This is where I’m at with it too. After that SOTU performance I think it’s time to maybe start accepting that the reason Biden’s made consistently good decisions in tough spots since becoming president is because, thankfully, he’s the good version of an old person who is still 90%+ there and has maxed out certain skills through pure repetition. When you’re really good at something you can lose a step and still be good at it.
I’m going to need to see impairment actually affect the way he does his job to accept impairment as an argument from anyone going forward. They gotta supply something more than Biden stumbling over his words or confusing morning for afternoon or something. Those are things normal humans do many times per day if they are honest with themselves… and those normal humans aren’t trying to juggle all the balls a PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES has to keep aloft.
We’re at a point where all the footage that gets shown of both candidates is entirely slanted. We get occasional clips of Trump behaving like a normal person, which are cut out of the context to hide the raw batshit crazy… and every single time Biden stumbles or fumbles his words cut out of an ocean of footage of him seeming generally pretty capable.
That is happening because the media makes billions of dollars on the close horse race portrayal of this story, and your anxiety gives them clicks. They’re literally farming us right now, and I do mean us. This isn’t some evil plot or conspiracy, they don’t have to all be in agreement about doing it this way because not all of them are. They’re doing it because that’s how the cookie crumbles when they do their job and hit their quarterly numbers.
The low poll numbers, to the degree they are accurate which is questionable because of the many opportunities for sampling bias, are a reflection of the very narrative the media has been pushing for the last 3 years because it drives clicks… and that’s before taking into account the pollsters incentive to produce polls that are newsworthy aka generate clicks.
Fortunately I’m beginning to see that Biden has been aware of this narrative the whole time, and seems to have exploited it to drive expectations very low. Realizing that we’re witnessing yet another violent rope a dope move I am suddenly even more calm about this election than I already was.
It’s every non poll data point that is pointing away from the GOP being competitive this cycle. Every single one. Demographically they’re worse off than they were and declining. In terms of cash they are fully and entirely fucked, there’s no amount of money the Trumps wouldn’t steal so it’s fully good game on that, not to mention the fact that they’ve been strip mining their small dollar donor base since Trump took office in 2016… and the big donors (including Murdoch) hate Donald. In terms of candidate quality Trump is a much worse candidate than Biden. They’ve underperformed every election since 2016 and 2024 is looking like it will probably be worse not better thanks to even more insane actual war on women stuff. Trump won white women in 2016.
If the Democrats lose this it really is time for accelerationism and the likely end of the US as a superpower. If that happens… yeah worrying about that for the next 8 months seems terrible for my health.