How do I know that the reports over Democrat despair are credible? This one comes from Politico, but the New York Times has covered it wall-to-wall for the past two weeks as well. This isn't just conservative schadenfreude, but a real phenomenon unfolding on and being reported by the Left.

Before we get to Politico's more explicit report, we can certainly extrapolate establishment Democrat despair from this NYT report about Joe Biden's appearance in Michigan. He drew a crowd, but not any other high-ranking Democrat officeholder:

Conspicuously absent, however, were many of Michigan’s highest-profile Democrats, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose popularity in the battleground state has helped put her in the top tier of those talked about as potential alternative candidates should Mr. Biden end his re-election campaign.

Whitmer was last heard suggesting that a cognitive test for Biden "wouldn't hurt." Nor was Whitmer the only one "conspicuously absent":

Also missing from Mr. Biden’s campaign event were Michigan’s two Democratic senators, Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, as well as Representative Elissa Slotkin, the leading Democratic candidate to fill the seat of Ms. Stabenow, who is retiring. Ms. Stabenow and Mr. Peters wrote statements of support for the president on social media soon after he landed, and they were shared by the Biden campaign.

When was the last presidential visit to a key campaign state where his own party holds both Senate seats and the governor's office ... and none of them were available to be on stage with him? Especially with a House member of the same party hoping to replace a retiring incumbent in the same election?

Those aren't scheduling conflicts. Those are rats leaving a sinking ship, and provides the perfect backdrop for Politico's deeper dive on Democrat despair:

All these forces are fueling a panic within the party that Biden’s meltdown could catapult Republicans into a trifecta in Washington. Some worry that Biden could drag down the rest of the ticket so badly that they not only fail to win back the House, but Trump and Hill Republicans could be handed big-enough majorities in both chambers to actually carry out huge GOP priorities.

“They are nervous about the upcoming election,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) said of his Democratic colleagues who are calling for Biden to step down from the ticket. “If anybody tells you they’re not, they’re lying.”

The anxieties about being tied to Biden — who polls show has lagged behind Trump in key battlegrounds for months, but has slipped even more recently — permeate the entire ticket. Democrats’ quest to assert more local control may be compromised as well, as Biden’s crisis could jeopardize their attempts to flip legislative chambers in swing states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, and hang onto Michigan and Minnesota. ...

More than two dozen lawmakers, Hill staffers, state officials and Democratic operatives were interviewed for this article. Most were granted anonymity to freely discuss the situation or weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

That's what happens when voters realize that the entire party has been gaslighting them for years. The exposure of Joe Biden's clear cognitive decline on national TV during the debate ripped the lid off of a vast conspiracy to defraud the electorate in this cycle, and likely in the 2020 cycle as well, by passing off Biden as fit for office but in fact using him as a figurehead. For the past three years, Democrats and media have insisted that Biden's encroaching senility was a conspiracy theory, that he runs rings around his staffers intellectually and physically, and that Biden could easily serve another four years and maybe more if he was allowed to do so.

Suddenly, the lie has been exposed, and with it, the other lies about the defense of muh democracy in this cycle. If they're all lying about Biden, voters wonder, are they also lying about Trump?

Thus are the consequences of fraud.

But are Democrats overreacting? Not really, a new analysis by the Cook Report and reported in the Wall Street Journal suggests. Biden can't win without Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and new data from those states suggest he's more likely to lose all three. If that holds up, Biden has a lower chance of winning than a human could survive on Mars for a full day, Cook's David Wasserman quips:

An aggregate of polls by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report finds that a largely static race—with the candidates essentially tied at 46% each in national surveys—shifted after the June 27 debate to give Trump a 2.5-point lead, about 47% to 44.5%. Among Black voters, a crucial Democratic constituency, three straight Wall Street Journal polls this year have found Biden with 68% support to about 20% for Trump—a 48-point advantage that is far slimmer than the 83-point margin he won in 2020.

If those narrowed margins held through Election Day, “then Biden’s chances of winning Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan would be about the same chances that a human could survive on Mars for 24 hours,” said David Wasserman, a Cook Political Report analyst. “The lifeblood of the Democratic Party is winning enormous margins among Black voters, and voters of color as a whole, in these battleground states.”

And it will only get worse while Biden remains on the ticket:

Many Democrats also worry that polling doesn’t yet reflect what could happen if Biden remains on the ticket: That Democratic voters, taking cues from party leaders who say Biden can’t win, become dispirited and decide it isn’t worthwhile to vote.

“There’s a real risk that a fatalism sets in on the part of base Democrats, that Democrats stay home,” Wasserman said. “And that sinks all boats.”

Left unsaid: It might get worse if they try to replace Biden, too. He all but endorsed Kamala Harris at the press conference on Thursday as his successor, and Democrats know all too well that she'd be a disaster as the nominee. A three-week campaign among convention delegates would be just enough time to rip open the rifts between factions within the party and not nearly enough time to heal them in the race for power. Like it or not, Biden's the only available-if-imperfect figure of unity in this cycle. 

The time to have that debate was during the primaries, but ... Democrats thought they could gaslight voters and avoid it. FAFO. And so ...

Inside the Capitol, Democrats who fear Biden can’t win make up a majority of the party and a growing number are willing to say so publicly.

“It’s over,” one aide to a battleground Democrat said of the fight to flip the House. “It doesn’t matter if they’re outperforming him by 35 fucking points. The math doesn’t work.”

The jig is up, that's for sure. But if Biden refuses to leave, expect the gaslighting to resume, this time as a comeback narrative that will last until the next aphasiac performance or "President Putin" gaffe. Just don't expect voters to buy it.