Washington –

I've covered presidents for 35 years, and one lesson has stuck with me: reality is always worse than what meets the eye.

And for good reason: The president surrounds himself with ambitious, highly skilled people and his job description is borrowed from the old Bing Crosby song, “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.”

The US presidential election campaign is incredibly long, but it has one big advantage: sooner or later, it gives voters a glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes. One of these is on June 27, when President Biden He took to the debate stage in Atlanta.For more than two weeks, Biden and his party have been struggling over how to address the issue.

This week, leading Democrats backed away from confronting the president, in part because he NATO welcomes allied leaders to summit In Washington.

As of Friday, after the summit concluded, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Pelosi made the announcement on Wednesday..

“It's up to the president to decide whether or not he runs,” House Speaker Pelosi said on MSNBC's “Morning Joe,” making it clear she doesn't consider the issue resolved.

“We're all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running out.”

I don't know what Biden will decide, but I know that the talking points he and his allies have been making, which I've heard from Biden-supporting readers over the past two weeks, are, as the president says, mostly just nonsense.

No, it wasn't just a “bad night”

“It was a terrible night,” Biden said. Interview with George Stephanopoulos last week.

Anyone who watched the debate knows in their heart that that's not true. No healthy person would look, talk or act like that, even if, as Biden said, he had a “bad cold.”

Biden has given far fewer press conferences and interviews than his predecessor and almost never makes unscripted public appearances. That's not a coincidence.

He still has a keen grasp of policy details. An hour-long press conference At a news conference Thursday that differed from the debate, he made a compelling case for a second term, saying the wisdom and experience that age brings make him uniquely qualified to govern.

“I'm here to finish the job I started,” he said.

Still, his answers were occasionally off-base and he made at least one memorable gaffe by referring to “Vice President Trump,” a gaffe that Republicans quickly began spreading on social media.

Whether you have a form of Parkinson's disease A knowledgeable doctor We may not know for years whether Steve Lopez or any other illness caused him to fall ill. Former presidents including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan withheld details of their illnesses until their biographies were released, and Biden will likely do the same.

But while the diagnosis may remain hidden, the symptoms were on full display at the debate.

Democrats who want Biden to stay in the race are betting that it won't happen again as Biden makes it through the next nearly four months of the campaign. That's a foolish bet.

No, the polls don't lie

I often hear this: “Polls predicted a Republican surge in 2022, and it didn't happen. Why should I believe it now?”

it's a lie.

Quality independent polls generally did not predict big Republican gains in the midterm elections, although some poor polls published by Republican-leaning companies did. The pundits who kept talking about a Republican wave in the fall of 2022 said so in spite of the polls, not because of them.

In late October before the midterm elections, I wrote Republicans are likely to win enough seats in big blue states like California and New York to secure a slim majority in the House of Representatives, but control of the Senate is up in the air and Democrats are poised to pick up big seats in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

I say this not to brag, but to make a point: If you paid attention to good polls, you could have reasonably predicted where the election was going.

That was true then and it's true now.

No, it's not easy to earn points

Indeed, Biden has only lost a few points in the polls since the debate, and the race remains very close. The FiveThirtyEight polling average is about 2.5 points against Biden. Polls tracked by The New York Times That's a three-point change. Both show Trump leading the national popular vote by a few points.

The few high-quality publicly available polls in battleground states showed similar shifts.

This is not good news for Biden. What it highlights is that the vast majority of voters are holding firm, and it would take something big to move even a small minority of them.

And the important thing is, Biden was already behind. At the time of the debate, he was trailing in most battleground states and needed the race to swing in his favor. So far, it has been going the other way.

Former President Trump is likely to gain another 2 or so points after next week's Republican National Convention, which would be in line with what typically happens.

Biden's defenders argue that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who had turned away from Biden because of dislike for Trump are likely to turn back as Election Day approaches, potentially tightening an already tight race as it nears its final stages.

But the shift resulting from hostility toward Trump would benefit any Democratic candidate, and not just Biden.

No, Kamala is not that dangerous.

From the start of his administration, Biden's main justification for running again was that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn't yet ready for prime time.

Maybe that was true in 2021 and 2022, but that argument doesn’t hold today.

Harris has performed better over the past year than he started out. Supreme Court rulings in 2022 To Overturning Roe v. WadeEnding state guarantees of abortion rights; Gave her problems She is, in effect, doing just that.

Abortion rights is one of the most important issues for the Democratic Party right now. Biden has never been shy about talking about it, and his stumble on the issue was one of the most painful moments of the debate. Harris makes the case for the Democratic Party with clarity and force.

Plus, Harris has upside potential that Biden doesn't have.

Sure, there are some voters (mostly older white men) who will vote for Biden but not a black woman for president, but they are probably outnumbered by others who believe she can win the vice presidency but not the presidency.

As I've written before, one of the main reasons Trump has maintained his lead this year is Biden's weakness with voters of colorEspecially young black and Latino voters.

Right now, polls show Harris with a slight lead over Biden against Trump. But there's potential for her to garner more support from these groups. Will that happen? Who knows. But if it does, the race would suddenly look very different.

Georgia, for example, could be brought back into the contest if black and Asian voters turn out in large numbers and with enthusiasm, as could North Carolina, especially if Harris chooses Gov. Roy Cooper, whose term ends this year, as her running mate.

To win Pennsylvania, Democrats need to gain ground in Philadelphia, where Biden is trailing, and Harris may have a better chance.

Finally, Republicans will likely spend the rest of the campaign trying to convince Americans that a vote for Biden is a vote for Harris, because she won't serve another four years. If Harris becomes the nominee, at least she can make her case.

The vice president may not be the Democratic front-runner. For example, every time Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg defends the administration on Fox News, some Democrats are in awe of him. I am fascinated by his debating skillsOthers are pinning their hopes on Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other possibilities.

But the proposed process by which one of the candidates would be nominated seems too contrived and complicated to work outside of a TV show. (In Washington, it's no compliment to call the scenario “Sorkin-esque.”)

The bottom line is simple: There are currently no states where Biden has a chance of winning that Harris could lose, and there are some states where Harris could win but Biden cannot.

Yes, the stakes are very high

“The stakes are high and we're headed for a loss,” Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego) said Thursday.

For Democrats, that's a frightening prospect: If Trump is re-elected, he and the Senate majority would be in a position to replace Justices Clarence Thomas (76) and Samuel Alito (74) with younger nominees, cementing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for years to come.

A Republican-controlled White House and Congress are almost certain to roll back efforts to fight climate change, reverse Biden's health care expansion and enact further tax cuts for high-income taxpayers.

The party will face conflicting pressures on abortion, but conservatives have made clear they will at least seek to limit access to the abortion drug.

Biden has been warning for three years that a Trump reelection would be nothing less than a threat to American democracy, and if he truly believes that, now is the time to decide what he's going to do to stop that from happening.

What else to read

This week's poll: 72% of Americans American democracy was once a good example Other countries should have followed suit, but not anymore.

LA Times Special: NATO's birthday summit in Washington comes at dark time

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