so, is biden fading after all?

well, harris appears to have a bump at his expense - tentatively. there's a signal, but it's not yet robust. that is, the bump could very well fade. or, to put it another way: now it's her turn to say something stupid. and, i'm going to ask another question: what is harris' reach with white voters?

i'm going to point to a fact that i will come back to over and over again as this plays out: for all of the talk of generational renewal, and the reality that the general voting population is undergoing a generational shift, there remains very little evidence that this is happening in the party itself. i'm not that impressed by the younger candidates in front of me, but if they want a generational renewal then they're going to have to get out and register more young people, because, as it is right now, the key demographic in the primary is in fact still older white voters, and in fact affluent ones at that. you're not going to win this primary by dominating black voters, and you're not going to win it by sweeping millennials, either. the person that wins this primary is going to do so by dominating the baby boomer vote, which is also, in fact, the reason that clinton won the last one.

i've never claimed that biden is ideal from the party base perspective (which is not mine), but he's the last of his kind. he's a dinosaur; it's true. but, that's an asset in this particular race, and not a liability - even if it kills him in the general. it's not a bug, it's a feature.

i still believe that the primary is fundamentally between biden and sanders. the media is trying very hard to insert warren as a replacement for sanders, and is waving around numbers to prove it's working, but the signal remains pretty weak. i would actually expect most warren voters to move to biden. but, she is the wild card. and, she could actually help bernie win in the end, if she takes enough delegates away from biden.

despite polling saying otherwise, which may have somewhat of a bradley effect to it, i would think that harris' ceiling is fairly low, due to the nature of the primary she's fighting. and, see, this is the point that i think a lot of the middle aged candidates aren't grasping: this is still their parents' party. it's not their kids' party. not yet.

if somebody is successful in a massive voter registration drive, that could change. otherwise, we're going to see what we saw in new york in 2016, where sanders was filling stadiums full of people that weren't able to vote for him and then got badly beaten amongst actual, registered voters. it may, in the end, still be sanders v. the universe, but they're all going to run up against the same brick wall that he did.

so, biden has a tremendous demographic advantage in the party, even if his numbers with black voters soften up a little. if he gets 50% of the black vote instead of 70% of the black vote, it doesn't change the outcome. and, nobody seems to want to come to terms with the only strategy that there actually is to counter that: they all need to get out and start registering new voters, because a dominant proportion of the existing ones are out of the reach of essentially all of them.