02a U.S. Politics – Conservative

The sharper takes came from our own Rick Moran and HotAir columnist Ed Morrissey.

Every piece I’ve read, including Ed’s (which I’ll bounce off of here), circles the same two facts: The report remains unfinished, and Democrats seem about as eager to release it as a teenager is to hand over a phone during a police stop. Neither point is at all mysterious. They couldn’t bend the obvious conclusions into political cover, much less a political advantage, so now the report sits in bureaucratic purgatory while party operatives pray the news cycle develops ADHD and forgets the thing exists. Sadly and to a large part, it has, for the “reporters'” own politically motivated reasons.

Perhaps this is because they know the voting public, including members of their own party, have already come to their own less-than-complimentary conclusions.

As Ed says:

People can directly access the 192-page report, but it’s not easy to parse, thanks to the lack of effort in finishing the product. It’s unfinished in another sense, too: there is apparently no mention of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline or the effort to cover it up in the autopsy. The words “cognitive,” “dementia,” “senile,” and “mental” make no appearance in this document. The June 2024 debate barely gets a mention at all, and the report completely ignores its impact and what it revealed about Democrats’ attempts to sell a sick old man as “Sharp As A Tack”.

Ed quotes the report itself further to make his point:

Before the candidate switch, the pollsters never reviewed ad copy or content – and commented how they did not see ads until after they were airing, in some instances reading about the ads in the media. They also reported they had little insight into the data provided to leadership from the analytics team.

As the June 2024 debate neared, there were discussions about polling around the debate and after the convention. The polling team was informed the plan was for them to poll three times during the general election, and the post-convention polling would count as one of those three polling waves. They attributed this minimalist approach to research to members of the media team not believing polling data was essential to decision making.

The debate obviously changed many things. The dial-testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the President’s performance, and a post-debate survey was scrapped.