Dear Fellow Members of the Media:
We need to talk about the way you’re covering the Democratic race for president. Consider this an intervention.
You all went crazy on Monday when a single poll showed a national tie between Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
It was like a ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes; articles suggesting a historic shakeup in the Democratic race rained down upon America like ticker tape. Huzzah! We have a whole new race!
No matter that it was literally the only poll in which Biden has not led by at least 2 points out of 68 national surveys dating back to April 8 (and in most of those, Biden led by double digits). Not even 48 hours later, two others came out showing Biden ahead by 12 or 14.
The head of the polling firm that reported the three-way tie on Monday then took to Twitter on Wednesday and declared his own survey was an outlier!
Look, I’m sorry you’re bored. I’m sorry you want more drama. I know you want Elizabeth Warren to be surging because she has such wonderful policy papers. I know you want Bernie Sanders gaining symbolic force by starring in Twitter videos in which he hits punching bags.
I know you want Beto O’Rourke to be a moral beacon on guns after his hometown was the site of a mass shooting — even though he sounds less like an Old Testament prophet and more like Kermit the Frog when he tries to speak with power.
I know you want Kamala Harris to soar on the basis of a controversial topic — 1970s school busing — most of you didn’t even know had ever been a topic, much less controversial.
I know you want Pete Buttigieg to give voice to the soul of the Democratic Party even after Buttigieg told a guy his mother would have had a perfect right to abort him the day before his birth.
I know you want Cory Booker to be an eloquent spokesman for whatever position he’s decided to take today that he didn’t take a decade ago.
Mostly, I know you want Joe Biden to be collapsing.
I know you want Democrats to gasp when he talks about Vermont when he’s in New Hampshire. I know you want Democrats to think “senile” when he says he was vice president during the Parkland shooting. You want it because the actual facts of the case are both boring and irritating.
Here they are.
Joe Biden is leading nationally by around 10 points in the poll averages. He’s in the lead in the four early states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
What’s more, he’s held these national and statewide leads now, with pretty much the same levels of support, since he declared for the presidency in the last week of April.
This is the last week of August. That’s four months. You know what we call that? A stable, long-term lead.
He makes this gaffe, he makes that gaffe, he makes the other gaffe and still he leads. He leads even as Bill de Blasio continues to make himself the biggest New York laughingstocks since “Moose Murders” opened and closed on the same night on Broadway in 1983.
That’s the story. Biden leads. It’s boring. But it’s the story. The other stories are not stories. They are acts of desperate wish-fulfillment.
Reporters and editors on the left don’t want Biden to be the nominee. Reporters and editors who want excitement don’t want Biden’s lead to just sit there like an Easter Island statue, large and unmoving and inscrutable.
But there it is. A 19th-century American philosopher named Margaret Fuller once announced, “I accept the universe.”
To which the 19th-century wag Thomas Carlyle responded: “Gad, she’d better.”
Time to accept the universe, people. Biden may not be the eventual nominee. No one will cast a vote for five months. That’s a long time.
But there’s not a single shred of actual data to contest this reality: Biden is well on his way.
Love,
A guy who refused to believe the evidence that was right there in the polls in the GOP primary in 2015-16.