r/politics • u/Murky-Site7468 • 6d ago

'Chill The F**k Out': John Fetterman Urges Democrats To Stick With Joe Biden | The Pennsylvania senator reminded panicked Democrats on Friday that he too had a bad debate once, yet he went on to win his Senate seat.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-debate-john-fetterman_n_667ea850e4b0415858d6a2f1
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u/Jacksonrr31 6d ago

I remember Hillary doing really well in the debates against Trump and she still lost.

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u/RandyBeaman 6d ago

And I remember Obama doing poorly in the first debate with Romney, and all the panicking online afterwards.

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u/sandysea420 6d ago

I remember, People need to calm down. For me I’m voting for the same reasons I was voting for, before the Debate. Democracy and rights.

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u/wiifan55 6d ago

Democrats aren't freaking out because they changed who they're voting for. They're freaking out because it looks like Trump will probably win vs Biden. I keep seeing these types of comments on reddit. "I'm still voting for the non-fascist." "I'd rather vote for a dead guy than Trump." "Anyone who changes their vote based on today's debate is an enemy to democracy." And on and on.

All of it misses the point. The people who were voting for Biden no matter what are still going to vote for Biden no matter what, just like the people voting for Trump no matter what will continue to vote for Trump. Elections are won or lost on the margins, and you can't tell me Biden's debate performance won't convince a substantial amount of undecided voters that he's not fit to run the country.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

So, 48m people tuned in for the debate last night, a 33% decline from 2020 and 2016. So roughly 20% of the electorate. AP did a few polls the other day asking how many people would watch the debate - 47% of respondents said that it was very important to see the debates. If you wanted, you could cheekily extrapolate that 27% of people that thought the debates were very important did not watch the debates. But cheek isn't the point. Of those 48m who actually, factually watched the debate, how many do you think were actually undecided voters, the voters who don't follow politics enough to form political opinions?

While I agree marginal changes to voter turnout can certainly decide elections, one could prognosticate ad nauseam on the possible combinations of factors that will eventually end up influencing the eventual outcome of the election, and if an undecided voter can be swayed by a debate, they can be swayed back by any number of other things. That is why they are undecided voters.

After four years of these two candidates, eight years of Trump, anyone that has yet to form an opinion is either lying or chronically undecided until they actually step into the booth and can't change their mind anymore.

One might make the argument for voter apathy, but I'd still say that if this debate is what makes you decide that you just can't decide, and you stay home, then again, you're either lying and you were going to stay home anyway, or something else tomorrow could change your mind just as easily.

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u/wiifan55 6d ago

Looking just at debate viewership is nonsensical. You're entirely ignoring online discourse, news coverage (major publications like CNN were running that Biden should be replaced for hours), word of mouth, and the endless amount of snippets from the debate that will be replayed and talked about all summer. More broadly, the debate plays exactly into the biggest legitimate concern about Biden and the strongest targeting point for Trump's campaign. To downplay the effect of this performance is to put one's head in the sand. Polls were already close going into the debate.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

I don't think my comment was looking particularly at the debate viewership, or making a point about debate viewership, but perhaps you didn't read much past that, as the next three paragraphs discuss how undecided voters are undecided voters for a reason.

I'll give you the courtesy you didn't give me, and not be deliberately insulting, but at no point did I say it wouldn't have an effect on the election. But for anyone (media, randos on Reddit) to say how much effect it will have on the trajectory of an election four months out, 18 hours after the fact seems a little premature, no?

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u/wiifan55 6d ago

The setup to your premise was debate viewership, so if you're saying that's not actually the core of your comment, then all we're left with is essentially "undecided voters are fickle," which is too general and vague of a position to really even meaningfully discuss. It's also just logically not sound. There's a sizable portion of America who do not fall into the "never Biden" and "never Trump" camps. Polling shows that. So to just hand waive away undecided voters when that's literally the group this election is going to likely come down to is willful blindness.

I also don't think you're seeing the forest for the trees when people point out the potential impact of this debate performance. The issue isn't that a presidential candidate had a bad debate -- plenty of candidates have recovered from bad debates. The issue is that the type of bad debate Biden had goes to the very core of his ability to run the country, which is precisely what the primary hangup has been for undecided voters. We're not talking about "oh X candidate was unprepared" or "X candidate was nervous" or "X candidate was caught of guard." We're talking about "X candidate didn't look mentally capable to run a gas station, much less the country." So to put it another way, it's not about this one-off performance; it's about the confirmation this one-off performance gave to people already worried about Biden's senility. That's not such an easy thing to change perception around, regardless of what voter block we're talking about. It plays 1:1 into what Trump's campaign has been pushing, and that'll only get worse from here.

I do agree we can't really say what effect this debate will have ultimately on the election. I mean, that goes without saying really. But there's urgency to figure it out, and we can only go off of the information we have at this time.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

Perhaps you missed it (happens to the best of us) or perhaps I just didn't write it well enough (always possible). You picked up part, at least, but my point was that I don't believe there are nearly as many undecided voters as there are claimed to be, and if they are "real" undecided voters, then yes, as you picked up, I think that those are fickle, relatively disengaged, and as such this is unlikely to move the overall needle with that (what I believe to be much smaller) group that much.

I'm just not very moved by media sensationalism these days. Perhaps that's a me problem, or perhaps it's affecting Democrats and Democratic pundits more than it would normally in this circumstance because there's not been a terrible amount of substantiation on the Biden front to actually conjure sensationalism off of in the last few years, like there has been with Trump. But whatever it is, I just can't find myself to feel as panicked as you appear to be.

I'm curious to see donation numbers over the next few weeks, polling numbers over the next few weeks, etc. I'm not saying, by any stretch, that the debate was good for Biden, but I'm skeptical whether it was as bad as is being claimed.

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u/wiifan55 6d ago

About 20% of voters say they have not picked a candidate in this year's presidential race, are leaning toward third-party options or might not vote at all in the Nov. 5 election, according to the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/undecided-voters-await-biden-trump-debate-with-eye-economy-border-age-2024-06-20/

About 10% of swing state voters remain undecided, according to an April 2 poll from the Wall Street Journal. The poll, conducted between March 17 and 24, questioned 4,200 registered voters, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article287347900.html#storylink=cpy

Is your position that people are just lying on polls and aren't actually undecided? And do you have any data whatsoever to show undecided voters are fickle? Wouldn't the fact that they still identify as undecided after all of this time demonstrate the exact opposite of fickleness?

I understand the general premise of your position. I just don't think it's supported by anything other than your own subjective feelings about undecided voters and what their motivations must be.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

I'm not sure I understand how your take away from my stating I would like to see fundraising numbers and post-debate polling over the next few weeks instead of posting a knee-jerk reaction on the Internet eighteen hours after the debate is me being motivated by feelings, but OK, I guess.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

It looks like your last comment to me was removed (you may have deleted it, iono), so I couldn't respond in time, but I'll leave this here in any case.

I didn't walk anything back. From your own quotes from your own links: 10% of swing state voters (as of April) are undecided, and 20% of those, if we're going to cross-reference those two percentages (pairing them together as you did, I'm assuming you find that acceptable) are leaning toward third-party or might not vote at all, (those being pre-debate numbers mind). Let's say they're all telling the truth, or think they are. That's 2% of people. Can that make a difference in an election? Of course. Is it within a margin error? Again, yes. And that does beg the question of how much the results of the debate will actually matter in terms of moving the needle, especially considering of those undecideds, many didn't watch the debate (because literally only 48m people out of an electorate of 230m people watched the debate, showing a decrease in voter engagement across all groups by a substantial margin).

All of that is to say I don't think it is in any way "obtuse" to say that there is very little to be extrapolated regarding the state of a race four months out from the debate with what we have right now, especially amongst a rather fickle subset of people, other than to say it's too early to make assumptions about campaign viability, especially frantic ones, which is literally what I have been saying the whole time.

Anyway, have a good weekend.

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u/wiifan55 6d ago

I didn't walk anything back. From your own quotes from your own links: 10% of swing state voters (as of April) are undecided, and 20% of those, if we're going to cross-reference those two percentages (pairing them together as you did, I'm assuming you find that acceptable) are leaning toward third-party or might not vote at all, (those being pre-debate numbers mind). Let's say they're all telling the truth, or think they are. That's 2% of people.

Nah, this is faulty logic. 20% of all voters are undecided, and 10% of voters in swing states are undecided according to these polls. It's not 20% of 10% are undecided in swing states. They're independent polls measuring different things. My point was just to highlight that the pool of undecided voters is not small, as you previously suggested.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

That's fair; I absolutely misread the first quote as "20% of voters that say they have not picked a candidate," which fundamentally changes the nature of that sentence and thus my extrapolation; that's my fault.

However, if you take the Reuters (20%) poll by itself, the logical move would be to compare that percentage of undecided voters to previous elections. This 538 analysis from 2019 references a study of the swing voter base at that point of around 30%, according to their measurement, of which they postulate about half (14%) are actually not legitimate undecided voters, but were undecided voters in name only.

Obviously we can't extrapolate too much from that, but we could say that there are fewer swing voters now than there were in the last election, and infer that therefore, there being less overall, there are less "real" undecideds now, and thus their votes will have less effect on this election. Which, again, I feel is probably a good cause for less panic.

Anyway, I'm tired and I'm going home. So yeah, again, have a good weekend.

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u/sennbat 6d ago

Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020. Clearly some part of your argument is wrong or that wouldnt have been possible. Theres bo reason to fall back on "lol nothing matters"

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

I didn't spend the time typing that out because "lol nothing matters." But there is a vast Internet overreaction to this topic (no surprise there), and I'm not confident it will move the needle much. Time will tell however, and that's exactly what we've not had at this point.