A debate broke out on Tuesday night between PBS's resident political analyst and forecaster Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report and die-hard Democrat and columnist Jonathan Capehart.
At the 10:13 p.m. (ET) juncture, after Walter had shared data showing Biden in a shaky position, and noted the Democratic party's lack of confidence with him at the top of the ticket, Walter walked into a spat with a prickly Capehart, who fiercely defended, in an aggrieved tone, the Democratic president from critics.
Amy Walter: So, this gets back to the other issue we have sort of touched on, but we will be spending a lot more time in the next week about, which is what’s going on, on the Democratic side. And the fact that it is the president who should be able to make this case about the dissonance, the president who should be talking about what a Donald Trump second term would look like, who would be pointing to these as examples of the differences between the two parties, he's unable to do that, because even within his own party he is seen as not able to go forward. We still don’t have an answer for whether he will be on the top of the ticket! And that is, at its very core, we can’t even begin to have a conversation about what does November look like when we don’t have a presidential candidate.
The royal "We" is a little much for involuntary PBS funders. Capehart launched into defending Biden's vitality -- personal and political:
Jonathan Capehart: Okay, wait a minute. We do have a presidential candidate. I don't know how many times President Biden has to say “I am running, I am running, I am running,” and the message is "Y'all stop asking me to get out, I'm not getting out."
This moment reminds me of the 2020 campaign, when Joe Biden's campaign was basically like the Hindenburg; lost Iowa, lost New Hampshire, lost Nevada, lost one other state that’s in there, and I kept saying, gotta wait ‘til black voters have their say. And miraculously, the Hindenburg sealed up and became president of the United States. And I think that the president is looking back on 2020, he said, “My candidacy was almost finito then, here we are now.”
We’re in July, people! People are losing their minds over polls that are snapshots in time. And I still contend that if that debate was so disastrous on June 27th, and it was, his poll numbers should be in the toilet -- beyond the toilet. And yet the PBS-NPR-Marist poll, Washington Post-ABC poll, NBC News poll, all done after the debate, no change, no change. It is still a dead heat and within the margin of error. I know I am arguing with a polling expert….[unintelligible crosstalk] arguing with a pollster!
Walter said she's not a pollster, but went on to more politely explain to Capehart how Biden is polling poorly in swing states, causing doom about the Electoral College.
