Welcome to How Bad Is This, Really?, a recurring feature in which we take the temperature of how things are looking in the presidential election and what seems likely to happen in November.

After a day of meetings and discussion between House Democrats, the word from Capitol Hill Tuesday was that Joe Biden had managed to stop the bleeding. After a number of Dems said in public or to colleagues over the weekend that they believed that the president’s mental deterioration should preclude him from continuing to run for reelection, Biden and congressional leaders prodded a larger number of other members of the House to announce they still support him as a mid-August nominating convention approaches.

Well, sort of. The tortured, circular phrase that has been used frequently by Democrats is “Joe Biden is the nominee” or “Joe Biden is our nominee,” not “I believe that Joe Biden is mentally sharp enough to conduct the kinds of dynamic and persuasive public appearances that will be required to overcome the polling deficit he currently faces.”

As Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin first articulated, Biden’s handful of modestly unscripted postdebate television appearances may not have convinced anyone that his mental condition isn’t a problem. (The debate was like a cursed version of The Dress for Democrats; instead of assessing basic sensory perceptions, it was a test of who would acknowledge the basic evidence of their eyes and ears.) But it did convince them that Biden is dead set on not dropping out of the........

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