bobburger

So the whole argument the poster is making is based on a general misunderstanding of what's going on?

Trump heard Joe Biden might have dementia so he went out and got even bigger dementia, the best dementia!

Where is he "polling at 35%"?

haha, I would absolutely love to hear you come up with a solid explanation for how voting for Biden will help Trump win.

I'm pretty sure the people voting for Trump and those that are suppressing the Biden vote because "Biden can't win" are the reasons Trump is polling ahead of Biden.

There's a couple really simple things you can do to help defeat Trump. First, vote for the person running against Trump. The second, stop trying to suppress the vote for the person running against Trump. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

That's a reasonable take and I appreciate you taking the time to share. I can see your point that increasing the uncertainty means that the new DNC candidate has an opportunity to pick up a larger share once the unsure voters pick. This seems like a sort of mutated version of the gamblers fallacy to me.

Having a larger uncertainty pool doesn't really provide any advantage for Democrats. While theres opportunity for the DNC candidate to pick up votes from this pool of voters there's also opportunity for Trump to pick up votes once they know more about the other candidates.

Without more information the most likely outcome is Trump picks up about 51.5% of undecided voters and the other candidate picks up about 48.5%. If we know why these voters are unsure then we can make a more educated guess about how they might vote for each candidate and we might be able to say the DNC candidate will pick up the required votes.

Unfortunately we don't know why they're unsure so saying that the best thing Biden can do is drop out just isn't supported by the information available.

On a personal note I think Biden should announce he's old and tired and just doesn't have 4 more years of being president in him. After that drop out of the campaign, endorse another candidate, and announce a clear plan for how the DNC is going to actually select the next candidate.

If he doesn't make it extremely clear that dropping out his decision, or there's no clear and transparant plan on how the next candidate will be selected, then it's going to start a civil war in the DNC that will hand the presidency to Trump.

I think I see what you're trying to say. You're saying "the best candidates are the unknown people, the nobodies, because Trump is getting 46% to 47% of the vote against them, rather than the 48% he's getting against Biden".

I drew the specious conclusion that you were refering to Joe Biden as the best candidate because he is polling the highest among candidates (tied with Harris) at 45%, has nearly the same margin of victory against Trump as all other candidates (2%-3%), has beaten Trump already, already has a massive campaign infrastructure, and is the current nominee.

On your last comment, more important than Donald Trump losing 2% to "Not Sure" is the fact that he's still beating all the candidates by 2%-3%. Without more information the best assumption we can make is that the undecided voters will vote the same as the decided voters once they have enough information.

As I said before, the only real conclusions we can draw with certainty from these polls is fewer people know who these candidates are than know Joe Biden.

I was using the same language as the OP when referring to the poll, but if you feel better about yourself now good job.

You draw a pretty extreme conclusion about the polling of a generic candidate. Honestly it sounds like another specious conclusion that's been drawn because it agrees with a bias. I'm open to being wring and am interested in how you came up with it.

This CNN article has some pretty interesting discussion about generic candidates. The general consensus seems to be that generic candidates simply indicate a party preference rather than a judgment about a particular candidate.

...it's not part of the poll.

That quote comes directly from the poll you linked.

...that means their floor is where Biden is.

That's a specious conclusion you're jumping to because it supports your biases. With out more information it's more likely that once the respondents know who the candidates are the overall responses will fall in line with the population averages and the candidates polling results will be the same as they are now.

All we can confidently conclude for now is "39%-71% of people polled don't know who the candidates in the polls were".

You kind of buried the lede there:

Overall, these results show that voters continue to be concerned about Biden’s age — but there is not yet clear evidence that an alternative nominee would significantly outperform him against Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

That's evidence that some candidates poll similarly to Biden.

That's not evidence the best thing Biden can do to stop Trump from becoming president is drop out.

Please provide some evidence to support your claim that the best thing Biden can do to prevent Trump getting elected is to step aside.

That is what should happen when a starting capacitor fails, but it doesn't always happen as it's supposed to.