of Kamala Harris or some other Democrat are the "elites" -- elected officials, wealthy donors, and Hollywood types -- while ordinary Democrats are backing Biden.

Well, I beg to differ. I'm no elite. Neither is my wife. Nor are the 56% of Democrats nationally who want Biden to withdraw according to a Politico story about a new poll released yesterday. 

Fifty-six percent of Democrats and 67 percent of all Americans believe Biden should withdraw “given his performance in the debate,” The Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll found, while new highs of 85 percent of Americans say Biden is too old for a second term and 60 percent say the same of Trump. Both men receive 46 percent support among all registered voters, nearly unchanged from the last edition of the poll in April.

I've been following the ups and (mostly) downs of Biden following his disastrous debate performance on June 27, just two weeks and a day ago, though it seems like a political eternity. I obsessively pour over the latest poll numbers and how analysts such as Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight, and the Economist are predicting the outcome of the presidential contest.

So here's another in my attempts to lower stress by writing about my anxieties, this time in the form of predictions about what will transpire with Biden between now and election day, November 5.

I'll be pleased if what I predict doesn't happen, because I want Trump to lose. Which is why I'm so stressed, because I don't see that happening. 

(1) There will be more calls from elected officials and other "elites" for Biden to withdraw. He'll ignore them. Biden is stubborn. He seems to truly believe that he's the only Democrat who can beat Trump. Campaign rallies with adoring supporters will strengthen Biden's determination to stay in the race.

(2) Biden will continue to have senior moments, a charitable way of describing the evident decline in his mental capacity. But not so many of them, at least for a while, to make Biden decide that he's unelectable. So Biden will hang on through July, past the point of no return to choose a different candidate.

(3) The Republican Convention next week will cause Trump to gain a few more points in the polls, both nationally and in the battleground states, notably the Democratic must-win states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

(4) It's a distinct possibility that Trump will spring a surprise by choosing a vice-president candidate who isn't on the usual short list: Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Doug Burgum. He might pick a woman like Elise Stefanik to shore up his support among women. This would be bad for Biden, as Harris would be against a fellow female in a likely vice-presidential debate rather than a man.

(5) By all accounts Trump's campaign staff are experienced and competent. They've already taken steps to moderate his positions on controversial issues like abortion. Trump will act and speak even more like a Republican moderate as November approaches in a successful attempt to further peel away Biden's base of support.

(6) National polls will continue to show a fairly close race, albeit with Trump leading once the polls are aggregated. However, this will mask a large difference in enthusiasm between those backing Biden and Trump. Biden voters won't be nearly as inclined to donate to his campaign and volunteer for it as Trump voters will. After all, 56% of Democrats don't even want him in the race. 

(7) If Trump has a comfortable lead in September, there's a good chance he will duck out of the second debate. This would deprive Biden of his best chance to reach a very large audience, 50 million or more, and show them that his first debate meltdown was an aberration. 

(8) As much as the Biden campaign will try to make the race about Trump (danger to democracy! unhinged! trampler of reproductive freedom! etc.), the media will continue to largely focus over the next four months on Biden's mental status. Every misstatement, every inability to finish a sentence, will be discussed in depth as another indication that the first debate was a window into Biden's fragile state of mind. 

(9) The Trump campaign will feature clips of Biden looking senile over and over and over. The campaign ads will almost write themselves. Biden saying "Vice-president Trump" yesterday when he meant to say "Vice-president Harris" will be what people remember of his NATO press conference, not his strong command of foreign policy.

(10) Those who continue to express doubts about Biden's ability to beat Trump will be attacked by the  party faithful as traitors who are undermining Biden's ability to win. Eventually they, which includes me, will largely stay silent, choosing to let events do the talking, while hoping they are wrong.

(11) Up until the end, the Biden campaign will argue that the polls showing Trump comfortably ahead are wrong, just as they showed Clinton beating Trump in 2016. 

(12) But on election night, November 5, the race will be called for Trump before midnight West Coast time. Depression will set in for Democrats. However, Biden will give a fairly upbeat concession speech, saying that because he did his best in an attempt to defeat Trump, he doesn't have any regrets about staying in the race.

(13) I'll do my best to avoid throwing up in disgust upon hearing those words. Then I'll go to bed and hope that either I never wake up, or find that all of this was just a bad dream and that I'm living in the Matrix, not really real reality.

Again, I'll be beyond joyful to refer to this post on election night as a massively inaccurate prediction, given that Biden pulled out a victory over Trump. I'd be ever so happy to be proven wrong.

More bad news for Biden. He needs to withdraw, or our country is screwed.

Recently on MSNBC's Morning Joe program, President Biden phoned in to announce that he's not going to withdraw as the presumptive Democratic nominee, no matter what the "elites" say, because Biden claims to know that the average Democratic voter wants him to stay in the race. 

As evidence he cited what people were telling him at campaign events following his debate debacle. Wow, what a non-shock: most of those who take the time and trouble to attend a Biden rally support his candidacy.

Next Biden should attend a Kansas City Chiefs home game. He'll probably find that most of the people there are fans of the Chiefs. Which obviously doesn't prove that most Americans are.

Virtually all of the news has been bad for Biden today. I've seen nothing that would make me change my conclusion that Biden needs to withdraw in order for our country to have the best chance of avoiding the horror of a second Trump presidency. 

Here's a tour of what struck my eye today.

Richard Hasen is a professor of law at UCLA and the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. He's a regular commentator on MSNBC where he always makes good sense about the danger Trumpism poses to our democracy. Today he wrote a scathing piece for Slate, "Democrats Sure Aren't Acting as if Trump Beating Biden Is an Existential Threat to Democracy." 

For all the talk from congressional Democrats about Donald Trump being an existential threat to democracy, they sure aren’t acting like it. That’s true in how they are handling the situation with President Joe Biden’s precarious reelection campaign, but the problem goes much deeper.

...A recent CBS poll showed that only 27 percent of people think Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, compared to 72 percent who think he does not. (A month ago, before the debate, the numbers were 35/65.) In swing-state polls, Biden is losing, and polls are moving in the wrong direction. Careful election analyst Dave Wasserman wroteon X: “The notion that the presidential is a Toss Up was a stretch even before the debate. Today, Trump has a clear advantage over Biden and a much more plausible path to 270 Electoral votes.”

Dave Weigel notes that this is the first time in 24 years that a Republican is leading in polling averages after July 4. In July 2020, Biden was leading by 9 points. He ended up winning that race by exactly half that margin—a feat that raises further questions about his ability to overcome Trump’s growing lead.

...If you genuinely believe that Democrats’ dire warnings about Trump and democracy are entirely reasonable, then their cowardice to have a hard conversation with Biden about the president’s path forward is itself a threat to the future of American democracy.

George Clooney wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, "George Clooney: I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee."

I’m a lifelong Democrat; I make no apologies for that. I’m proud of what my party represents and what it stands for. As part of my participation in the democratic process and in support of my chosen candidate, I have led some of the biggest fund-raisers in my party’s history. Barack Obama in 2012. Hillary Clinton in 2016. Joe Biden in 2020.

Last month I co-hosted the single largest fund-raiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever, for President Biden’s re-election. I say all of this only to express how much I believe in this process and how profound I think this moment is.

I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced.

But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.

...We love to talk about how the Republican Party has ceded all power, and all of the traits that made it so formidable with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to a single person who seeks to hold on to the presidency, and yet most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks. But the dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.

NBC News reports, "'It's already disastrous': Biden campaign fundraising takes major hit."

President Joe Biden’s campaign has already suffered a major slowdown in donations and officials are bracing for a seismic fundraising hit, with the fallout from a debate nearly two weeks ago taking a sizable toll on operations, according to four sources close to the re-election effort. 

“It’s already disastrous,” one of the sources close to Biden’s re-election said of fundraising.  

"The money has absolutely shut off," another source close to the re-election said.

The Oregon Capital Chronicle has a story, "Rep. Blumenauer calls on Biden to withdraw while other Oregon Dems stay silent." Blumenauer has the courage of his convictions. I sure wish his Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives did.

Oregon’s longest-serving U.S. representative on Wednesday called for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, while other members of Oregon’s Democratic congressional delegation and nominees are keeping mum.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from east Portland who plans to retire in January after nearly three decades in the House, became the first member of Oregon’s delegation to take a public stand on Biden’s ability to win in November. 

...Rep. Andrea Salinas, meanwhile, said Biden should do the best thing for the country, without specifying what that would be. 

The Washington Post tells us, "Pelosi opens the door, subtly, to replacing Biden." 

In a 10-minute TV appearance on “Morning Joe” at 7:40 a.m., Pelosi — who has a decades-long relationship with the president and still commands the deep respect of her colleagues — left her mark on the biggest political crisis facing the Democratic Party in years.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short,” the California Democrat said. “He is beloved, he is respected, and people want him to make that decision.”

In those few sentences on a program Biden is known to watch, Pelosi didn’t directly call for Biden to step aside. But she did significantly reframe a delicate but urgent conversation taking place among Capitol Hill lawmakers, Democratic donors, party strategists and voters after Biden’s faltering debate performance two weeks ago raised questions about whether he can beat Donald Trump and serve another term as president.

Lastly, it's important to realize that as a man who works for Nate Silver reported today in a message to subscribers of Silver (I'm one), the electoral college bias toward Republicans, including the conservative leaning of most swing states, means that Biden has to make up 5 points in the national polling average to have a decent chance of winning the presidential election. 

After last month’s debate, Donald Trump leads by about 3 points in our national polling average. But even now, the natural variation in polls means that we’re going to get individual polls that show a tied or even Biden +1 national race — just as we get others that show Trump ahead by 6 or 7. It’s obviously wrong to cherry-pick these polls to claim the race is tied. But things wouldn’t look great for Biden even if he and Trump were tied in the polling average. Why? Trump still has an edge in the Electoral College.

...Here’s a chart showing each candidate’s chance of winning the election at different popular vote margins. Biden becomes favored to win the election when the popular vote margin is between D +2 and D +3. But even in this scenario, Trump has an almost 1 in 3 chance of winning, like he won against Clinton in 2016 with a margin in this range. If Biden wins the popular vote by less than 2 points, he has less than a 50/50 chance of winning the election and is usually the clear underdog. Even if Biden wins the popular vote by between 1 and 2 points, for instance, he only has a 38 percent chance of winning a majority of electoral votes.

Biden's interview with Stephanopoulos showed why he shouldn't run again

President Biden's debate with Trump was painful to watch, since Biden looked lost and confused, and often couldn't speak coherently.

Yesterday Biden had a second chance, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, to reassure Americans that he was capable of both beating Trump this November and of serving competently for another four years as president.

He failed again, though in a different fashion than at the debate. Debate Biden appeared senile. Interview Biden appeared like an old man who has lost touch with reality, yet wrongly believes there's nothing wrong with him.

It was fortunate for me that the interview was only about 22 minutes long, because at the 15 minute mark, my wife was begging me to turn off the recording I'd made of it, Biden was speaking so annoyingly. 

I convinced her to watch the remaining few minutes. But just barely.

Prior to the interview both of us believed that Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and allow Vice President Harris to take his place. After the interview we felt even more strongly this should happen.

It's even more clear now that Biden is seriously out of touch with both his own aging and the state of the race between him and Trump. While it's obvious to just about everybody in the country, Biden denied that he is any different now than he was four years ago when he first ran for president.

That's obviously false. So either Biden is lying to the American public or he has deluded himself about his physical and mental health. Not a good look whichever is true.

Over and over, Stephanopoulos presented facts that Biden discounted or outright denied. I'm not saying that Biden acted as badly as Trump does with his griping about "fake news," but I heard enough of this from Biden to make me feel that I was watching Trump-lite.

Check out a transcript of the interview to see for yourself how much Biden was truth-impaired and annoyingly clueless. 

Biden was asked if he'd watched a recording of his disastrous debate. He answered, "I don't think I did, no." You don't think you did? How could you not know? And if you didn't, why not? There was general agreement that Biden performed very poorly. Football teams watch a game where they played badly to learn how to improve. Yet Biden hasn't done this. Really disappointing.

Biden was asked "Are you the same man today that you were when you took office three-and-a-half years ago?" He dodged the question, talking about his accomplishments as president rather than what he was asked about, his physical and mental condition now compared to 2020.

Fifty million people who watched the debate saw a very different Biden from his first campaign for the presidency. About three-fourths of all voters and almost half of Democrats consider he is too old to run for president again. Yet Biden never addressed this concern straight-on in the interview. That was an insult to the American public.

Biden was asked if he'd agree to take a cognitive exam by a neurologist and make the results public. He said he wouldn't do this, coming up with some B.S. about how he passes a "cognitive exam" every day via his duties as president. Again, an insult to the majority of Americans who have doubts about his mental capacity.

Biden was correctly told by Stephanopoulos that he was behind Trump prior to the debate and was farther behind now. Biden said that the polls weren't accurate. Wow. Sure, they're not totally accurate, but they give a snapshot of the current state of the race. For Biden to deny this is absurd.

Biden was told that his approval rating is 36%, a big drop from 2020 when he narrowly defeated Trump.  This is an undeniable fact. Yet Biden's reply was a reality-denying "Woah, woah, woah."

Biden was asked, "Do you really believe you're not behind right now?" He replied, "all the pollsters I talk to tell me it's a tossup." Well, the three major predictors of the presidential race all say that Biden is behind, with two of them saying by a lot. 

The Economist gives Biden about a 25% chance of winning. FiveThirtyEight is kindest to Biden, giving him a 49% chance of winning. Nate Silver gives Biden a 30% chance of winning. So either Biden is in poll-deniability mode, or he's grievously uninformed about the state of the race.

Two final irritations from the interview.

When asked if there was any way he'd withdraw from the presidential race if he could be convinced that he couldn't beat Trump, Biden said, "It depends on-- on if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that, I might do that." He repeated that line, adding that the Lord Almighty isn't coming down.

This was a terrible answer.

It shows that Biden is putting himself above what's good for the country, since even if there's every indication that his running would result in Trump becoming president again -- a full-on disaster for the United States and the world -- Biden's erroneous belief that he's the only Democrat who can beat Trump is going to make him continue on with a doomed campaign.

Which brings me to an even worse answer. 

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about.

Aside from Biden's response not making much sense, it shows a lack of concern about how disastrous a loss to Trump would be. Just as I've been fearing, if Biden remains the Democratic candidate and loses to Trump this November, Biden will be just fine with the loss, because he's deluded himself into believing that no other Democrat, including Kamala Harris, could have beaten Trump.

Bottom line: Biden has to be forced to withdraw from the race in order to save our country from another four years of a Trump presidency. The alarm bells are ringing. Everybody is hearing them except for Joe Biden. That's why he has to go.

I'm a Dem eager to see Biden withdraw. Tell me why I'm wrong.

Maybe obsession for what I'm experiencing is too strong a word. But maybe it isn't.

Because I can't stop thinking about how much better it would be for the country, and also for Biden, as I argued in a recent post, if he withdrew from the presidential race.

My anxiety about Biden losing to Trump, which is looking increasingly likely, as I'll describe below, only increased after yesterday's Supreme Court ruling that basically said a president can't be held criminally liable for official acts during a presidency.

I have zero worries that Biden will get all gangster'ish. I have a whole lot of worries that Trump will.

After all, he's been promising to vastly expand the powers of the presidency if he gets another four years in the White House, including directing the Justice Department to indict his opponents and critics, regardless of the inconvenient truth that they haven't committed any crimes.

So now the only way to make sure that Trump doesn't throw our country into constitutional chaos is to have a Democrat defeat him this November. Until last Thursday's debate, I was fairly confident that Biden could do this. Now, I'm almost totally convinced that Biden can't. 

Here's reasons why I feel this way. If you disagree with any or all of these points, I'm eager to learn why. Educate me via a comment on this post.

(1) Post-debate polling shows Biden even farther behind Trump. The Biden campaign asked for, and got, a very early debate because they recognized that Biden was trailing Trump and they wanted to shake up the race by what they expected would be a strong performance by Biden.

Instead, the horrendous way Biden acted at the debate has caused him to lose even more ground to Trump. Here's a X post about this.

This fits with Nate Silver's model of the odds that Trump or Biden will win this November. It's based on more than just polls, so Biden has slumped post-debate to a greater degree than the change in battleground states polling. (I'm a subscriber to Silver's site; the chance of winning figure below is only available to subscribers.)

And a Politico story, "Two new post-debate polls have bad news for Biden," says this: 

Two new polls taken after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump offer discouraging news for Democrats.

A Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll published Tuesday found Trump beating Biden by 3 percent in a six-candidate presidential ballot — a post-debate reversal from a survey a month earlier that had the two candidates tied.

Another poll conducted for CNN by SSRS similarly found Trump holding a 6 percentage point lead over the president, unchanged from an earlier survey, but also this: Fifty-six percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning registered voters said their party has a better shot at winning with a candidate other than Biden.

(2) Kamala Harris is a stronger candidate than Biden against Trump. The CNN poll mentioned above found that voters believe someone other than Biden would fare better against Trump, with Harris showing more strength than Biden.

Three-quarters of US voters say the Democratic Party would have a better shot at holding the presidency in 2024 with someone other than President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. His approval rating also has hit a new low following a shaky performance in the first debate of this year’s presidential campaign.

In a matchup between the presumptive major-party nominees, voters nationwide favor former President Donald Trump over Biden by 6 points, 49% to 43%, identical to the results of CNN’s national poll on the presidential race in April, and consistent with the lead Trump has held in CNN polling back to last fall.

...The poll also finds Vice President Kamala Harris within striking distance of Trump in a hypothetical matchup: 47% of registered voters support Trump, 45% Harris, a result within the margin of error that suggests there is no clear leader under such a scenario. Harris’ slightly stronger showing against Trump rests at least in part on broader support from women (50% of female voters back Harris over Trump vs. 44% for Biden against Trump) and independents (43% Harris vs. 34% Biden).

Several other Democrats have been mentioned as potential Biden replacements in recent days, and each trails Trump among registered voters, with their levels of support similar to Biden’s, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom (48% Trump to 43% Newsom), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (47% Trump to 43% Buttigieg), and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (47% Trump to 42% Whitmer).

Keep in mind that the other Democrats polled as an alternative to Biden are much less familiar to voters than Biden, so they have a lot more upside potential than Biden. 

(3) Biden and his campaign aren't being honest about the reason for his poor debate performance. Biden puts himself forward as a truth-teller. Indeed, he is hugely more honest than Trump, who lies constantly. But it bothers me that Biden and his campaign keep coming up with excuses for his very weak debate performance that don't make sense.

Midway through the debate panicked staffers started to say that Biden had a cold. But a cold doesn't take away someone's ability to speak in coherent sentences. And the next day, Biden was speaking much more clearly and strongly at a campaign rally -- where he spoke from a teleprompter, as he did at the State of the Union address. 

Today Biden said that he was tired from two trips overseas. But a Politico story, "Biden's latest excuse: blame it on the travel," casts doubt on this theory.

President Joe Biden is now chalking up his fumbling debate performance to a heavy travel schedule ahead of the face-off with Donald Trump — the latest in a series of explanations for an episode that has caused some Democrats to call for him to drop his reelection bid.

The president told donors Tuesday that he was offering “not an excuse but an explanation” for his struggles during the debate.

...“I wasn’t very smart. I decided to travel around the world a couple of times … shortly before the debate,” Biden said at a fundraiser in McLean, Virginia. “I didn’t listen to my staff and I came back and then I almost fell asleep on stage.”

Biden went to France for the 80th anniversary of D-Day in early June, then to Italy for the G7 meeting on June 12. The president followed that up with a Los Angeles fundraiser on June 15. He returned to Washington on June 16, or 11 days before the debate. He and his team holed up at Camp David for prep for nearly a week prior to the event with Trump in Atlanta.

So actually Biden took no trips for 11 days before the debate. That doesn't fit with Biden saying he traveled around the world "shortly" before the debate. And reporting has said that Biden's team scheduled an afternoon nap time during the six days of debate preparation.

It's clear that Biden and his campaign staff are desperate to throw out excuses for his poor debate performance that avoid the most likely explanation: he's 81 years old and has been having increasing trouble with his mental focus. 

Lastly, I can recommend a Vox story, "5 terrible reasons for Biden to stay in the race," if you're still convinced that he should do this.