Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby.

Tonight, my reporting on the latest round of Democratic panicking over Biden’s 2024 polls, and how they’re being interpreted by operatives close to the White House. Some are urging voters to keep calm and carry on. Others are calling for a new sense of urgency. The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle.

But first, the latest congressional chatter from Abby Livingston on Capitol Hill…

As my fellow Texans know, Jackson Lee lost bigly in the Houston mayoral race last weekend, coming in second to a fellow Democrat. Her loss was expected (she’d been down in the polls since the outset), but the 30-point margin was a stunner. Now other Democrats, sensing weakness, are eyeing her congressional seat, too.

Jackson Lee has already switched back to running for re-election in Texas’s 18th district, as nearly everyone in Houston anticipated. But now she’s facing a viable challenger, the up-and-coming Amanda Edwards, who previously sought to run for mayor, last summer, and then shifted to running for Jackson Lee’s seat after Jackson Lee announced her own mayoral run.

The big question is whether Edwards, who raised a ton of money in the interim, defers again to Jackson Lee. If she doesn’t—and it’s looking like this time she won’t—the primary battle could be intense. While Jackson Lee is a notorious figure around the Capitol, I can’t think of many other House Democrats who have more favors to call in among colleagues. She has a habit of showing up for members on their worst days, instilling a quiet loyalty. That’s the sort of currency you can’t buy.

Both candidates would run as establishment Democrats, but their age difference could play into the generational divide currently raging within the Democratic primary. Moreover, the Texas primary is among the first down-ballot primaries on the calendar. (Texas filing wraps around the time this newsletter comes out, so we will soon know for sure if Edwards changes her mind.)

Democrats were met with more aneurysm-inducing data on Monday. A pair of polls from CNN showed Biden losing to Trump by four points in Georgia and a dizzying 10 points in Michigan (caveat: not even the Trump campaign thinks Biden would ever lose Michigan by that much). Emerson College has Biden losing to Trump by four—and by even more with outsider candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the mix. And more bad news for Joe: A Monmouth poll showed that Trump’s 2020 supporters are more motivated to stick with him next year than Biden’s supporters are.

If your eyes are glazing over from reading all these numbers, here’s what you need to know: The trend lines over the last two months are clear—and dire for Biden. He’s losing in battleground states to the criminally indicted Trump, Americans blame the president for high prices, core Democratic constituencies are deeply unenthusiastic about the election and want someone else to run, Biden is shedding support among young Black and Hispanic voters, and professional Democrats—the ones who don’t work inside the White House—are panicked.

The polls are bad for Biden any way you slice them. Unfortunately, I learned about Monday’s polls in the worst way possible: By waking up on the West Coast and opening Twitter, and diving straight into a series of already-running arguments over the new CNN numbers. The first post I saw was from Never Trump Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who lamented, “It’s gonna be one of those bad news polling days.” Trump senior strategist Chris LaCivita promptly responded to her with some holiday cheer: “Not for me!” Before I had my first sip of coffee, I was overwhelmed by a stream of progressive activists, Democratic strategists, actual pollsters, and gormless social media addicts squabbling over polling jargon like oversamples and weighting and outliers.

Some of Monday’s commentary echoed what we heard from Democrats after The New York Times and Siena College published a grim round of polls in November showing Biden losing to Trump in several key states: that “polls aren’t predictive,” the election is still a year away, yada yada yada. In other words: Keep calm and carry on. (The pollster Patrick Ruffini calls these Democrats “polling denialists”—an updated version of those desperate Republicans back in 2012 who tried to “unskew” polls showing Mitt Romney losing to Barack Obama.)

One tweet did keep my attention, though. Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic strategist who has been moonlighting recently as a pro-Biden warrior on social media, wrote this: “Dear Bidenworld, please turn on the campaign, 100 percent, everywhere. Thank you.” It was an unusual sentiment from Rosenberg. Back in 2022, he was a rare Democrat telling his party to ignore the pundits predicting a G.O.P. red wave, correctly forecasting that the abortion issue would carry Democrats to victory in key races. Same in 2023. And unlike many in his party lately, Rosenberg has been all-in on Biden. Rosenberg’s Substack is literally called the “Hopium Chronicles.” (Recent post: The Economy Is Remarkably Strong. Period. Stop The Bullshit.)

So, I called Rosenberg to ask why the hopium wasn’t hitting this week. “The polls are a warning sign that we are not where we want to be,” Rosenberg told me. “We have enough polling to know at this point that whether Biden is up by a point or down by three points, the full campaign just has to start. State directors, comms people. It has to be built out, they have to get going. It’s just time. Democrats have this issue, which is that Democrats read polls. And given the gravity of the election, there is a lot of worry and fear out there. The levels of fear that exist are justified. The Biden campaign has to channel that into action. Millions of people out there are ready to get going. They need the campaign to give them something to do.”

The choice. It’s the same line of thinking I hear over and over again when I check in with the White House and the Biden campaign about the state of things heading into 2024: Next year’s election will be a choice between Biden and Trump. The polls aren’t predictive. This election was always going to be close. Voters aren’t paying attention right now. Trump will be campaigning from the courtroom. Yes, we have work to do. But Democrats will come home once they understand the stakes.

Ben Coffey Clark, a partner at the communications firm Bully Pulpit Interactive, who is close to the White House, compared it to picking out a Halloween costume. Sure, you might wear a George Santos costume to a Halloween party this year, he said. But you wouldn’t do that next year—because it wouldn’t be relevant anymore. “Every election cycle, the same thing is true; some people only decide when they are asked to make a choice,” Clark told me. He pointed out—correctly—that the majority of Americans aren’t following the daily churn of political news, and that includes voters who don’t even know who the nominees will be. “There are millions of people who don’t know that the choice in 2024 will be a Trump versus Biden rematch,” Clark said. “A large reason they don’t know today is because the campaigns aren’t running massive advertising operations to make that choice clear. But next year those campaigns will launch, and you will see movement in the swing states as more folks become aware of the candidates.”

Biden’s team is also aware—and annoyed—that Trump is basically coasting to victory in the Republican primary while simultaneously avoiding the usual scrutiny that comes with the campaign trail, by minimizing his campaign events and skipping the debate circuit. Unlike 2020, Biden is the incumbent—and right now he’s on the receiving end of public blame and negative press attention for everything going haywire in the world. But next year, as the Biden camp sees it, voters will eventually wake up not only to Trump’s legal challenges and toxic personality, but also his unpopular positions on issues that favor Democrats, like healthcare and abortion. The election simply won’t be as abstract as it is today. And by then, we’ll also know which of the third-party candidates being named as choices in polls today will actually be on the ballot.

Along with stepping up efforts to tie Trump to Republican attempts to roll back abortion rights, that’s basically the message—the stakes and the choice on the ballot. If voters actually hear the message in an information environment that’s more fractured and polarized than it’s ever been, the White House thinking goes, then the polling starts to correct itself. Biden’s support is soft among all Democrats of all stripes, but the gap he needs to close the most is with young voters, especially Black and Hispanic voters under 40. The bright side here—the hopium—is that these groups voted in large numbers for Democrats in 2020 and 2022 despite not being Biden superfans. There’s a lot of data out there about Gen Z—I’ve written about it before—showing that they consider voting an almost-existential duty. And they vote Democratic by a wide margin because of the issues on the ballot, even if they aren’t thrilled about the candidates themselves.

I caught a glimpse of this last week while preparing for an appearance on Sarah Longwell’s podcast, The Focus Group. Given my work at Snapchat with Gen Z voters, Longwell figured I might have some insights on her recent focus groups with Zoomers—some Dem-leaning, some G.O.P.-leaning. Their answers lent some important texture to the Biden campaign’s response to all the bad polls coming their way. The Dem group was eight young people under age 25—a mix of white, Asian, Black and Hispanic—all of whom voted for Biden in 2020. When the focus group moderator, Meaghan Leister, asked the Dem-leaning group if they were “motivated to vote” in 2024—all of them grimaced, none smiled. They criticized Biden on the economy, on his support for Israel, on his age. But at the same time, every single person raised their hands and said they planned to vote in 2024, for Biden and against Trump, no matter what. None of them said they were considering sitting out the election—and none said they were interested in a third party.

A young woman from Texas named Madison summed up the group’s thinking. “There are issues with every candidate,” she said. “I always feel motivated to vote because I need to exercise my right and make my voice heard. I am going to be voting for Biden again because Donald Trump scares me. Biden was honestly not very great, but I think it is the lesser of two evils. I will mainly be voting for the other things on the ballot.”