Democrats are worried about the polls, to put it mildly. But let's look past "Democrats," an increasingly incoherent political grouping almost entirely defined by who and what they're not. People around the world who were traumatized by Donald Trump's presidency — and who expected or hoped that Joe Biden's victory in 2020 represented a return to some version of political sanity and normalcy — now regard the American electoral landscape with deepening dread, like dreamers unable to escape a recurring nightmare.
It turns out that normalcy and sanity are not among the menu options at the moment, and we don't possess a time machine that would allow us to return to some stable version of reality that never existed in the first place. All of that should have become obvious by now, no doubt, but hope has a way of springing eternal. So here we are, facing a nightmarish rerun of the 2020 campaign between the two oldest major-party nominees in American history, one of them the massively (and, sure, unfairly) unpopular incumbent and the other his immediate predecessor, who is more like a symptom or a hallucination than a conventional political figure or a human being. Throw in a couple of major wars (and several smaller ones), a rapidly overheating planet and a level of global division and uncertainty not seen since the end of the Cold War, and it's marvelous that any of us can sleep at night.
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Biden is trailing Trump in nearly all national polls, and there are days when that seems like an incredible detail from an impossible fictional universe, along with other days where it's more like, sure, because that's where we are in this profoundly delusional country. There's plenty of disagreement about what those polls mean and how seriously to take them 11 months out from Election Day, and we'll get to that below. But the trepidation and anxiety are real, and are not improved by the unassailable fact that we cannot possibly know how this will turn out. At some point, won't Americans simply become exhausted by the endless tape-loop claim that "this election will decide the future of democracy," which is basically never true, and just watch the catastrophe unfold, something like Jean-Paul Marat in the bathtub except with subscriptions to all the major streaming services?
I digress. For at least the last year, faced with mounting evidence that most voters would prefer to avoid Biden-Trump 2.0 and that most Democrats don't want Biden to run again, a handful of progressive activists have tried to engineer or enable alternative possibilities. One such activist is Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watchdog FAIR and a former journalism professor at Ithaca College, who helped launch the notably unsuccessful "Step Aside Joe!" campaign (along with author and activist Norman Solomon, a frequent Salon contributor).
Cohen emailed me last week with a proposed op-ed that drove the stop-Biden wishcasting into uncharted and perhaps entirely fanciful territory, and if you're reading this, you already get the idea. Although no one is likely to mistake Salon for a politically "neutral" outlet — we don't believe that's possible, let alone useful — we do not endorse political candidates (or un-endorse them). Rather than publishing Jeff's article as a sort of elaborate troll on increasingly anguished........