Remember all the Democrats who were quoted during the spring brooding that Biden was frittering away his electoral lead by refusing to leave Wilmington because of the virus? In a Times op-ed, former Obama strategists David Axelrod and David Plouffe described Biden as “mired in his basement, speaking to us remotely, like an astronaut beaming back from the International Space Station.” A Reuters story, which quoted former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell, stressed that Biden had “all but disappeared from television” and “Internet memes questioned his whereabouts.”

The Black Lives Matter protests brought with them dozens of comparisons to upheavals of the 1960s that aided Richard Nixon and George Wallace. Less than a week after the death of George Floyd, New York magazine provocatively headlined an online piece by Ed Kilgore, “Will Today’s Riots Spur Electoral Backlash Like 1967’s?” And, finally, as the Democratic convention opened in mid-August, Democrats were brooding aloud over Biden’s fuzzy image with the voters. Longtime Democratic pollster Peter Hart told The Los Angeles Times, Biden is “well known, but not known well.”

With seven weeks to go before the election, we are still waiting for the fabled Trump turnaround. But Democrats keep retreating to their panic rooms with the help of reporters searching for original story lines.