Chuck Todd: An All New Campaign

Six weeks ago, it seemed pretty clear that the country was not interested in a rematch between Biden and Trump. Even the ratings for the first debate, important as they were, were shockingly low. With 51 million viewers, it was the first lowest-rated general election debate for a presidential race since we started tracking TV ratings for these things.

Polls also indicated a lower interest in this campaign and an extreme aversion to the choices that the two main parties offered. More than 50% of voters regularly said they would like to see someone other than these two run for president.

In short, voters were telling us in every way that this confrontation was something they didn’t want and wouldn’t watch – until, perhaps, the last possible minute. After all, these two candidates, as far as voters were concerned, were well defined. What new information would voters think they needed? One of the reasons I believe the initial post-debate polls didn’t change much is that the public got the two candidates they expected: a slightly manic, fact-free former President Donald Trump versus a poorly walking president, Joe Biden.

To paraphrase the late, great football coach Dennis Green, shouting from a postgame podium, “They were who we thought they were.”

Well, there’s a reason we political reporters like to utter the cliché that sometimes a month (or a week) is a lifetime in politics. Because right now, we are in the middle of a second or third political life, right since the debate on June 27th.

We are now moving from a presidential campaign that left the public disinterested and at times disgusted, to a campaign that I see generating an electorate that could be as interested, if not more so, as in 2008 and 2020, two of the highest voter turnouts in recent years. 50 years.

And the more the public pays attention, the more volatile this election could become again.

Before the assassination attempt, there was no scenario in which I believed Trump could persuade skeptics to give him a second look, much less win over voters who decided not to support him in 2020 — especially after his actions on September 6. January 2021, in particular. And maybe he still can’t win over these people. But I have a feeling those skeptics will be curious enough to know whether Saturday changed Trump to at least give him a look, perhaps tuning in to some of Thursday’s acceptance speeches. And that is an opportunity.

Meanwhile, if Democrats end up with a new nominee — and that seems more likely to happen by the hour — that is also likely to suddenly spark interest in what the new nominee has to say, which in turn could engage the electorate in a in a way that the pre-debate version of this campaign simply did not achieve.

Bottom line: We are getting very close to the moment when it would be fair to say, “Throw away everything you thought you knew about this election.”

The range of scenarios is only increasing, not decreasing. About the only thing I’m convinced of is that the various third party candidates will start to see their numbers dwindle. Why do I believe this? The Republican Party appears more united than it has been since at least 2004 and the re-election of George W. Bush. That’s not to say that Trump-skeptical Reagan conservatives aren’t still skeptical, but this convention did a lot to get the party singing more from the same song sheet.

Yes, there are still some blue state Republicans who are fighting to support Trump, and may continue to do so, but right now it is a much smaller group of Trump opponents than it was in 2016 or 2020.

And I believe the decision to nominate a replacement for Biden would have some third-party supporters, especially supporters of Cornel West and Jill Stein, giving Democrats a second look. As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s supporters, his campaign simply isn’t serious, and with the regrouping of both Democrats and Republicans, I also expect to see Kennedy’s vote begin to slowly evaporate. The lack of serious campaign events may indicate that whatever resources he had for access to the polls must be running out, because he is no longer running as a fully level campaign.

But before we get to this restart of the campaign, Democrats have to figure out what their ticket looks like and, more importantly, how quickly they can have their ticket selected and certified by the party.

At the time of writing this article, my sources tell me that just about the only people who are still trying to rationalize Biden staying in this race share Biden’s last name, with the possible exception of Biden’s longtime chief political strategist, Mike Donilon – who, as the custodian of the data that reaches the president’s desk, is starting to be blamed, along with Biden and his family, for the Democrats being in this position.

Alarmingly, for many Democrats who have spoken with some members of Biden’s inner circle, it is unclear whether the president has seen any new true data on the race since the debate, instead receiving memos with cherry-picked, less-based numbers. in individual states. polls than in “analytical” polls that use a large sample of respondents across states, along with election file data, to model results.

If anything, this data can often end up being glorified projections based on historical performance and turnout estimates, which can have difficulty capturing changes in volatile times.

It may help explain why there is such a disconnect between Democrats in Congress and the Biden campaign when it comes to the president’s actual standing with voters.

But the reality is that Democrats have passed the point of no return with Biden. And I’m willing to bet that if Biden doesn’t bow to pressure next week, he’ll start to lose support among the delegates he already technically won in the semi-uncontested primary. Rules on the Democratic side mean that delegates are only “pledged” to Biden, not legally bound to him. And the likelihood of congressional leaders orchestrating a “stop Biden” movement at the convention is increasing by the hour.

I can’t imagine that happening. At some point, Biden will realize that he wants a positive legacy for his presidency. Does he really want denial of the nomination to be the end of his career? The longer this goes on, the harder it is sometimes to watch. Wednesday night, seeing that split screen with the Republican convention celebrating Trump as Biden touched down in Delaware with Covid was a reminder that he just doesn’t look like the same guy who won four years ago.

Assuming Biden drops out, the cleanest transition for the party would be if he simply supported his vice president. If he did that, I assume many of the other top Democrats would follow suit, lining up behind Kamala Harris, the Obamas to the Clintons, and, most likely, all the potential 2028 hopefuls, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Michigan. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

I’m not ruling out a mini-primary of sorts, but I would be surprised if one developed. It’s getting very late and the party needs to have tickets, money in the bank and advertisements on the air. Any delay in determining her nominee hurts, and the need to focus on the GOP ticket will likely cause Democrats to rally around Harris in a way they wouldn’t have if this were a traditional primary that began months ago.

The only real drama, then, will be about the second wave. The most talked about first names include Whitmer, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. Three of these four elected officials are popular state office holders in three key battleground states, so their inclusion among the Democrats I spoke with makes sense in the Electoral College.

As for Beshear, the case for him is more in the messaging. He’s a Democratic governor of a red state who has to work with a GOP-controlled legislature to get things done. Beshear also has experience running against a polarizing conservative populist. Beshear won his first term against Matt Bevin, whom many people in Kentucky call “Trump before Trump,” as he won his only gubernatorial term in 2015, a year before Trump’s victory in 2016. But Bevin was just as unpopular in Kentucky, a red state, which allowed Beshear to win, and Beshear was successful enough in his first term to win a second term by almost 6 percentage points – which to a Kentucky Democrat looks like a landslide victory.

Ultimately, whoever Harris chooses, she needs to choose someone she feels truly comfortable with. If it looks too much like a forced political marriage, voters will smell it.

But let’s not sugarcoat things for the Democrats. The last time the party got a ticket this late in a campaign cycle was in 1968, and although that ticket came much closer than many Democrats thought possible after their chaotic convention, they still lost. It’s not easy to build a national campaign this late, although Harris wasn’t starting from scratch.

At this point, Democrats simply want to be competitive. As many congressional leaders believe, simply losing a very narrow race nationally would give them at least a strong swing toward regaining control of the House and possibly finding themselves with a deficit of just one or two Senate seats.

But none of this mess can begin until Biden withdraws, and until that happens, Democrats will remain in campaign purgatory. Will it last another weekend, a week or the rest of the campaign? For now, it is up to the acting president to decide.