Biden places another bet on his own indispensability

Ultimately, if Biden wants to stay in the race there’s not really anything that can be done about it, and this is still the choice he’s making:

President Biden delivered a brief but animated and defiant speech at a campaign event in Wisconsin, asserting that he would continue in the race and describing former President Donald J. Trump as a liar and a threat to democracy.

“I’m staying in this race,” Mr. Biden told the crowd, to cheers. “I’m not letting one 90-minute debate wipe out three and a half years of work.” Mr. Biden’s speech in Wisconsin is the first of two appearances on Friday that will be closely watched as doubts among Democrats intensify about his ability to beat Mr. Trump. ABC News will air an interview with Mr. Biden on Friday evening.

After Mr. Biden’s shaky debate performance last week, many Democrats have urged him to prove to voters that he is fit for the job by limiting his reliance on teleprompters, engaging in unscripted conversations on the campaign trail and agreeing to more high-profile interviews with seasoned journalists. But Mr. Biden and his team limited his public appearances for much of the week — and he used a teleprompter for his brief speech in Wisconsin.

It should be noted that Biden’s belief that he’s being subjected to an unfair double standard are not wrong, and this rube-running bullshit about teleprompters is a good example.

Still, I don’t think there’s any real ambiguity about what the polling data is showing right now. This leaves us with three options assuming Biden does indeed stay in until November:

• The polling is systematically erroneous in the direction of underestimating Biden’s support by several points.
• The polling is fundamentally accurate but Biden will come back and beat Trump (even though the early debate is one of the things that was supposed to turn the tide and in fact had the opposite effect.)
• Biden’s bet on his own indispensability will work out like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, only even worse.

I think it’s pretty obvious which of these is the most likely, but as long as Biden is determined to stay in I guess we have to hope that the most likely probability turns out to be wrong.