Emergency podcast on the state of the presidential race

🚨 I am legally required to put the siren emoji in the subheadline. 🚨

Maria and I have a special episode of Risky Business for you on the state of the presidential race following Thursday night’s debate, which was — how to put this nicely? — an utter disaster for Joe Biden from start to finish. I had a spicy post last night about how Democrats would probably be better off if Biden dropped out — and honestly I feel no less spicy about it today after sleeping¹ on it, as you’ll hear in the episode. But it’s a forthright episode where we consider the issue in some depth, and I think you’ll appreciate it.

In terms of what’s next: the “June” edition of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions, originally scheduled for this weekend, will instead appear on Monday. The so-called “time experts” (chronologists? horologists?) claim that Monday is actually in July, but when was the last time they got anything right? There’s still time to submit questions — but this month’s SBSQ is going to focus strictly on the election model, and perhaps some adjacent questions about the election itself, so I’d hold your other questions until the next edition.

As penance, Eli and I will run at least one model update this weekend. We’ll probably just update the landing page with the new data, without any accompanying post. This is a slightly tricky circumstance. On the one hand, if we’re being good Bayesians, the debate was a big moment that plausibly shook up the race, and literally any data is better than none. (So far, the very early polls have ranged from actually-not-so-bad for Biden to utterly catastrophic.) On the other hand, overnight polls are inadequate in many respects, such as in the failure to recontact voters you missed initially, so it’s impossible to have high-quality data until early next week. And furthermore, voters will react not just to the debate itself but also to the media coverage of it, which is still being formulated. So basically our plan is to update the model once or twice but to be kind of low-key about it, with longer takes to come next week once we’re more confident about what the data says.

1. Albeit not very much.