The race was always going to tighten, but the fundamentals are different this time. Trump ran as himself an example of the Clintons' legendary corruption. Biden is impossible to define as what's wrong with our politics, and the public knows and likes him. https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1298632963412852736

Will the rioting hurt Biden? There's a pretty decent chance it can. But it's not *defining Biden* in those terms. The RNC has thus far been more successful in a lot of ways than I expected, but still utterly failing at redefining Biden as something other than 'old'.

Here's a perfect example. This guy was elevated as a surrogate of Bernie Sanders--Sanders even wrote the intro to his book. But Bernie lost, Biden won, and these guys aren't representative of the nominee

It was bad that Sarsour was on camera at the DNC! Were Bernie the nominee Sarsour would be out there repping the campaign daily. It's just harder to define Biden as an extremist, even if his party is currently losing its mind. In presidential elections that sort of thing matters.

When BDSniks came to Warren she nodded and hired IfNotNow cofounder. When they came at Biden he told them to go play in traffic. I'm not dismissing concerns about the Democratic Party's trend. I'm just saying Dems chose the one guy who doesn't intentionally cultivate that trend.

You can be right about the extremism of a party in which Nancy Pelosi endorses Ilhan Omar and still understand that it hurts the Trump campaign to not have someone like that as the Dem nominee. Dem future is likely the Squad. Biden beat their candidates. The optics matter.

Riots can hurt Biden by making it look like the Squadniks are the *present* not the *future*. That's the trap for Biden. He has to show, as Bill Clinton would say, that the president is still relevant here. If he can show that the party *right now* is his, he wins the argument.

Again to folks who are arguing that Biden is already the Democratic past: That may be! But my point is that *Republicans are struggling to define him as such to the public.* This is about the messaging debate, and who is currently winning it.

This is probably a good way of putting how Americans seem to be interpreting the election: https://twitter.com/edgarageous/status/1298646019450839042?s=20

A counterpoint to my thread: that Biden running as a placeholder hurts the argument that he's all that's standing between voters and the abyss https://twitter.com/indoeuropa/status/1298658164095713287?s=20