When an election matters so much that nothing matters

So we had a Presidential debate, and it was bad. Trump did Trump things and Biden looked extremely old and fragile. Biden forgot stuff. He tripped over his words. There were clearly moments where he warmed to his task, spoke off the cuff, and did ok; there were also large stretches where he couldn’t put together coherent sentences. It was a historically bad debate performance by a Presidential candidate, if not by polling then just by, well, looking at it. Mostly I just felt bad for Biden – an old, tired man who thought (true) that he was the best/only person to beat Trump in 2020 and thinks (indeterminate) that’s true again in 2024. 

There’s no use denying Biden’s age or its effects, partly because it’s the truth and partly because it’s so obviously the truth that denying it insults the intelligence of everyone involved. Now, there is a difference between “Biden is too old to debate or campaign well” - a thing I believe - and “Biden is too old to perform the job of President” - a thing I don’t believe at the moment, given the evidence of the last 4 years of him actually doing the job, although it could become true by the end of a second term. The first one is pretty obvious to most people. The second is less so, and there’s a case to be made for Biden there. 

But is the debate an electoral liability? Will the bottom fall out of the Biden campaign? Will this hurt him, not in polls or opinions about his fitness to serve, but in the actual damn election? I predict: no. This is because there’s a massive, cataclysmic, galaxy-spanning difference in the way different two groups of voters consume political information and make political decisions. 

The first group is deeply engaged in this election. This is the majority of people who will, or are likely to, vote. For a lot of these voters, the 2024 election could be described as “the election that’s so important that nothing matters.” The stakes are so high, the candidates’ visions are so fundamentally (perhaps permanently) incompatible, that we’re locked in. If you’re going to vote Trump in the year of our Lord 2024 - after the lies about the election, after the attempts to overturn that election, after the coup, after the indictments, after the felony convictions, after the promises of revenge and unchecked power - then you’re bought all the way in. The rest of us look at the specter of Trump 2024, and Project 2025, with a fierce determination to vote for anyone who will keep that man and his allies out of the White House and away from the power to end this country as we know it. 

If you’re on Team Trump, odds are very high that you think one of two things, or perhaps both: that populist right-wing electoral authoritarianism is affirmatively good, or that the Democratic party is so full of Radical Leftists that you just have to beat them no matter who the GOP is running. If you’re on Team Biden, odds are very high that you think one of two things, or perhaps both: that Joe Biden has been a basically fine-to-good President and you want him to have 4 more years, or that you’d vote for a cabbage over Donald Trump. The election matters so much that nothing matters.

The second group is people who, despite the most informationally locked-in election in history (both people have been President before, both people have campaigned against each other before), don’t know which way they’re voting yet. To those of us who pay lots of attention to politics and political campaigns, and view this election as supremely high-stakes, they’re basically incomprehensible. Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What is it like to be a bat”-level incomprehensible. How can you not be absolutely committed in this election? How can you look at Trump as a political figure, and MAGA as a movement, and not be either totally on board or totally opposed? I can’t explain it, any more than I can tell you what it’s like to be a bat. But I know bats are real, and so are those undecided voters. 

I can’t overstate how weird this whole thing is. You’d think that if one candidate had previously tried to launch a coup and was a convicted felon the race would be over. You’d think that if one candidate looked so elderly and frail he couldn’t get through a debate the race would be over. Trump voters are locked in, anti-Trump voters are locked in, undecideds are so locked in to being not-locked-in that I don’t think anyone besides God can possibly understand what’s going on in their brains, or will be going on at the precise nano-second they pull the lever on Election Day. And that last thing is why the politics-attention-payers (like me) are prone to overestimating the impact here. The people who would change their minds in reliable and predictable ways after the debate are the people who pay attention to politics and have a semi-comprehensible (to us) approach to evaluating politics. Those people, though, are already locked in! 

See, we’ve already been through this with everything Trump does: he gets indicted for serious crimes and the polling basically doesn’t move. He gets found civilly liable of sexual assault and defamation and the polling basically doesn’t move. He gets convicted of 34 felony counts and the polling basically doesn’t move. He says outrageous stuff all the time and the polling basically doesn’t move. Trump’s numbers should have cratered a billion times. You look at this picture (from 538) and tell me normal stuff matters in this election

Philip Bump over at WaPo has the same basic stability showing up. Normal stuff doesn’t matter because the people who process information have already processed information and the people who make decisions for, um, other reasons (like vibes, favorite tie color, coin flips, or bird entrails and other divine oracles) aren’t going to start processing information now. For all my jokes about the incomprehensibility of some voters, though, they’re not completely oblivious. They know Biden’s old! It’s not a surprise! You’re telling me that Biden just looked a little too old, and that this time the polls will move? Nah, man. Trump’s, well, Trumpiness is table stakes in this election. Joe Biden’s age is, too. 

I think we’re so locked in that this election is going to be determined by a tiny, tiny handful of voters who will decide how to vote in a way that, in terms of trying to analyze, predict, and influence that process, is the functional equivalent of shaking a Magic 8-ball. What do I think we should do with this? I have no clue. I’m not a political operative and I can’t tell you if it’s feasible to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. I have no clue if a replacement candidate would really do better. I have no clue if they could build a retail politics ground game in 4 months (although I’m pretty skeptical about that bit). But I don’t think it matters all that much. Probably another candidate really can make the anti-Trump-coalition case better than Biden. The people who decide on the case being made have decided already. You love Trump, you hate Trump, or you’re one of the people who will shake the Magic 8-ball and decide our fate.

Bonne chance, America!