Ukraine Preps A Counterpunch; America's Presidential Election Gets Real
To reclaim the lands stolen by Moscow, Ukraine has to solve the problem of conducting offensive operations in the Network Age. When anything that is seen gets killed, advancing is tough.
With respect to Ukraine, the American presidential debate revealed little of substance. I don’t watch these silly rituals, as you can glean far more by reading the coverage of them after the fact without losing a full ninety minutes of your life. And the rhetoric in these events is so stage managed (or badly mangled) that there’s little of intelligence value.
At least when Putin writes a fake history asserting that Ukraine doesn’t exist and NATO allowing Ukraine to join is like using a weapon of mass destruction on poor oppressed russia, you get a sense of what he wants you to think. American election rituals are pure theater. They only matter when someone screws up in a historic way.
Biden stuck with his usual rhetoric about stopping Putin from attacking NATO, which is sensible enough, even if I doubt that he remembers Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are members or would actually fight to defend them. Trump continued his little game of pretending that he’d somehow end the war before taking office, which conveniently gets him off the hook for being unable to. An as always, he took care to bait those Democrats who only care about Ukraine and Putin because they think these are issues they can use to make Trump look bad and unelectable.
Neo-Puritan Americans have a positive obsession with the idea that if they shout bad man lies! often enough that it will actually matter. Unfortunately, available evidence indicates that the average American voter will take the crass bully as their protector in a scary world over the bumbling fake-nice of a geriatric wannabe oligarch with a family and inner circle as impenetrable and unaccountable as Putin’s. Too many of Trump’s most vocal opponents are unwitting allies.
But first, the fight that truly matters right now: Ukraine’s struggle to repel the ruscist invader. And thanks to aid starting to flow in quantity again - though the rate is still insufficient - Ukraine is beginning to drain Moscow’s combat power faster than it can be replenished. Signs of strain are mounting, and there is real hope of seeing cracks open up before 2025.
Overview of the Fronts
I always appreciate the daily updates by Centre for Defence Strategies, as they include a lot of information from Ukrainian sources with more context than standard news pieces. A statistic reported this past week caught my eye: ruscist units on the front line are reportedly receiving just 75% of the new personnel they need to cover losses. This is a change from better than 100% replacement rates before Ukraine started getting 155mm artillery shells again this past June thanks to the Czech-led initiative.
The accords well with my claim that if Moscow is mobilizing 30,000 personnel monthly and losing as many or more on the battlefield, the net effect is a steady degradation of its effective combat strength. Invisible losses to desertion, illness, and battle damage Ukraine isn’t able to directly assess, probably add substantially to Moscow’s casualties.
Recently Ukraine has been running a 6:1 loss ratio, while through winter it was more like 4:1. This indicates a shift from Ukraine drawing roughly even with Moscow in terms of loss of national combat potential to a marked ruscist decline. The progress isn’t quick or always visible, but Moscow is losing even as it creeps forward a square kilometer at a time.
Ukraine’s strategic bombardment campaign continues to score hits deep inside russia, hitting several industrial sites linked to military production. Refineries and fuel storage sites continue to draw attacks, though apparently fewer this week than in the one prior. If Moscow is intensifying air defense efforts to protect these targets, that likely means gaps are opening up around others. With Ukraine now mass producing long-range drones, Moscow’s geography is turning into a major disadvantage. There’s a reason that Moscow generally only wins defensive wars where the landscape works to its advantage.
Moscow in turn is doing all it can to destroy Ukraine’s power infrastructure. With several new Patriot batteries promised but not yet active, Moscow is trying to knock out what it can while it can still get shots through. Thanks to Ukraine becoming steadily more integrated with Europe’s power infrastructure, the consequences are not likely to be dire. However the attacks can’t help but be a strain on resources, and their consequences are expensive - this is all part of Putin’s war on the EU.
As someone who did a lot of research in sustainable energy landscapes, the answer seems obvious: decentralized power systems owned by the communities they serve. That means lots of solar panels, since they’re quicker to install. Energy gain at those latitudes aren’t great, but even a few hours of juice in winter beats none. Anyone interested is free to peruse my old research notes and the National Science Foundation research proposal I put together to get practice writing a major grants and having it reviewed by a professional audience.
Anyway, better air defense is the solution until energy production sites can be decentralized so that attacks aren’t worthwhile. Hitting ruscist bases within 300km of the border with ATACMS would help, but jets can fly farther than that so can relocate and disperse to limit their effects. First Moscow would have to do this, of course, so Ukraine might get a couple dozen Flankers in a single strike with some luck. And Moscow can barely build ten a year, if that.
More Patriots should be arriving in Ukraine in the coming months, and the first fifty F-16 maintainers have graduated in Denmark. Assuming that another fifty will come out of Arizona along with the pilots training there (ground and air crew are supposed to work as teams), and Ukraine should as of now have a miniature F-16 squadron operating in western Ukraine. Small wonder that Moscow keeps hitting airfields as it can. When Ukrainian F-16s start ambushing orc Sukhois carrying glide bombs, that should swiftly force Moscow to adopt more cautious tactics. They’re already inaccurate, so if their arrivals are also more infrequent Ukrainian troops will gain some breathing space.
Over the past few weeks reports have clarified that by the end of the year there will be forty trained F-16 pilots, enough for a full-sized NATO squadron split into two or three smaller detachments. It sounds like around two hundred dedicated maintainers will be in the country too. Half of each group look set to be operating by September, with a quarter ready to go into action any day now.
Unfortunately there’s been no word on ramping up Ukraine’s pilot training, though France will have at least twenty-six pilots eligible for advance training by the end of the year, in theory indicating a pipeline in development capable of producing twice that many in 2025. They need a place for advance training, though, since the US only has space for another dozen pilots during the entire year and the facility in Romania looks sized to train just two or three dozen.
At sea Moscow is still in pure defense mode, only a remnant of the Black Sea Fleet still deployed in the actual Black Sea, mostly submarines. The rest of it is now more like the Azov Flotilla, with access to the Kerch Strait restricted by barges and other defensive structures to guard against Ukraine’s naval drones. These are starting to carry small surface to air missiles, making them lethal against the helicopters that russia has been using to hunt them. They’re getting small surface to surface weapons like rockets and anti-tank missiles, too. Harrying the coast of Crimea, even pushing ruscist troops a kilometer inland, is in the realm of possibility.
Needless to say, the siege of Crimea is slowly tightening. ATACMS strikes rain down pretty much at will, Moscow shooting down just a fraction, and sometimes killing bystanders. One harrowing video from the strike a week and a half ago showed dozens of civilians in Crimea narrowly avoiding being slaughtered by bomblets falling from a destroyed missile as wreckage from an air defense interceptor does land among them. Pro tip: don’t vacation in a warzone, people. And welcome to life in Kharkiv before Ukraine finally got permission to shoot Himars rockets across the international border. Or any of the other places in Ukraine where orc missiles slip through.
At some point Ukraine will start routinely combining Storm Shadow and ATACMS attacks - Moscow recently deployed its latest S-500 SAM system to southeastern Crimea, so I expect that it’s a primary target. Allegedly it can shoot down aircraft 500km distant - if it performs to spec. But the S-400 it was developed from has certainly been proven to have major blind spots. As it turns out, you don’t need stealth aircraft to hunt them, so forget about F-35s - ballistic missiles do quite nicely. Small drones are a major threat too, and Ukraine can mount attacks with a hundred.
On the ground, the tale this past week has been similar to the ones prior, with one major difference: Ukraine has begun to mount local counterattacks with visible success. I’ll focus on that and some command changes in the next section, but they are worth mentioning to offer some added context to the latest orc progress in Pokrovsk. Putin’s troops are grinding on there and maintaining the pushes on Toretsk and Chasiv Yar - but slowly, and almost certainly suffering severe casualties. Reported Ukrainian counterattacks have driven most or all the orcs out of the Kanal district in Chasiv Yar though the units responsible have not claimed the area as liberated and probably won’t right away. It makes for a nice trap.
Zelensky visited the Pokrovsk this week, and that’s usually a sign that the fighting is tough in an area. He mentioned the 47th and 110th Mechanized Brigades in particular, implying that they’ve borne the brunt of Moscow’s attacks. But they aren’t alone - they’ve simply blunted some of the most consistently intensive pushes. Moscow continues to fight to push Ukraine across the Vovcha river, while Ukraine’s brigades slowly pull back while forcing the orcs to fight for every inch.
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Ukraine is holding some positions east of the Vovcha to slow the orc advance, allowing more time for defensive fortifications to be constructed while preventing Moscow from building up any momentum across a broad front. Every attack Moscow’s assault troops make is harried by drones and artillery, and Ukraine launches local counterattacks to reclaim abandoned positions once the enemy has been weakened. When the heat gets too intense they give up a tree line or two for good, then the whole thing repeats.
What Moscow hopes to achieve here is still a matter of some debate. One line of reasoning goes that it won’t try to push north to Kostiantynivka because this would expose its supply lines to attack from Toretsk. Another claims that this is exactly Moscow’s objective because a march to Pokrovsk forces it even farther from its staging areas in occupied Avdiivka while pushing uphill across another water line. It’s taken Moscow months to get this far, and the rate of advance has not quickened despite the tactical breakthrough at Ocheretyne. As Ukraine falls back towards Pokrovsk, its supply lines will get shorter, too.
So I still anticipate Moscow to turn north, though it might not seek a grand envelopment of Toretsk but instead attempt to form a pocket and storm the place directly, Avdiivka style. Moscow is at least giving the impression that this might be the plan, but though the orcs have crossed the grey zone to push near Ukraine’s main defense line actually entering the built up area is set to be extremely painful if that’s what they try.
And at this point, inflicting pain is what the whole war is about. Moscow will only stop trying to conquer Ukraine if its leaders understand that all efforts will be in vain. Their petty, false vision of history where Muscovy represents a continuation of the Rus polity is as much of a lie as the Nazis’ Aryan delusion. It’s an excuse for conquest, pillage, and murder, nothing more.
This truth is the fount of Ukraine’s strategy for winning this war. It isn’t about territory, not directly, but raw power. Putin is making a bet that he has enough to outlast and crush all opposition. Ukraine is betting that the ruscist army will bleed out long before that happens. Putin’s bet appears to be bound to the idea that Trump’s election will matter. Ironically, many of Putin’s erstwhile foes seem determined to agree - an intriguing point of confluence that masks a similar delusion. People with skill in stringing words together have a nasty habit of mistaking what they wish were true for what the evidence suggests.
I’m not immune, of course, but do benefit from the discipline that solid scientific training is supposed to instill. A controversial belief that I hold is that anyone who has a PhD but doesn’t understand basic calculus should be stripped of their title. It’s a sign of an intellectual deficiency that needs to be remedied to ensure that anyone who trains scientists has a full grasp of its tools. It’s the lack of truly comprehensive scientific training that most undermines efforts to teach critical thinking. Sorry, literature professors. But not that sorry.
In a very real sense, wars of aggression only end when the perpetrators surrender the delusion that they can subjugate an unwilling population by force. Those that forget this lesson are doomed to have it taught to them. The moral side of reality can’t be neglected, but it only matters if material needs are met. And when one group of people decides to kill to get their way, those in their path have a material need for raw firepower. If you’d like to dispute this, please pay a visit to the front lines.
Ukraine’s Probing Counterattacks
Over the past week there were some interesting developments on the command side of Ukraine’s fight, with a high-ranking Ukrainian general removed from his post after some remarkable accusations by an officer with a well-known Ukrainian brigade. Ukrainian press outlets have suggested that there is a substantial degree of tension in the forces between a core group of older officers and younger ones who have spent the past couple years fighting on the front.
No amount of rhetoric about unity can ever completely submerge the simple truth that people are people, and politics is inevitable. It’s also generally true that a given leader in an institution is partly a product of the forces that shaped them, for better or for worse. Organizations, like any system that functions similarly to a biological organism, are in a constant dialogue with their environment and must find a way to adapt to changing conditions. Life is that which sustains and replicates itself, but the genetic code of a human group is made up of the preferences and expectations of its members.
Generally speaking, leadership turnover is a good thing. It prevents an organization from becoming too bound to the identity of a given personality. Though my argument here is naturally bound to be controversial, I have to consider it a scientific fact that leadership is nothing more than a steering function. Leaders create moments of operational closure by cutting off internal discussions about future actions when these no longer serve a purpose. These actions give structure to an organization, generating effective truths that all members will use as a common reference point.
Were I to build a West Coast Defense Force after this part of the USA gained Constitutional autonomy, “officer” would be a mission occupational specialty just like infantry or scout. The career of a service member would naturally branch after four years of enlisted service, each of these entailing a boost in professional responsibilities. All personnel would receive a college degree and have their choice of specialty paths, one of which would be to serve as an officer responsible for filling progressively more complex leadership roles. There would be no more hard officer-enlisted distinction.
Military institutions in the twenty-first century badly need to shed the last vestiges of nineteenth century thinking. This includes the conception of officers as having their own separate identity and heritage that places them in a caste that stands above other portions of the force. I am not advocating the end of any notion of traditional military discipline or a rank structure - it just needs to be detached from the longstanding intrusion of social dynamics into defense affairs.
That’s why I tend not to give much credence to the usual media probing for juicy stories when a commander is relieved of duty. Zaluzhnyi’s replacement was an exception because of how it happened, and there have been few notable morale issues as a result, at least ones visible through open source materials available in English.
Sodol’s removal is also notable, however, because it came after a public campaign waged by Ukrainians in and out of uniform. Being publicly accused of incompetence bordering on malice that hints at treason is not typical for senior officers. Neither is being summarily removed by the President almost immediately after.
It’s always possible that there are some political games going on here. Sodol’s record is hard to assess, especially from a distance, because in pretty much any leader’s case there will always be sharp differences of opinion about their actions. And they have less direct control over matters than media stories often pretend.
Yet the specific nature of the accusations stands out. And it is to be expected that within any military organization there are going to be otherwise successful, respected officers whose affect is largely a sham. You also have the potential for someone to be an excellent brigade or corps commander who proves utterly inept when promoted to a higher level. Assessing performance is rarely as cut and dried as people like to imagine, with even the most objective-looking metric containing a dangerous seed of subjective bias.
In general, Ukraine is likely in a position where an old guard of generals and people they promoted have struggled with adapting to the demands of contemporary warfare as much as orc officers seem to. Being part of an old guard does not make a person incapable of effective leadership - often some of the most effective senior officers in history have been seventy-something consummate pros who understood warfare at a deep philosophical level.
Often it’s a group of folks from an old guard in an institution who see the need for change who partner with up and comers to make something new. Seniority and skill are not identical, but they do run together. Diversity is a good thing; generally speaking, the most effective solutions re-imagine old techniques in a new way.
Sodol might well have been one of the many social climbers who is good at masking their lack of raw ability. He could have simply had bad luck. But it rarely hurts to bring in new blood when a fresh approach is required. There are some rumors in the Ukrainian press that suggest more turnover is coming. We’ll see.
Ukraine is in a position where it has to innovate a new method of combining the different pieces of the military puzzle at the right scale and tempo to break down the orc military system. Where China focuses on a systems destruction warfare concept that breaks top-down connections across an entire theater, the one I’ve developed is bottom-up in nature. The goal is to produce autonomous cells capable of leveraging all the capabilities of a country’s full arsenal on demand.
Elements of this kind of approach appear to be on display this past week east of Terny, where over the past year a bulge has formed as a result of constant ruscist efforts to advance to Lyman. Completing this arm of a broader offensive aimed at Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in Donbas is probably necessary to have any hope of bringing them under Moscow’s control.
But ruscist progress was always halting, and lately had been mostly stopped. One of the premier brigades fighting in this sector, the Swedish-trained 21st Mechanized, has been fairly quiet of late, hopefully a sign it is being built up with new kit now that Sweden is sending up to 200 older armored personnel carriers. With luck, some more of their version of the Leopard 2, as well.
Whether or not they’re involved, a couple weeks ago some Ukrainian bloggers started talking about Ukraine pushing back in the forest area along the Siverski Donets River. Then, late last week, suddenly Ukrainian forces fighting near Terny went on the attack with little or no warning, throwing the orcs back by up to 2km.
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It’s not a huge turn of events as these things go, but potentially signals Ukraine shifting to a new mode of operations going forward in select areas. Moscow has been sustaining its ongoing efforts on several fronts only by shuffling reserves around. Instead of having a set of big force groupings dedicated to individual theaters or fronts, Moscow is forever moving fresher or better equipped units to places where an advance had bogged down. In an apparent attempt to maintain the illusion of progress, the orcs look to be burning energy and damaging their own cohesion.
The contrast with Ukrainian practices is stark. Not every operation that Ukraine attempts goes well or is even advisable. As effective as the Krynky bridgehead has proven as a meatgrinder for the enemy, word is that the Ukrainian Marine Corps hates the mission. If they don’t have enough boats or fire support, I can’t blame them. In general, with the town annihilated and Ukraine having been holding the same positions for months, I am beginning to question the wisdom in clinging to it. That’s a question for someone with access to hard data, though.
In general, however, any kind of work that involves crossing a substantial water line has do be done in pulses. You’ve got to secure a line of supply to a unit in a very precarious position. It’s typically only wise when the enemy is thin on the ground, so pulling out and moving to another spot is standard. While I’d really like to see Ukraine be able to form a broader bridgehead here over summer, lives matter more than the preservation of an option. Moscow might easily be induced to thin out its defenses if Ukraine pulled back and appeared to give up on a crossing operation.
It is becoming clear that offensive operations can only succeed when backed by enough firepower. You’ve got to be able to reliably and swiftly suppress any enemy fighting position then destroy it. Surprise in a broad operational sense is unlikely because of how easy it is to spot troop concentrations. That means the enemy must be surprised in a different dimension. When fighting the Red Army 2.0 surprise depends on exploiting the fundamental blind spot in the system: the lack of faith in those lower on the ladder.
Front line ruscist combat units, regiments and brigades, have to be targeted, overwhelmed, and functionally dissolved. Ground troops will then be able to isolate and destroy separate element in detail until the enemy reacts, at which point they pull back and prepare to strike somewhere else.
What that looks like in practice is a lot of separate, localized, but very intense counterattacks against orc units that get put in a vulnerable position. Enemy units must be encouraged to feel disconnected and abandoned; once they realize that they themselves are always Ukraine’s primary targets, not a given fighting position or town, a psychological toll should help reduce their will to fight.
I’ll write more on how granular level counterattacks will look under this paradigm in the future. The main takeaway here is that with restored ammunition supplies Ukraine is not simply hanging back and rolling with orc punches. First small units, then eventually entire brigades, will slowly start switching to a more active posture over summer. By fall Putin’s army will face a foe that is gaining confidence and firepower.
This will be a very good thing, because Putin’s last best hope in all of this is that politics intervenes. Elections in France and the USA give him cause for celebration, of late. It’s a delusion, of course, with real politics putting limits on politicians no matter what they babble in a debate.
The Rogue Systems Recon Official US 2024 Election Forecast
France’s current election situation is interesting, but I don’t have any particular expertise on politics in the Francophone world. Macron will still control France’s foreign policy until his term is up in 2027, as I understand, so as with the European elections the impact on Ukraine should be minimal. Notably, all that most of the New Right leaders anywhere will say with respect to Ukraine is that they’d like the war to be over; forcing Ukraine to surrender is simply not a popular position.
What is often termed the political Center - Macron and Biden reside here - has always been a bit of an illusion, especially in the USA. People are tribal, voting according to their closest in-group’s preferences. All politics has always been identity politics, but the tribes aren’t as simplistic as class or race except where these have become overtly politicized.
Politicians use rhetoric to connect to various tribes in a population and assemble an electoral coalition. Right and Left tend to be distinct, easily defined nodes roughly organized around questions of whether taxes should be lower or higher and the generosity of the social welfare system.
The Center on the other hand is more a mish-mash, groups that generally lean Right or Left but don’t always vote. Partisans usually turn out, but those not as closely bound to a partisan identity tend to show up only when specifically motivated. As social media has made communication incredibly cheap, it’s easier for people to closely invest in a particular tribe, so boundaries have become harsher. This makes developing truly unifying principles a challenge.
Left and Right are increasingly complex and autonomous - though co-dependent - coalitions that use opposition to the other as the major organizing principle. Those who claim the Centrist banner tend to either promote a renewed status quo or superficial reforms that target people who care more about symbols than substance. They often get pretty weird trying to appeal to too many different audiences at once who lack a common uniting thread.
Of course so do partisan politicians. To my ear, Biden and Trump have always sounded identical - each distorts the truth or even outright lies, their speeches a word salad of slogans and catch phrases. They do this less because they’re old - most of the time - and more because that lets them play a trick on listeners. The goal is to make as many people as possible believe that the politician is directly speaking to their parochial concerns. It’s a parasocial trap, an attempt to build a false bond, and it’s at the heart of any effective American campaign.
For people who have had Trump living inside their head rent free for about eight years it is understandably hard to accept how cruelly Biden and his team have played us all for fools. Last Thursday’s debate was the first time since Biden took office that it was impossible to hide the fact that his backers and allies have been covering for him since day one. The Biden that fumbled the Afghanistan withdrawal then insisted that he did great has always been the real Joe.
While debates rarely matter thanks to the dwindling number of voters not already bound to a partisan team in the contemporary USA, to understand what just happened to Biden’s electoral fortunes demands a quick review of how American presidential politics actually functions as a system. Here is where I need to reiterate that my analysis is explicitly non-partisan. During election season the social pressure to conform to a party’s chosen narrative becomes extreme. Luckily, I’m more or less a hermit continually surprised that I have readers at all.
I’m probably best described as a conservative progressive, which is all but heresy in contemporary American political discourse. Summed up: the science suggests that the Scandinavian mode of social democracy is broadly optimal for most of humanity. However, the nature of the United States demands a decentralized approach. Today’s progressives offer hope of a grand revolution that can never be, just as the neoliberal-neoconservative alliance behind Biden sells a saccharine delusion of a united America in defiance of the laws of geography.
I have closely followed American politics for most of my life. In 2016, I detected the early signs of the polling error that tanked Clinton’s hopes using the results of the gold-standard Selzer poll of Iowa to infer an unusually high degree of support for Trump among rural voters in the Midwest who were likely not being accurately polled by national outlets. In 2020 I correctly predicted that the race would not be a blowout for Biden despite what the polls said, but another effective tie. I was right about that and Trump’s little scheme to overturn the election by getting friendly states to send alternative slates of electors to Congress. The plan might have worked, too, had Republican state officials in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin not stood up to him.
Ever since Biden took office I have watched with growing alarm as his team has made one predictably catastrophic mistake after another, from downplaying Covid right before a major wave hit to ignoring the Taliban’s rapid advance in Afghanistan until it was too late. Seeing Putin ruthlessly play Biden’s team on Ukraine for over a year drove me to write this blog.
Look, a lot of prominent Democrats - Schumer, Pelosi, Clyburn, Newsom - have been desperate since 2021 to preserve the illusion that the Biden Administration is the best America can hope for. They are continuing to fight a determined rearguard action to pretend that the polls are all totally wrong and that Biden can’t possibly lose to Trump - Newsom because he actually believes that he can get the job someday, the rest because their legacies are tied to Biden’s. Naturally, anyone who questions the orthodoxy is ignored or attacked, so groupthink rules the day.
The Very Smart People who run the Democratic Party are dead wrong - again. If numerous media reports over the weekend are to be believed, the fate of America now depends on whether Joe Biden’s wife and family will cling to power or step aside. No, I’m not kidding - the fate of the Republic is in the hands of one famously close-knit family that somehow also has all our best interests at heart, like kindly grandparents, as if this were some bad C-grade political thriller by Disney.
And they call this a democracy. When the majority of Americans can agree on only a few things, one of them being that Biden shouldn’t be running again. America’s Founders and every president before Richard Nixon would positively weep.
The weight of evidence going into the debate indicated that Biden was already on track to lose the election to Trump. His team called a historically early first debate in an attempt to stop dismal polling from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy amid rumblings that some donors thought it best for him to bow out and ride off into the sunset. This was never a wise gambit, and so the thing naturally backfired in spectacular fashion.
Now Bidenworld is making excuses, up to their same old pathetic tricks. He had a cold, they say. He was tired from too much debate preparation and also isn’t as chipper after 4PM. But he also has a more active schedule than anyone a quarter of his age and will challenge you to a pushup-off, so watch out! Also Trump is a liar so nothing else matters anyway, especially not polls showing that we’re totally bluffing, and if you disagree then you must hate democracy, bedwetter.
Their only goal is to convince people to overlook the fact that Biden blew perhaps his only chance to reboot the narrative about his campaign before it was too late. Blind faith is an interesting look for a party that loves to talk about how it has a monopoly on Truth and Reason.
Individual polls are always flawed, but an average of polls will smooth out most random error. Tracking these polling averages over time adds another important control. Realclearpolitics is a right-leaning but nominally Independent site that offers simple polling averages, plus how the Biden-Trump numbers in 2024 compare to the state of the race in 2020 as well as the Trump-Clinton match in 2016. The data tells a compelling tale.
Since Trump sealed the Republican nomination this spring, polls have shown him consistently in a statistical dead heat with Biden at the national level. That puts him 8-10 points ahead of where he was at this point in 2020 polls and 6-8 points ahead of his standing in 2016. Trump’s estimated share of the vote has ranged from 44-48%, while Biden’s has hit a high of 47 and low of 43.
The trouble for Biden is that historically the Republican contender for the presidency generally improves their numbers by 2-3 points between summer and November. This was true in 2016 and 2020 - the distance between Trump and his rivals nearly halved between summer and election day. Every October more voters wind up coming home to the Republican, leading to endless talk of some October Surprise upending the race.
This shift is mainly a function of scattered tribes of voters only loosely bound to the main parties beginning to paying attention when the campaign begins in earnest - something symbolized in the past by the first debates, which come once both parties have formally nominated their candidate. Despite the historic trend of this shift favoring the Republican, Biden’s team has been insisting for over a year that dangerously bad polling was an artifact of people not paying attention, insisting that his numbers would improve once voters got a split screen view of the two candidates.
Well, they made sure that happened last Thursday. And first impressions matter in a campaign. While decades ago a debate performance watched by only a third of voters could be overwritten in people’s memories by later media appearances, the clips and memes from the June debate will never die. Biden now has a millstone around his neck, and his people’s response so far has been, according to numerous reports, to gaslight them by pretending this is all just a tempest in a teapot.
The smart money is on Biden powering through thanks to silly fears of chaos at the Democratic convention. But only narrowly - the damage has been done. Democrats across the party are making their own calculations. If his polls decline substantially and don’t recover by August, donors might demand change. They’re who Joe Biden works for. Trust us, we’re the good guys! Won’t fly with them all.
Worse yet for Biden, his poll numbers have been moribund for over a year, bouncing in the same unpleasant range. The only way that he’s not actually behind at this point is if the polls have universally over corrected in the same direction, even ones paid for by pro-Trump outlets. Only a fraction of voters, no more than 10%, have no opinion of Biden, so room for improvement is extremely limited. And Biden’s situation is much worse in the swing states.
Here you have to take into account the fact that polling errors tend to be regionally correlated, which means that you’ve got to assume the final results will be skewed from what the polls say in a peculiar way. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Biden has been statistically tied with Trump for weeks. In Pennsylvania he’s actually been a little over 2 points behind, which the size of the samples there pushes Trump right up to the statistical margin of error on the side of a victory.
In all three states, the vaunted Blue Wall, Biden had a narrow but comfortable polling lead on election day in 2020 - then almost lost. Every other swing state is even worse for Biden. Though the polling error actually understated Biden’s support in Nevada and Arizona in 2020, he’s now behind by far more than the margin of error in both, so even a correlated error likely won’t save him. Georgia, which Biden won by around 10,000 votes and fraction of a percent, tends to have no overall poll bias, and he’s been consistently behind by more than the margin of error.
Biden probably won’t suffer in the polls as much as you might expect given the grand pundit freakout after he started talking. I’d bet on 2-3 points of slippage at most. But having to claw back to square one now represents a major defeat. He was already a 50-50 shot against Trump at best, probably more like 40-60. This put him closer to 30-70, and if Trump does something clever like pick Nikki Haley as his VP in the next week or two it drops to 25-75.
Which voters Biden just alienated matters. Turnout in 2024 will almost certainly be lower than 2020 because it was a unique moment. Biden won by less than 1% in the swing states that put him over the magic number of 270 when polls the day before showed him 3-5 points ahead. Everything points to 2024 turnout falling to somewhere between 2016 and 2020 levels. In the latter, despite setting a modern record, turnout still only reached 67% of eligible voters - up from around 60%. Third parties will also trouble accurate polling efforts, though so far the statistical impact appears to be a wash.
At the ground level, voting is mostly a habit, and people who will actually show up to vote are split into two partisan coalitions of approximately equal size, comprising about 80% of the electorate. The other 20% mostly lean one direction or the other, but who actually shows up depends on the year. What parties call “swing voters” are really members of tribes that sit on the margins of their coalition’s appeal. Presidential elections wind up being decided by how many people from each tribe show up, with base voters likely to turn out unless deeply offended and the various “moderates” or “centrists” harder to pull in.
Biden and Trump are in a competition to get as many of their 2020 voters to show up in November. The less connected to the party a voter is, the lower the odds they will. Polls can only indirectly shed light on intensity of support, but those which ask pertinent questions indicate that everywhere Trump has maintained the backing of 92-96% of his 2020 voters. For Biden, the range is roughly 85%-93%.
Less than a 1% reduction in relative vote share in the right combination of swing states, say Trump turning out 94% of his 2020 people while Biden gets 93%, dooms the incumbent. Before the debate Biden’s numbers were substantially worse than that in sufficient states to tank his hopes. Now, whatever margin he had is gone. He’s an electoral liability for his party with no real precedent.
Biden’s debate performance is doubly damaging because even partisans viewed it poorly - this means that those not as closely tied to the Democratic Party media bubble will be even more resistant to Biden’s efforts to reach them. In the immediate term, Biden’s biggest challenge is convincing his donors not to abandon ship, as they could force the party to change course.
American politics since the Citizens United decision has degenerated into a simple market, wealthy interests investing in politicians to gain a say in legislation and regulation. But a donor, like any investor, needs information about what politicians are relatively trustworthy. To get it they tend to rely on media pundits, which is why Biden cultivates close relationships with Neo-Puritan writers like early-gen AI Thomas Friedman and fake Oregonian Nicholas Kristof who both turned on him last Thursday. Banal and mindless as he and the rest of The New York Times’ op-ed writers are, a lot of people with big bank accounts use their blather to figure out what politicians are worth throwing money at.
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The collective pundit class freakout that began as soon as Biden opened his mouth happened because they’ve been openly carrying water for the guy since Clinton lost. Then - and I heard this direct from the mouths of die-hard feminist Democrats - it was promptly decided that her gender was to blame and not the candidate’s pre-existing unpopularity. Biden almost immediately became their security blanket, and he actively encouraged the party to listen. A nasty feedback loop formed, culminating when the Democrats used the pandemic as an excuse to basically end the 2020 primary by having almost every candidate drop out and endorse Biden before most states had even voted.
When Biden melted down in the debate, he discredited and embarrassed the pundits who had staked so much on creating the illusions that have always sustained his bid to be president. All of a sudden they knew that it was impossible to pretend that this isn’t who Biden has been for years - a guy who might be tired and freeze up if a nuclear crisis hits too late in the evening. Biden went out there in front of 50 million people and made them look like fools, and that’s hard for them to forgive.
Team Biden’s efforts to downplay what just happened will probably make the situation worse. At best they’ll convince Democrats to sigh and accept that this is their fate. At worst his polls slip in the coming days and don’t recover. This is not a good range of outcomes to face when you claim to be defending democracy. If Biden truly cared about democracy, America, or even his own legacy, he wouldn’t just drop out of the race - he’d resign before the convention.
Harris has polling numbers that match Biden’s except in one important respect: slightly more people are still willing to reserve judgement about her. With the full weight of the Democratic Party’s narrative machine behind them if Biden resigns due to ill health this July and fully endorses her, team Harris would have a precious chance to change the game.
Has Harris demonstrated any particular ability so far? No. But at this point, the arguments for Biden are all rooted in illusions that conveniently sustain the Democratic Party’s internal pecking order. The geriatric elders will cling to power until the next generation pries their cold dead hands away.
At some moments, what people need to rally them is a sign that change is not just coming, but here. If you’re determined to act like a brand, make sure the packaging is up to date. The Democrats might do just fine with an open convention where a ranked-order vote by the delegates lets the party put on a show of what democracy can look like. Biden could decide not to run and let Harris take her shot, but that would still risk her looking like a puppet. At this point, it would be much more palatable to the average American to simply put Harris out front now when everyone assumes that she’ll be taking over by 2028 anyway. Let her make her best case after jumping in the deep end.
The reality is that Harris teaming up with a moderate Northeast Republican governor like Hogan as her VP is probably the Democrats’ only hope. They could make the necessary argument that theirs is an emergency arrangement intended to save democracy from the likes of Putin and Trump. That might get the country through this election - and give space for a successor to Trump to rise. They’d back Ukraine.
Unfortunately, if the last few years have demonstrated anything, it’s that US leaders will sacrifice anyone and anything on the altar of their personal ambitions. Every day that Joe Biden continues to occupy the White House represents another nagging reminder of what America’s values really are: getting your family in a position where the usual laws and rules of accountability don’t apply to them.
Whether Bidens, Trumps, or Kennedys, in America the posh people all dream of being kings and queens. That’s part of what makes them all domestic enemies of the Constitution. They are also no true friends of Ukraine. If Putin loses, the global status quo is shattered and their own power is threatened.
Fortunately for America’s allies, what happens in D.C. is set to matter less and less going forward. As the USA turns inward and abandons the Postwar Order that made it strong, the steps that allies have already begun to take will look wiser each year.
If a Fifth America rises from the ashes of the Fourth, it will return to the world stage as an equal. As it should always have been. An ally and true friend of freedom, not the hollow empire run a bunch of hacks imitating their British forebears that it became.