On the matter of flop sweat

Should the Biden team be panicking more?

In my recent podcast discussion with Jonah Goldberg, he noted recent polling in the presidential race suggesting Biden may well lose in the fall, and suggested that Biden and fellow Democrats seem a bit nonchalant about this and should be showing “more flop sweat” at this point. In a related point, Dan Drezner has a recent piece arguing that the Biden team should really be doing more panicking:

Can Biden supporters breathe easy? Unfortunately, no. The Biden team is probably right to dismiss the vibes; they are wrong to dismiss the polling…. For the love of God… the Biden team needs to stop dismissing the polls as wrong and take them seriously. Pretending they are skewed does no one any good.

Drezner’s piece, in particular, highlights a number of ways that Biden and his staff have publicly dismissed recent polls showing him at best tied with, and possibly losing to, Donald Trump. And honestly, that’s pretty normal — candidates who are trailing basically always say some version of “The only poll I care about is Election Day,” or some crap like that. And, as Drezner notes, Biden has a pretty significant history of being underestimated, and of winning when people just assumed he and his party were doomed.

I truly don’t like to see candidates or their supporters disparaging polling in general. It’s a pretty short hop from “This poll’s not realistic” to “You can’t understand 150 million voters from 1,100 people” to “The media just make these numbers up to sell copy.” I understand the temptation to dismiss a poll you don’t like, but, seriously folks, don’t go down this path. Polling is pretty good and has stayed pretty good even as response rates have dropped substantially. And a lot of different polling organizations using a lot of different methods have roughly converged on the same depiction of this contest.

But back to the flop sweat. I would say that we don’t necessarily know how much Biden’s team is panicking. No, they don’t seem to be panicking, but they’re also a pretty competent and experienced team, and they don’t want to look like they’re panicking. If you think they’re getting bad press for not seeming panicky enough, wait until the coverage saying they’re too panicky.

But beyond just appearances, let’s say the Biden team, regardless of how it speaks to reporters, is legitimately worried it could lose this thing (which I’m guessing it actually is). The question then is, just what do you do about it?