“Master Yoda is exactly what you need to protect against the Dark Side,” added Melhorn, who works closely with Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn who has become one of the party’s biggest donors. “As Joe Biden gets older, he’s like Master Yoda.”

Jamie Patricof, a movie and television producer in Los Angeles, added that debates are not that important. “If it were, then Hillary Clinton would have been president,” Patricof told me. “I trusted Joe Biden to be a great president, and he has delivered on that. I trust him to know if he can do it again.” 

So those are the kind of things prominent Democrats will say publicly. Privately, it’s a different story.