Known Unknowns
By 
Rick Perlstein — who is fundamentally in agreement with people who think that the best shot at beating Trump requires another Democratic candidate — points out that we’re also in the midst of a collective media crusade against one candidate that pretty clearly isn’t motivated by a desire to thwart fascism:
…falls into agenda-setting elite political journalists' narcissicism sweet spot: it makes themselves the center of the universe, while denying they have any political agency at all…— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) July 11, 2024
…oh, and, bottom line, they're all so jacked up over the prospect of a ten-way contest of Boar on the Floor. (The Peter Bakers are, yes, the Logan Roy in this scenario.)— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) July 11, 2024
This doesn’t mean that Biden shouldn’t step aside — indeed, the crazy media environment is something that needs to be taken into account (and, contrary to the inevitable claims that all Democratic candidates would be greeted with a similar wall of relentlessly negative coverage, this did not in fact happen in 2020 or 2012 or 2008, with 2004 being somewhere between those and the feeding frenzies against Hillary Clinton and Gore.) The basic case against Biden is 1)he’s losing, and 2)given both the media and Biden’s inability to run a normal campaign it’s not clear what the equivalent of the Comey letter that allowed Trump to come from behind in 2016 would be. But also beware people telling you that the best path forward for the Democratic Party is a Thunderdome convention with absolutely no plausible way to pick between low-name-ID candidates and the high probability of a candidate that lacks the legitimacy to turn things around. And whatever you think about the merits of another candidate, the one-note media crusade against Biden — with the frontrunner’s daily insane ramblings being almost entirely ignored — is not defensible.
While we’re here, I’m a big fan of Eric Levitz’s writing, and I think he’s written persuasively about why Biden is in deep shit, but this polling data is as useless as citing Truman and LBJ to “prove” that Biden stepping down is a bad idea:
it is not surprising that an unknown candidate with a description this positive would perform better than pretty much any known politician, but especially the president, in a survey experiment pic.twitter.com/vVnHmL79y1— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) July 10, 2024
“Candidates poll better when voters know nothing about them but one paragraph of glowing praise” you don’t say. If Republicans agreed not to run negative ads and the press agreed not to run any critical stories about a new Democratic candidate, we’d be in great shape, but I’m not sure that’s a realistic scenario.
The properly modest and cautious case for Harris — and it’s ultimately a persuasive one to me — is “variance is the Democratic Party’s friend right now.” It’s not “Trump is easy to beat and we can be very confident that anybody but Biden would win.” Any discussion about what to do about this predicament has to accept that there are a lot of things we don’t know and will never know.