The Antihistamine Theory and What The Campaign Itself Is Saying

In some ways, the “open convention” position — of which, after the horrible debate, I was sure was the right course — is safest for people like you and me, who follow this stuff closely and care passionately:

> If we’re ignored and Joe wins, we’re thrilled.  We won!  (And can still feel sure we would have won by even more with someone else.)

> If we’re ignored and he loses, we’re in despair — but at least can tell ourselves (perhaps rightly), “if only they had listened to us!”

> If Joe steps aside and we win, we’re thrilled.  We won!  And can tell ourselves we wouldn’t have, had we not pushed for a new nominee.

> If he steps aside and we lose, we can tell ourselves, again, perhaps rightly, we would have lost even worse with Joe.

So in a sense there’s no downside to taking this position (as I did for the first hours after the debate).

Except that it may be the wrong position.

Here are two reasons I’m not nearly as certain as I was initially that we should do anything other than keep our heads down and return this great president to office for four more successful years:

What I call THE ANTIHISTAMINE THEORY and WHAT THE CAMPAIGN ITSELF IS SAYING.

I’m going to start with the latter.

It’s long, but so worth reading.

WHAT THE CAMPAIGN IS SAYING

To: Interested Parties
From: Jen O’Malley Dillon
Subject: The View From The Battlegrounds
Date: June 29, 2024

It’s a familiar story: Following Thursday night’s debate, the beltway class is counting Joe Biden out. The data in the battleground states, though, tells a different story. On every metric that matters, data shows it did nothing to change the American people’s perception, our supporters are more fired up than ever, and Donald Trump only reminded voters of why they fired him four years ago and failed to expand his appeal beyond his MAGA base.

Here’s what else the voters saw immediately following the debate: President Biden met with grassroots supporters in Atlanta, dipped into Waffle House for some late night food and some selfies, then touched down in North Carolina where he shook every hand on the tarmac before a rally the next day with fired-up voters that highlighted the stark contrast at the center of this race. At the same time, Vice President Harris was campaigning in battleground Nevada. And our surrogates and tens of thousands of volunteers spent the week organizing and mobilizing Americans – because that is the work winning campaigns do. Every single day matters in reaching the voters who will decide this election. But for all the hand-wringing coming out of Thursday, here’s the truth: this election was incredibly close before Thursday, and by every metric we’ve seen since, it remains just as close.

Flash polls from CNN, 538, SurveyUSA, Morning Consult, and Data for Progress show what we expected: The debate did not change the horse race. This mirrors what the campaign’s internal post-debate polling showed: The president maintained his support among his 2020 voters and voters’ opinions were not changed.

  • CNN: “An 81% majority of registered voters who watched the debate say it had no effect on their choice for president, with another 14% saying that it made them reconsider but didn’t change their mind. Just 5% say it changed their minds about whom to vote for.”
  • 538: “The face-off doesn’t seem to have caused many people to reconsider their vote.”
  • SurveyUSA: Continues to show a tight race between President Biden and Donald Trump, consistent with public polling averages pre-debate.
  • Morning Consult: A new large-sample, independent poll has President Biden gaining 1 point post-debate, now leading 45-44.
  • Data for Progress: Vote choice between Trump and Biden remains largely unchanged, and Biden continues to run ahead of other Democrats in a Trump matchup.
  • Geoff Garin of Hart Research: “I am finishing my second battleground state poll post-debate and both surveys show the same thing: the debate had no effect on the vote choice. The election was extremely close and competitive before the debate, and it is still extremely close and competitive today.”

Following the debate, our internal dials showed President Biden led Trump on key measures of being presidential, speaking to the issues that matter, and being likable by more than 20 points. Dials showed that independent voters were turned off by Trump’s personal attacks, and had deep negative feelings when Trump talked about January 6, his support for Putin, and refusing to lay out his vision for America. Our internal poll confirmed the dials: Trump’s performance left independent voters feeling less confident about his position on reproductive rights and abortion, respect for the Constitution and rule of law, and truthfulness.

Debate dials conducted by outside groups in Phoenix, Arizona largely confirm what we saw from internal dials. A few key takeaways:

  • “Overall, voters say that the debate for the most part didn’t change their overall outlook of either candidate.”
  • “Trump’s refusal to answer questions in a straightforward manner and his exaggerated boasting fed into perceptions that he cares more about himself than solving peoples’ issues.”
  • “Biden’s strongest moments were on matters of policy substance, and voters thought he better addressed their concerns on the issues than did Trump.”

In focus groups of voters who watched the debate, President Biden won on substance:

  • As one undecided voter in Warren, Michigan told CNN: “When it comes to a strong leader and what we’re looking for in a leader, I’m looking for somebody that I trust to be able to uphold policies that will protect me, and are more concerned for the general well being of everybody in the United States, which I got more from Biden considering he did a lot more talking about policies, and what he’s done and what he plans to do. Whereas on the other side from Trump, all I really heard was ‘I’ve done this and it was the best ever,’ but I never heard what it was…”
  • This was reinforced in a focus group too from Univision in Arizona showing undecided Latino voters that moved toward Biden following the debate

Across the battlegrounds, our state campaigns have received an influx of volunteer enthusiasm and support, which we are channeling into voter outreach:

  • More than three times as many people applied to work on the campaign in the 24 hours following the debate than apply on an average day.
  • Post-debate, across the battlegrounds, our rate of volunteer signups was more than three times as much as an average day.
  • In North Carolina, we had our largest event of the campaign on Friday, with thousands of people turning out to hear the president give strong and forceful remarks.

This weekend, Team Biden-Harris launched a massive mobilization blitz to engage thousands of volunteers and supporters at over 1,500 events across battleground states.

That same enthusiasm is showing up in the campaign’s fundraising: In the wake of the debate, Team Biden-Harris raised more than $27 million between debate day and Friday evening. Debate night saw three record-breaking hours for grassroots fundraising – including the hour following the debate which was the best one hour of grassroots fundraising since launch.

If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls. In 2012, we saw media coverage of President Obama’s first debate performance drive a large, but temporary, drop in his polling – driven almost entirely by fewer Democrats answering polls in the days after the debate, rather than true changes in support.

This drop in polling led to highly reactionary headlines that didn’t reflect swing voters’ true opinions:

Bottom line: Our team knows a thing or two about putting our heads down and doing the work to win hard races. This will be a very close election. It was always going to be. It will be won by breaking through and talking to voters every single day, making our case to them about just how high the stakes are and who is fighting for them. That’s what our campaign has been planning for. It’s the relentless work we’re doing on the ground to get our winning message out that makes us confident President Biden will win this race and beat Donald Trump.

THE ANTIHISTAMINE THEORY

Basically, it’s that a cold pill the President took Thursday produced the horrible result.

This would explain how he got stronger and clearer as the debate went on and the drug had begun to wear off (by which time so many had switched it off in despair), and how — once the drug had worn off completely — he completely bounded back, as I described yesterday.

I will admit that when I first read that theory in Newsweek (also run, with less distracting advertising, here), I thought it was ridiculous.  I preferred my “Gish gallop” theory, based on my own experience.

But here’s how the co-author of the theory, Jeff Sonnenfeld, has responded to skepticism like mine:

Roughly a million board certified physicians received yesterday’s Newsweek piece I coauthored with Yale’s renowned Dr. Harlan Krumholtz via Med Page Today, the country’s #1 medical newsletter, resulting in widespread concurrence with our theory from thousands including pharmacologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, and internal medicine experts.

I have no idea how effective the current presidential physician is, but you can make your own judgment before you endorse chaos. Perhaps he was not on top of his game either.

This is not about Biden suffering the sniffles, but rather how a harmless common cold was probably treated. Whenever you go before large audiences, suffering from congestion and sore throat, you likely take some over-the-counter medication.  For normal, healthy, cognitively functional older people, this can be dangerous.

First-generation antihistamines such as diphenhydramine (Benadryl) unlike pseudoephedrine (by contrast a stimulant) which are in most cold tablets, frequently cause many side effects in older adults, such as confusion, dizziness, drowsiness, reduced executive function, blurred vision, and sedation.

If you think you know better than thousands of expert physicians, read the non-controversial massive research on this demonstrated risk and then reflect on Biden’s remarkable immediate resilience, perfectly in-line with the half-life from when the medication would have worn off.

I still like my theory.  But the two are certainly not mutually exclusive.

Either way, I believe the president is fit to continue his remarkable record of success, heading up a team of 4,000 appointees who are doing a great job.

And though the first of Lawrence O’Donnell’s arguments was his weakest — that viewership was low — there is a counter argument to be made.  Yes, in this era of social media, everyone saw excruciating clips.  But the opposition already had more than a few excruciating clips (many of them doctored) to run endlessly between now and the election.

Everybody already knows Joe’s old and not always strong of voice.  And at least some know he refused to wear a boot after he fell off that bike and hurt his ankle, which has affected his gait.  Yet he has accomplished more for the country, walking and talking like an old man, than perhaps any president since FDR.  Which may be why the debate may not have changed many minds.

And if what I call the antihistamine theory does wind up explaining the awful debate, then the fear so many have — that he’s suddenly gone into rapid decline — evaporates.

One last thing:

A lot of you have written concerned that Joe won’t be able to make it to the end of his second term, or, at the very least, continue to age.  The former is actuarially unlikely.  But if he does die, the White House will stay in progressive, democratic — small D, as opposed to autocratic — hands.  So I don’t care.  (Well, of course, I do care; but you know what I mean.)  And though he will unquestionably age, I refer you again to the fortune you would have left on the table had you abandoned Berkshire Hathaway stock when Warren Buffett was 82.  Or 86.  Or 90.  Or 93.

SO I DON’T KNOW FOR SURE WHAT SHOULD BE DONE . . . SMARTER PEOPLE AT MUCH HIGHER LEVELS OF THE DEMOCRATIC ECOSPHERE THAN ME TOTALLY KNOW THE STAKES AND ARE THINKING ALL THIS THROUGH . . . BUT RIGHT NOW IT LOOKS TO ME AS THOUGH JOE’S THE MAN . . . JOE WILL WIN* . . . AND JOE WILL CONTINUE TO REVITALIZE OUR INFRASTRUCTURE, LOWER OUR DRUG COSTS, FIGHT FOR WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS, MAINTAIN OUR ALLIANCES, STAND UP AGAINST AUTHORITARIANISM AND INTOLERANCE, STAND UP FOR THE RULE OF LAW, UPHOLD HIS OATH OF OFFICE, AND CONTINUE TO EXEMPLIFY THE DIGNITY AND DECENCY OF THE PRESIDENCY.

BONUS

The Philadelphia Inquirer: To serve his country, Trump should leave the race.

He won’t of course, because he’s afraid he’d go to prison.

Because he hopes to be the strongest strongman in the world.

And because he isn’t quite finished: