When it's worse than you think.

We've been talking about whether Joe Biden is too old for the job since at least 2017. Sometime in 2020, conventional wisdom settled in: we need an old but sane white guy to beat an old batshit white guy. That wisdom bore fruit.

But last night it was clear in the first few minutes that there would be a cleavage among Democrats, breaking up a core group that has defended the Biden candidacy at all costs into one group that maintains that position, and another group that says they will stay committed unless the Party does the right thing, convinces Biden to end this painful and upsetting display, and anoints a successor. My DMs and Slack messages last night named the usual suspects: Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer (nobody suggested the Vice President to me). #resistance podcasters gestured at an open convention. New York Times columnists took a rueful victory lap.

What happens next is anyone's guess. Over the past century, we've gone from parties selecting their candidates to voters in primaries selecting delegates to the nominating conventions to delegates being bound to honor the preferences of those voters, so conventions are now a fait accompli — a debutante ball for the candidate. There has not been an open convention for the Democratic nominee for president since 1968.

The Democrats will return to the scene of that debacle, in Chicago, this summer.

There are a few questions before us: Will Biden stay in the race and the committed delegates hold the line and nominate him? Will Biden stay, but other candidates emerge, allowing delegates to defect? Will Biden step aside, and the Party rush to select a successor (and who might that be) before the convention? Will Biden step aside, and the Party permit (or be forced to accept) an open convention?

It's a pretty simple 2x2 ... Biden stays in/Biden steps out v. Party pre-selects nominee/Convention contest. But within that 2x2 lay multiple scenarios that could play out. Because of that, it will be extremely hard to present scenarios to voters in a survey and ask pollsters to make sense of what the electorate would prefer (or what "prefer" would even mean in this case). We are entering a seven-week stretch that will be defined by rank speculation and gross punditry.

In this moment, the Democrats don't need predictions, and they don’t have time for impotent hand-wringing.

They need a strategy.

The good news is there is a way to develop and test multiple strategies before selecting and committing to one. You might have heard of wargaming, tabletop games, or serious games. I don't mean Warhammer; I mean a grounded, story-based, immersive, role-playing strategy game that creates a repeatable simulation of what could happen if various parties interact over a point (or points) of contention. Its purpose is not prediction, it's analysis. It's to help strategic decision-makers select the best available strategy and to help them identify alternative strategies to adapt to reality as it unfolds. It's the thing a serious political party would be organizing right now.

This is not the first time I've thought about this. In the spring when Ezra Klein and others were seriously discussing an open convention, I reached out to people I knew who use serious games professionally to help government agencies, businesses, and academics strategize through tough decision-making environments. As I talked to people who worked on campaigns for the show, however, I discovered two things: nobody wanted to talk to me about it (in what I assume was a "don't give this idea more oxygen" sort of response), or they told me they were unaware of any campaign or party engaging in such activities.

And I was actively ignored when I proposed that we convene a group of serious people to run a series of simulations for what it would be like to go to a contested convention, or for Biden to drop out of the race. That was then.

This is now.

Now's the time to realize that every decision a candidate, or a campaign, or for that matter, a voter makes is based on assumptions about what is possible, what is likely, and what they believe is either unlikely or impossible.

In 2016, it was impossible Trump could be elected President; Biden was out on a book tour in 2017 promoting Promise Me, Dad not to kick off a presidential bid, but because this was supposed to ring in his leadership of a cancer moonshot under a Clinton presidency.

In 2020, it was impossible that Trump would still be popular after an incompetent and cruel term in office, and especially impossible after 350,000 people died of Covid, and America was rocked by protests.

In 2024, it would be impossible that Trump would run again — surely he'd be in jail or simply disgraced; surely the GOP would return to its senses. Dating back as far as 2015, Biden's people spread rumors he would seek only one term, so it's impossible that the match-up is Trump v. Biden, again.

We've seen in polling and in focus groups that voters have only recently started to come to terms with the reality that these are their choices once again; last night's performance will likely throw them back into the zone of disbelief — surely it is impossible, the Democrats will stick by a candidate so clearly not up to the job of campaigning.

We live inside a bubble of disbelief. It is why conspiracy theories are spreading, and misinformation flourishes. It is why voters answer nonsensically on surveys about their candidate preferences (really, who would vote for Trump and Ruben Gallego?) and the state of the economy. It is why we talk about a vibes economy and a vibes election. We have to burst this bubble, but we can't do it with polling (which only makes people respond to disbelief with more disbelief) alone. We can't do it with punditry, or calls to have a debate about something we then steadfastly avoid debating; we can't do it by calling people bedwetters or telling them not to believe their lyin' eyes.

If we want to get back to reality, we need something better than a prediction.

We need a plan.

What’s next?

Coming up soon on the Cross Tabs podcast — a conversation with serious games designers about how a strategy exercise like the one I propose here would actually work.

Cross Tabs Podcast updates

The most recent episode of Cross Tabs is live, continuing my conversations about online survey sample quality, the threat of fraud, and how to combat it. It’s a three-episode arc, so I think you should listen to them all.

Have a great weekend and to my US readers, a joyful Independence Day. To my UK readers – good luck next week.