Why Biden’s Still In: Insights From Democratic Insider Dmitri Mehlhorn

Dmitri Mehlhorn is among the most powerful Democratic funders and operatives working inside what can roughly be called the party’s establishment. He’s also been one of the most ardent defenders of Joe Biden as the best Democratic nominee to beat Donald Trump in November. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim speaks to Mehlhorn about why he’s committed to Biden at a moment when more are calling for him to abandon his candidacy.

Transcript

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome back to Deconstructed.

First, some rather important programming announcements. I am no longer at The Intercept. Jeremy Scahill and I, along with our former editor Nausicaa Renner, have launched Drop Site, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. We’re publishing over at dropsitenews.com, and we’re also sending our stories out by email. You can sign up to get them at, again, dropsitenews.com. Our journalism will always remain free but, if you can help out, please do that at donate.dropsitenews.com.

Contributions to DropSite are tax deductible. If you need any information on that, you can email majorgiving@dropsitenews.com.

I’m also going to continue hosting this podcast, and Jeremy will continue hosting Intercepted. You’ll be able to listen to them the same way you have been. The transcripts will continue to be posted at The Intercept.

Now, last year, one of our most popular episodes was with Democratic megadonor Dmitri Mehlhorn, who often sees the world quite differently than I do, but he doesn’t mind mixing it up with people he disagrees with. Well, he now finds himself disagreeing with far more people than just me, and he’s become one of the few Democratic power brokers making an ardent case behind the scenes on behalf of Joe Biden’s viability in the presidential election. We spoke for an hour over the weekend, when the entire world was pretty convinced Biden was done for, but Dmitri was sticking by him. Biden no longer looks like he’s certain to drop out, though the situation remains quite fluid.

Agree with him or not, Dmitri is often as provocative as he is powerful. Here’s our conversation.

All right. I am pleased to be joined today by Dimitri Mehlhorn, who goes by the one name of “Dmitri” in Democratic circles. If you talk to the DC funder or operative class, there’s just one Dmitri. Dmitri says this, Dmitri thinks this.

Dmitri, you were in the news recently. I think it was Fox News or somebody was reporting that you were saying privately — correct me if I’m getting the paraphrase wrong here — Biden’s corpse would be more popular than Kamala, nationally. Fox News is not always the most reliable source of information, but just give me a general kind of overview of your take on where we are right now, post-George Stephanopoulos Biden interview.

Dmitri Mehlhorn: Alright. I’m happy to answer that question, but you asked a couple, so let me answer the little one and the big one.

The little one is about what I said about the president and vice president, and I just wanted to let you know that quote was taken out of context. I did say that, but it was in a donor call that had been scheduled to last an hour, where this conversation was happening. And I was trying to make the point that Biden has a particular brand superpower that happens to be kryptonite to Trump. And that may be more important than age concerns in an environment where the other party is trying to smear our people.

So, I was trying to make the point through example, and then one of the donors on this very large call shared it with someone at Semaphore. And so, of course, that’s the quote.

And so, the reason I was on Fox and Friends is because they saw that quote, and I think they sensed that they had another Mark Penn type on their hands, who would come on the show and sort of privately acknowledge how terrible both the president and vice president are. And when I wasn’t doing that, that interview got cut short pretty quick.

RG: You went on and called Trump out directly on Fox, and it seemed like they were not here for that.

DM: They were not. But the funny thing, Ryan, is right before I came on, they had been having a conversation about the way in which the mainstream left-of-center press had handled Biden’s age, and they were so angry. And the arguments they were making sounded very much like the arguments that journalists might make, about how important it is to tell the truth to your audience.

RG: Yeah.

DM: So I was like, hey, you know? And so, the Fox host was like, do you really think he can do it? And I’m like, yeah. And he’s like, I’m not talking about age, I’m talking about mental acuity. And my answer is, yeah. One of those candidates has lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, and it’s not my guy. And so, that was the end of that interview.

RG: So, the bigger question: where are you now on Biden and his path forward?

DM: Broadly, that debate and everything since then has hurt. But it has hurt in a lot of emotional ways and a lot of other ways. The disagreement that Reid and I have with everyone else is how much it hurt, relative to all the other bad things that are happening.

So, as far as we can tell, our best guess is that that debate moved the polls away from Biden by about three points which, in an election this close, is devastating. And Trump’s odds of being reelected are now as high as they’ve been since mid-2020. You know, up in the mid-60s, in terms of likelihood of getting reelected; like two-to-one odds. And Ryan, you know me well enough to know what I would give to move those odds that much in the other direction. That’s a lot.

Also, two to three points and ten to fifteen points of likelihood are the range that this race has been in for the past two years. And, when you start to unpack it, you realize that that is the nature of these two men. Each of them is going to be revealing new things about themselves that the public wasn’t really clued in on, and each time that happens, it is likely to move things away from them.

And the difference that Reid and I have with everybody else is that we still think that the fundamental choice facing the American public — and this is both in terms of serving as president and in terms of running — the choice is between Yoda and Jabba the Hutt. And America will choose even any version of Yoda over the best version of Jabba the Hutt, because if there’s a 3 a.m. call and Joe Biden is disoriented, he will gather his team and they will make a good decision. Whereas, if there’s a 3 a.m. call that wakes up Trump in 2027, it’s possible he will invade a country, so.

RG: That assumes a race in November in which you’ve got Trump on the ticket for Republicans, Biden on the ticket for Democrats. And I think you’re right, most people listening to this show would say, yeah, in that scenario, yes. All right, Biden it is. A lot that we’re wondering about, but we don’t like Trump. We don’t think Biden’s even necessarily going to survive the next four terms, but it’s better that he beat Trump.

DM: Four years. It’s Trump [where] it’s the four terms.

RG: Right. But, at the same time, we’re not necessarily wedded to those two options. So, that’s why I wanted to hear your analysis of why you think Biden has this super ability to connect with voters, such that he serves as this kryptonite to Trump in such a way that it’s worth the points that are getting knocked off on him on a regular basis. It’s worth, even like you said, not necessarily having somebody who’s able to orient himself at 3 a.m. and make a call, because he has these particular virtues that are so impressive that there’s nobody that could come in and step in for him.

Because that seems to be your fear — correct me if I’m wrong — that you’re a pragmatic person who wants to beat Trump. Like, if you thought that there was somebody who could take Biden’s place and beat Trump, I would assume you’d be for that. This is not some, like, diehard sympathy for Biden himself.

So, what is it about Biden from your perspective that makes him such a unique figure worth rallying around, despite everything we’re seeing?

DM: Yeah. And all of your assumptions about my point of view are correct, except one; I’m not conceding he would be disoriented, I’m saying, even if you think that.

So, there’s a variety of reasons why I think, actually, he’ll continue to be a great president, as he currently is, as he’s been for the past four years. But that’s not your question right now.

For your question right now, let me ask you something. Have you sorted out in your head the efforts that have been made, the quantum of efforts that have been made to paint Joe Biden as corrupt and criminal?

RG: Yeah. I co-host this show Counterpoints with a conservative host. And so, I’m constantly seeing all of the different right-wing activity.

DM: So, you see all that.

RG: Yeah. I’ve been seeing it since the original campaign.

DM: A hundred percent.

RG: Hunter Biden, China Joe. Like —

DM: It’s been since before the original campaign.

RG: All of the buzzwords that would be odd to people in Democratic circles, I know. You say “China Joe,” I know what you’re talking about. I know Romania, I know —

DM: A hundred percent. And you said “since the first campaign,” so you already clearly have a list, right?

RG: Mm-hmm.

DM: But it started before the first campaign. I mean, Donald Trump’s first impeachment, Donald Trump used the power of the United States federal government and its foreign services to make sure, even before Biden declared, that Biden was seen as corrupt.

RG: Yeah.

DM: It’s a lot.

RG: Right. And, for people who don’t remember, it was a guy named Vladimir Zelensky — who nobody had heard of at that point — who Trump called and said, basically, I need you to go on CNN and say that Joe Biden is corrupt. And, if you do that, I’ll send these weapons.

DM: 100 percent.

RG: Biden was the guy that Trump was trying to do that to.

DM: Correct, before Biden had declared.

So, the other side, if you think about the amount of time and effort that Donald Trump personally — and the United States federal government — and Vladimir Putin, personally, and the Russian government, and all of Fox News, and all of the related — Steve Bannon. And that’s a lot, right? They have spent more money and effort trying to paint Joe Biden as corrupt than they’ve spent on anything else, by far. It’s not close. Right?

RG: Mm-hmm.

DM: So, one thing to ask yourself is, why is that? Is it that they are not seeing how weak Biden is, and they are just making a catastrophic error in investment? Because that’s possible, but it seems pretty unlikely. We are talking about the equivalent of literally billions of dollars designed to degrade Joe Biden’s brand as honest, decent, and patriotic.

Now, I believe I know why they think that’s so important. This is a hypothesis, but my belief is that Donald Trump is what Madeleine Albright would call a fascist, meaning it doesn’t really matter if you’re left, right, theocratic, whatever. You’re an authoritarian. Every fascist movement that I have studied — from the left, or the right, or otherwise, or religious — they start from a base of cleansing fire. All of the things that we are about to do are necessary to cleanse our society of its rot, right? It’s always that kind of a frame. And, every time a fascist succeeds, they’re running against someone that they can smear as equally corrupt. Or, at least, it’s close.

And so, Trump’s campaign from day one — In fact, from the 1980s onwards, when he first was effectively running against Reagan. He’s been running for president for decades. And it has always been that the system is rigged and corrupt, and he’s at least honest about it, and he will do it on your behalf, right? That is his essential pitch.

And that, by the way, that basic pitch dispatched a long list of people who were great. DeSantis, and Rubio, and Hillary Clinton. These are impressive people. It worked.

RG: The center-right and the center-left are very vulnerable — especially as we’ve seen in Europe — to that charge.

DM: A hundred percent.

So, then particularly against the Democrats, in general, globally, it is always a campaign against the cities; the diversity of the cities, the elites, the cosmopolitan values, it is always that kind of campaign. And so, in addition to painting his adversaries as corrupt, Trump, in the general election, taps into the deep white nationalist Christian rural theocracy that is, I don’t know, a fifth of the electorate?

And it matters, right? For example, white evangelical Christians: 85 percent for Trump in 2016, 80 percent for Trump in 2020. That’s a huge difference, right? And so, it matters if those groups are super-fired up, and Trump is super firing them up by warning them about the threat of the urbane, antireligious, etc.

So then, along comes this candidate — and, again, Trump saw this early, 2017 is when he started using his powers to make sure that he damaged Biden in this way — along comes a candidate who has this brand, and is also branded as a kind of centrist, kind of middle, Christian white man. Trump chokes on it.

And so, if you look at the perceptions of the genuine marginal voters, the people who are really at the fringe and they perceive Biden, you can ask them a lot of things about Joe, and they will say things that are not great. But that entire Trump brand campaign — and Putin and everybody, the billion-dollar smear campaign — failed, and everybody else it’s been run against, it succeeded.

So, the point that I make about Kamala and everything else and all the others is that — Now, could someone else do that? Could a Michelle Obama or a Dwayne Johnson maybe have that? Sure. But those are not the options that are available. The options that are available are other politicians who, in a three-, four-year period of time, I am so fired up about the bench. The 50-year-old Democrats who are leading around the country, very good. But, in 120 days, with the influence that the right-wing disinformation ecosystem has? If you did not like what happened to John Kerry in 2004, do not watch as your preferred candidate gets introduced to the American public. So, I’m just saying —

RG: Let’s actually even stipulate all that, and I think a lot of that is true. I’ve watched the right have this apoplectic frustration with their inability to code Biden as left wing, and a socialist as —

DM: Or corrupt.

RG: Or necessarily even corrupt.

DM: I actually think corrupt is first and left is second. But, yes. They’re frustrated that they can’t.

RG: Throughout, especially, Build Back Better, and all the deficit spending, and even the inflation, even with Biden saying a lot of the things that Bernie Sanders has said. Even with Biden being probably the most populist domestic policy president since FDR, it just has not stuck, because he just seems like Joe Biden, the centrist guy. And that has really frustrated Republicans, and I think that that’s all great.

But then Thursday happened, and it seems like Biden can’t complete a thought, that he loses his train of thought very quickly. He can’t separate out his words so that you can understand what he’s saying. He confuses things. We don’t even have to get into all of the different medical diagnoses, and the requests for neurological testing, to get to a place where we say, all right, the American public by 70-plus percent thinks he’s not fit for office anymore.

And every day that he fights against that, the media is going to zero in on whatever his latest gaff was, and that’s going to kick off another couple of days. And it’s also going to overshadow everything else.

Like, you may have seen the North Carolina gubernatorial candidate.

DM: Some folks need killing.

RG: He said some people need killing, yeah. And that just gets washed aside, because every Democratic member of Congress who now comes out and says Joe Biden needs to step aside is going to make news. Mark Warner gathering senators together, that’s going to make news. And Biden is going to try this loop where he says, OK, well, I’m going to do a press conference next Thursday, and that will buy another week. And then, that press conference, maybe it goes as poorly as the Stephanopoulos interview, but he doesn’t wander off stage. And so, he says, well, in three weeks, I’m going to do this thing. And then, eventually he says, well, it’s August, and now he’s pulling at the high 20s, low 30s.

And, while everything you said might have been true, age is a thing, and it landed on Biden, and this is the situation we’re in. And so, are you just so pessimistic about being able to bring in any alternatives, that you’re like, we’re just going to roll the dice here? Because it seems like the thing that Biden has is this brand of honesty, which is the thing that you’re saying you need to combat fascism, and fascism’s ability to kind of equate all corruption and say, well, I alone can fix it.

It’s hard for Biden to maintain that aura of honesty if people think he’s lying about his ability to function.

DM: Yeah. So, you have summarized, effectively, the case, and it’s a very real question. I’m trying to think of — There are so many embedded assumptions in there that we questioned, that I want to try to see what’s the most useful.

Let me say a few things. One question is, can Joe Biden be a good / great president as he is now, as he will be in four years. And we believe, contra-everyone, that, actually, he certainly can. And the reason we believe that is because of the nature of the job of president.

RG: Staff, etc.

DM: It’s not just staff. To be in that role, you have got to have great leverage. And great leverage means an amazing network of relationships, and people, and deputies, and foreign leaders, who you can work with, because they understand your values. And all of those things get better with age. I mean, in some cases. Not in every case; the Warren Buffett example, etc.

So, the question is, is Biden also suffering from age enough that that makes him worse? And that’s the presidential question, and we can have a whole separate podcast on that. But the more important question is how these five million marginal voters in the swing states that I’m talking about will perceive it.

Almost everything that you said is an argument that makes sense to people who are not in that category. Remember, the convention will be over in about 50 days. About 30 days after that, we’ll be in mid-September, and the actual five million will start paying attention. And then, 40 days after that, we will have a result. And Those five million voters are going to consume an enormous amount of information and disinformation about whomever.

Let’s assume that Biden were to choose to step down; it would be about Kamala. Like I said, I think she can prosecute that case, and we will support her hard. But it’s not guaranteed, because that campaign has worked against everybody else prior to Joe.

And so, they will consume bits and pieces about Joe’s age, they will also consume new information about Trump. And probably the biggest disagreement that Reid and I tend to have — and our team tends to have — with folks that are making your argument, is the extent to which Biden’s downsides are baked versus Trump’s. We think, actually, that Biden’s downsides, if you think about the five million marginal voters, Ryan, they overwhelmingly anchor their news in either TikTok — which is, like, four-to-one pro-Trump — or the Fox/Steve Bannon social media ecosystem, which is even worse.

So, my belief is, those five million people already think Biden is like you are suggesting he is now proven to be.

RG: Sure, I think you’re right about that.

DM: And then, on the Trump side, people tend to say everything is baked in. And I think that is an understandable instinct. But, really, what we’re saying is that we’ve seen this for so long, and all of our friends have seen it for so long, what more can be said? And, it turns out, more can be said.

The last time those five million voters seriously paid attention, yes, Joe Biden was younger. And, also, Donald Trump had not launched a violent assault on the Capitol that broke his brain and destroyed his ability to distinguish truth from fiction. Also, last time they were looking, Donald Trump had never been convicted of anything, and now there’s four unanimous juries and counting.

And so, my point is that we are going to get more and more information about how Donald Trump has lost it and how criminal he is, and that’s new news. At the same time, we’re contextualizing a bunch of other information about Biden and his team. At the same time, who knows what else is happening? That’s a long time.

RG: And so, I think the error that you guys might be making — and let me frame it this way — might be rooted in both the success that you guys have had, and also your roots in Silicon Valley.

And so, you and Reid both have been able to identify what you guys perceive as the real reality, which you believe a lot of people are missing. And you’ve also been able to, effectively, over the years, move hundreds of millions of dollars in different directions to kind of push people to see that reality with some success, some failures.

And so, I think that, at this moment, you guys might be overestimating your control over reality, your ability to get people to see what you see, and that, in fact, it’s over. That the world has decided and, whatever the world is, that this guy just isn’t up for the job, and it’s just going to get worse and worse and worse, day after day after day. And that looking back and seeing your guy’s ability to kind of shape reality in the past has convinced you that maybe you can shape it again this time in a smarter direction. When, in fact, the smarter thing might be to say, you know what? Actually, we might be right here, but nobody is ever going to agree with us. And we are going to lose credibility making this argument, and we need to do something different.

Now, I think that — and I’ve argued this — I think the different thing you should do is not anoint Kamala, because I think that’s a disaster. I think she has to fight for it, in what Jim Clyburn called a mini-primary. And there are donors lining up — you’ve probably heard from them — willing to back this idea of a mini-primary.

But, before we get to that, what do you think of my psychologizing of what I think is the error that you guys are making at this moment of overestimating your ability to influence this?

DM: I am so glad you asked that question. I’m surprised by it, but delighted to have the opportunity to talk about it, because that is actually the thing I think about all of you. I think we’re being modest.

That’s the thing; if Reid and I do not believe that we can move the odds as much as that debate did, we believe we have a little bit of influence. And, because the stakes are so high, we’re using all of it. And you are correct that it is very damaging to our credibility to take positions that all of our allies disagree with, right? And yet, you all think you can change people’s minds. You have so much confidence that you can get Kyrsten Sinema to change, you can get Joe Manchin to change. Just pressure them and they’ll change. And we can get Biden to change, we can get Kamala to not take it.

And I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, I know who Biden is. I know he’s grateful for our support. But I don’t know that we’re in the top 100 most influential people. Probably in the top 1,000 but, like, even that’s questionable.

And so, we are just trying to play the cards we’re dealt. That’s what we’re trying to do. And we don’t think we can make a huge difference, but we are trying to, like — Guys, if this is the situation we’re in, this is kind of a conversation — A little bit, this is a conversation we had about S1. Like, I agreed with S1 in March of 2021, and the fight was always over. OK, are we accepting reality or overestimating our own influence? And I was on the other side. I was like, guys, it’s done, move on.

And I think that the cost of ignoring that reality — you know how I felt about those seven months of failure — and also, I know you’re not sad to see Kyrsten Sinema leaving the party, but she and Manchin are shitting on it on the way out, and that does not help right now. And that is all a consequence of overestimating your ability to have influence.

So, you kind of have this perception that we think we’re masters of the universe and can change everything and, on the contrary, we happen to be in a position where we are approaching this landscape of politics with a new set of lenses that gives us access to different insights that might be more relevant. And when we work through the game theory implied by that, we think the only thing we can do is increase the odds of Biden beating Trump. And one of the things that all of these conversations are doing is not talking about Donald Trump.

RG: Right.

DM: And you don’t want to talk about Donald Trump because you feel like you’ve already said it a million times, and I get that. The problem is, now is exactly the time I need you talking about Donald Trump, if I’m right.

So, I know that I’m expending my credibility, [and] Reid does, too. If we were solving for our credibility in politics, we would be doing the exact opposite of what we’re doing.

RG: I started by saying you were overestimating your capacity; now I think you’re underestimating it.

I think if you and Reid Hoffman came out — and you have a network of people as well that you can be influential around — if you came out and said, look, Jim Clyburn’s right, we need a mini-primary. We have six weeks between now and August 19th. We can have two debates, we can captivate national attention. We have 3,900 delegates who are there because they love Joe Biden. These are rank-and-file, everyday party figures. These are not the kind of elites — there are superdelegates and there are some elites mixed in there — but, overall, I think people would be shocked to find who these delegates actually are. These are just regular people who are really active in Democratic Party politics.

And it’s obviously too late to do voting, but there would be relentless polling, and Democrats just want to beat Trump. And if by August 19 you head into the convention and say, J.B. Pritzker is three points ahead of Trump, and Whitmer is two points behind Trump, I think the delegates are probably going to say, you know what? Big JB is our guy, and maybe he’s got some of that kryptonite, too, that works against Trump, and there just isn’t time over the next 50, 60 days to nuke him with the amount of oppo that Republicans are going to come after [him with]. They’re going to try, but you can only do so much; there’s only so much TikTok you can consume in a 24-hour period, people have tested it.

DM: Have you tested it? Have you tried it?

RG: I have deliberately stayed away from it because I can tell how addictive it is. Right now, I’ve heard a lot of Democrats say, look, the chance of Biden actually winning the election at this point is close to zero. And so, we have nothing to lose. Anything above zero is worth trying. So, let’s try. And we get closer to zero every day that this goes on, whether we like it or not.

So, what’s wrong with that analysis of it? And don’t you think if you guys came out and endorsed that, it would substantially move the needle internally? And I say this after I just said you overrate your ability to have influence, so I understand that’s incoherent.

DM: No, no, no, no, no. No, it’s not incoherent. It just sounds like we just learned, we moved forward together.

So, you’ve blended a couple of different strands in your question, as you know, because you get into the substance of why it would be good as part of gaming out what would actually happen. But I want to just go a little bit deeper into the decision-making process of Joe Biden, right?

Joe Biden is haunted by the fact that, in 2016, he listened to these arguments, and he’s right. We were all wrong. If he’d run in 2016, we would not be here. A lot of people — not us as much this time, but a lot of people — made those same arguments to him in 2020. He stubbornly, stubbornly resisted all of them, and he saved us.

I mean, it is very plausible, given how close that was, that anybody else, if our theory of Biden’s brand is correct, that was it. So, all of these arguments came at him in ’16. He listened. The world suffered grievously. All of these arguments came at him in 2020, he refused to listen. The world benefited tremendously. America now has the strongest economy in the world. We are powering the world economy, we are leading the free world against Russian aggression, because he refused to listen to these arguments.

So, right now, who is he going to listen to? I believe that, fundamentally, he is going to listen to voters, and he’s going to listen to the Democratic voters in particular. And the Democratic Party’s voters, since mid-2020, there has never been any single person who has been anywhere close to as popular as Biden with Democrats. It’s been the inverse on the other side.

And the choices in this country, in this political system, the way democracy works in this country is that the two parties put forward their candidates, those are the only chances to win, and they are put forward by the parties, and the parties are not most people. Certainly not the swing, and the swing is left with the choices, and there’s always a complaint.

And so, the question is, is there an argument for Joe Biden to step down? And the answer is, well, if he were to plummet in the polls — which would be the result if all these arguments are correct about how he’s being perceived — that might change his mind. And, at that point, we will be there to help with the transition.

He hasn’t plummeted. He’s dropped in the averages by less than three points, which is the amount by which they moved in the other direction — or slightly less than, actually — when Donald Trump was convicted of felonies. So, we are going to get more and more evidence of Trump’s criminality. At the same time, we’re getting more and more evidence of Biden’s physical aging. And you all assume that that is going to net out in a way that is going to be so obvious that you will persuade Joe Biden that, this time, you’re all right, and he’s wrong, when the last couple of times it was catastrophically the reverse.

RG: One thing that worries me is he told George Stephanopoulos that all the polls have him tied. And it made me wonder who’s feeding him, who’s briefing him on the polling? Will he actually see the numbers if they do collapse?

But, that aside —

DM: No, that’s actually important. Can we talk about that, or do you want to go to another one?

RG: Yeah.

DM: Because that one’s important. Because, look, there were many, many, many times when I watch politicians that I’m backing say things that I hate. From the time I watched Mike Dukakis answer that question about Kitty Dukakis, right? It happens. And so, there was a lot that Biden said that I did not like.

But his answer about polling, I’m like, yeah, actually. Everybody’s wrong and Joe is right. The polls are tied. They are still within the margin of error. That’s what matters at this stage.

RG: Not all of them, for sure.

DM: The aggregate, for sure.

RG: I see.

DM: Like, New York Times over? But the weighted average — And, look, you can disagree with a bunch of stuff about 538, and think that Nate Silver’s new thing is better, or whatever. But the one thing that I believe that 538 has cornered is the ability to evaluate pollsters. They go so hard at that, no one else is close. And they use that to weight the polls, and the average, it was Trump up about two, then there was a felony conviction — 34 actually — and, as the public digested that, it went to Biden, up about a little less than half a point. And now, it’s Trump by two-and-a-half. And all of that remains within the margin of error of these polls.

These two men have been tied in the 270 electoral vote battlegrounds. They have been within the margin of error since inception. And so, when people are saying Joe’s losing, and they’ve been saying that forever, I’ve been saying, it’s tied. And the reason it’s tied is because Joe Biden has this brand advantage. That is why, if you compare him to incumbents all over the world, he’s actually less unpopular.

So, I’ve always said it was tied, and it’s still roughly a jump ball. So, that is one of the cases where, look, there were a lot of things Biden said that I did not like, but that was one of the ones where I actually think he’s right, and you’re all wrong.

RG: So what would a plummet be? A drop versus a plummet?

DM: It would be outside the range. It would be outside the margin of error. It’d be, like, five points, and it would last a week or two. Five or more.

But, by the way, Ryan, the other side of it, just to set the presumption properly, if you guys are right, how much should the polls drop? I mean, shouldn’t they drop a lot? Shouldn’t they drop more than two-and-a-half points? Shouldn’t Trump’s odds of winning be higher than two-to-one, if you’re so right?

RG: I think you would need a more plugged in population to have swings bigger than we see, maybe.

DM: More plugged in? I don’t know, man. It wasn’t that long ago when George H.W. Bush had 90 percent approval ratings, and even George W. Bush was pretty high after September 11, right? So, it is not ancient history when Americans swung a lot. The reason they don’t now — in my view — is negative partisanship, and that goes both ways.

Remember this: even as the donor class — not me and Reid, obviously, but a lot of donors are freaking out — more small-dollar fundraising to Joe Biden came in since that debate than ever before. Those two hours were their best two hours. Those 24 hours were their best 24 hours. These are indications that the other side is also true.

And so, my whole point is, on all of this, it seems to me, especially given the psychological history of Biden being right and us being wrong — twice previously, catastrophically — and the way the polls are moving, the odds of him stepping down are very low. If things move a lot, I think he’ll reconsider. That will be his decision.

So, if it’s 90 percent likely that it’s Biden, and 10 percent likely that it’s someone else — or even 80/20, even if it’s just more likely than not — all of us need to be focused on attacking Trump, because Biden is going to make that decision in that way based on those factors that we don’t control. And he may be right. So, what are we doing?

RG: At what point does the reality start to intervene and we say, you know what? Horse race aside, numbers aside, all of the game theory aside, a president who said he needs to work less and shouldn’t do stuff after 8 p.m., and that we’re not confident is up to it, it’s just not something that, as a country, we want.

Like, people who would say, “OK, we want him to beat Trump, but do we want him to be president? Like, do we actually have confidence in his ability to be president?”

DM: See, this is great, I’m glad you’re raising this, because we talked at the outset that this was going to come up. And once you work through all the gaming and so forth that you and I have just discussed, you get to the fundamental of, like, “Wait, can he be a good president, right?”

And so, Ryan, my question to you: what do you think the job of the president is? Because clearly you seem to think it includes working super long hours. And I don’t think the president is necessarily an investment banking associate.

RG: I divide it into two things: one is making hard decisions, because the reason a decision gets to a president is because it’s a difficult one, and his massive apparatus that’s underneath him could not answer that question. That, maybe you can do between 10 and 4.

DM: No, no, no. Biden is not saying he won’t take calls.

RG: But, there’s that. And then there’s also, this is the second part of being president: communicating to the American people and persuading them of your vision.

DM: I agree with both of those. So, let’s go into those. OK. So—

RG: And, actually, the international public, I should put the international public in there, too.

DM: Yeah, a hundred percent. Absolutely. OK.

The president has to be able to make tough decisions, and communicate them in a way that is consistent so that everybody understands, right?

RG: Yeah.

DM: My contention is that Joe Biden is as good or better on those two things than anybody else, and it’s not getting worse as he’s getting older.

The way in which he makes decisions is with his close team. He is the leader of a council. He is the leader of the council of elders at the center of a network of decision-making, and he has been working too hard. He’s been working too hard if he was 50. And, when you’re older, you need to ease up a little bit, and he’s got the leverage to do it. He’s just working too hard. That doesn’t mean he’s not available, at all. If you need him, you can call him, but he’s working too hard. But his process of making decisions is one that seems pretty good.

And the second thing about communicating, if you are clear in your values, and you’ve recruited a network of people who embody those values, when you do make those decisions, they pulse out effectively.

Now, I’ve just made two contentions that you don’t agree with, and I understand that. My two contentions are that Joe Biden’s decision-making process is really good, and that his ability to implement and communicate and effectuate those decisions is really good. And you disagree.

So, the next question, Ryan, is, how do we look at the world and determine from the evidence without our bubbles, outside of our bubbles, how do we look at the evidence and determine outside of our bubbles what’s really true? And I think the best possible evidence is, how good of a job is Biden doing at president-ing today?

So, let’s look at the international leaders. International leaders call Biden personally when they need help. That is why he travels to war zones; they want him, personally. Look at domestic negotiations in the Senate. When they have a logjam, they call him, personally. And if you think that the left has been hiding Biden’s inability to do that well, Kevin McCarthy was caught saying, against interest, that actually that’s not the case. That when Joe Biden is embedded within his team and intervenes in those places, he is the closer, and everybody knows it. The international community calls him, the leaders call him.

And America is doing really well. We have the strongest economy in the world by far. And America is once again the leader of the free world. We almost lost [that] in just four years under Trump. We are back, and all of that is true right now.

So, that seems to me a pretty good evidence base that maybe my point of view might be right, and yours might be wrong.

RG: It seems that the candidates who are running for office around the country — a lot of them, at least — seem to think you’re wrong, and seem to think that, at least, from their perspective, as kind of cynical electoral operators, that Biden is now a drag on their electability. Angie Craig, in a swing district, a representative from Houston, became one of the most recent to come out and say he should step aside.

Can you really go forward with so many elected Democrats telling the public that their candidates should drop out?

DM: I am not saying that electeds are always cynical, or that people running for office are all always cynical, right? There’s a continuum between just being brutally cynical and just maybe having some motivated reasoning, you know, etc., etc. And then there’s also specific brass tacks, right?

If frontline swing district candidates are talking about issues, I think it is very important that we take them seriously with how they want to frame things, for sure. Because they’re the ones who know what the swing voters are thinking. However, a presidential nominee runs nationally, and it is almost always the case that there is some upside to locals distancing themselves from the nominee. That would certainly be true for any alternative to Biden as well. And it always happens.

So, I don’t mind that, it doesn’t bother me. But it’s also not evidence that is relevant to any of the questions we’ve discussed, which are, can he be a great president? Is he already a great president? Can he be a winning nominee? Is he our best bet? None of that is influenced even by what electeds say about distancing themselves from Biden. That is just a different thing.

RG: Let’s talk about Cori Bush for a second. Last time we spoke, you were pretty excited about the possibility of being able to take her out, that she was kind of one of the proxies you saw for Democrats who make it harder for swing district Democrats to win, because of her support for defunding the police, and —

DM: It was defund the police in particular. Bob Menendez and Cori Bush were my two biggest targets. So, one down, one to go.

RG: How is the Cori Bush race looking?

DM: I think it’s even.

RG: How invested are you? What are you going to spend?

DM: We’re not going to spend anything new. So, look, you know we support the mainstream Democrats, and we’ve supported some of the sort of centrist Black organizations that are dissatisfied with Cori Bush. We put resources into those. Wesley Bell, I really like him, I think he’s very good. And I think that, from the polls I’ve seen, it’s about even now.

She has a lot of loyalty and a lot of name recognition, but so does he. He actually has a pretty good brand. And I think the race is pulling into a tie, and I think there’s a very good shot that Wesley Bell wins, which would be great.

And he’s like— You wouldn’t hate him.

RG: We covered his initial race when he won as a progressive prosecutor.

DM: Yeah, you would not hate him. He’s just different from Bush on that thing that I think is important.

RG: Yeah. And he also was running for Senate.

DM: Against Josh Hawley.

RG: Yeah, and saw an opportunity to take her out after October 7.

DM: Thank god.

Yeah, look, Cori Bush took out Lacy Clay Jr. So, Cori Bush decided out of the woodworks to take him out, because she believed that he was not the right fit. And Wesley Bell made the same decision rather than taking on Josh Hawley. And thank god it works both ways.

RG: And did you say you’re not putting more?

DM: We’ve already put in a lot. I’ve maxed out personally, and Reid has, and we’ve supported some of the groups that are active. But that is not our priority right now.

RG: Do you have any guess what AIPAC’s super PAC is going to spend there? Did you coordinate with them at all?

DM: No, I don’t. The mainstream Democrats that we work with have ties with AIPAC. We do not. We have real issues with AIPAC: The stance they took vis-à-vis Netanyahu and Obama. Horrible. Horrible. So, we don’t work with them.

However, clearly, every now and then, someone you don’t like is fighting the same enemy you are. What are you going to do?

RG: So, the headline here, right now, you still think Biden is the best possible candidate to take on Trump, and that will remain the case in your view until or unless the polls plummet, and he moves outside the margin of error. Is that about right?

DM: Well, so, it’s a good headline, but just to be a little bit more precise: number one, yes, I believe Biden is still the best bet. Number two, I believe that Biden will choose to step down only if the polls move significantly for a couple of weeks; significantly meaning, like, five more points, stays there, etc. And, even then, the only way he will make that decision is with his close advisors, and that we will not have influence because of the history we’ve discussed.

The third thing that we believe is — and, again, this is just a positive statement, not a normative statement — we believe that, if it is not Biden, the confidence level that we have it’s going to be Biden, whatever it is, call it 90 percent, 80 percent, whatever. That is the level of confidence we have. And if it’s not Biden, it’s Harris. And I do believe that Harris can prosecute the case.

Remember, in 2020, even as I was pushing Biden over Bernie, I was making a bunch of arguments about how, if it is Bernie, here’s the play, and he could win. If it’s Kamala, she could win. She’s a prosecutor and he’s a criminal. And if she picks the right running mate, like, that’s cool, too. We’ll go for that. But those are the choices.

RG: You don’t think a mini-primary is a realistic possibility.

DM: Yeah. So, just to be clear, you said, “as Jim Clyburn advocated.” Remember, Clyburn advocated “it’s Biden’s decision.” But, no, I don’t actually think that’s realistic.

Actually, sorry, it’s not that it’s not realistic, I think it might actually happen. I just think that the odds that someone other than Kamala is winning that are close to zero.

RG: A lot of them are so cowardly they won’t even run against Kamala, even in an open mini-primary.

DM: Maybe it’s cowardly, maybe it’s not. But the cowardly thing is, Ryan, this is a little bit about picking your battles, and this is the same thing as the S1 debacle or disagreement. If you’ve lost, move on to the next fight, right?

So, there’s 2,000 delegates who’ve been pledged to Joe Biden. And even Black women who dislike the vice president go nuclear when people talk of passing them over do not see how our coalition passes up a number two, with her resume, background, and emerges better for it, at the same time that the disinformation ecosystem is attacking us. I just don’t see it. So, if that’s all true, then it’s going to be Kamala. And if you game it out, then don’t fight that fight.

So, I think that Kamala will win for all of those reasons if it’s not Joe. And so, it’s Kamala or Joe. And, either way, our job is to pay attention to the other guy who is worse.

RG: One side point on that that, to me, undermines the credibility of a lot of the people who are warning that Trump is going to usher in fascism and it’ll be the last election, is that you have so many of these top-tier Democratic candidates who presumably are very good political prognosticators — like a Newsom, and a Whitmer, and a Pritzker, and all these others — who are clearly taking a dive for 2028, they’re like, you know what? This is not my year. If they truly believe there would be no 2028 election, and that 2024 is the last shot at an election, I suppose you could say that it’s purely selfless, and they understand that their running would make it less likely that Democrats win in the end in 2024.

But all of the jockeying that I hear in the background from all of these camps who are very openly positioning themselves for 2028 undermines the idea that there won’t be a 2028 election. You know what I mean?

DM: I do. And I think that that is not a contradiction, I think it is a nuance that makes sense. So, maybe there’s a specific comment that I’m not thinking of, but people have varying degrees of confidence as to whether Trump will be able to end America’s constitutional democracy. Will be able to/will, right? So, I have very high confidence. I think if you had that much power, that kind of a criminal, in that kind of a setting, you don’t get it back, and there’s a ton of history on that.

But a lot of people say otherwise, and America is super complicated. So, some people say, well, the odds of America’s constitutional order collapsing rise from 1 percent to 3 percent. I’ve heard these Democratic politicians articulating a risk associated with Trump. But, if it’s just a risk, if the odds of America’s constitutional order ending rise from 2 percent to 4 percent, or from 5 percent to 10 percent, you still play the 90. If you believe, as Liz Cheney does, and as I do, that the odds are way worse, then you don’t.

So, I understand that it creates some brand conflict but, fundamentally, Ryan, I think that most people have less conviction than I do about how serious the risks are by a great deal. I am no longer seen as quite as insane as when I first started warning about this in 2016. I have more company, but people still think I’m exaggerating the threat.

So, mostly, people are going to act as though it’s not as big of a threat as I think it is, even if they’re going to say, any threat at all of that nature is unacceptable.

RG: As always, Dmitri Mehlhorn, thanks again. I really appreciate it.

DM: Thanks, Ryan.

RG: That was Dimitri Mehlhorn, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of Drop Site. This episode was brought to you in part by a grant from The Intercept. The episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. The episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. And I’m Ryan Grim, cofounder of Drop Site. Check us out at dropsitenews.com.

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