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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined today by Damon Linker, who is senior lecturer in political science

at the University of Pennsylvania, and he also is the author of a brilliant substack,

which is called Notes from the Middleground, and you can get that damonlinker.substack.com.

Damon, lots of things I want to talk to you about, really, but I thought I'd start

by saying it's now, I think, 11 days since Joe Biden gave his State of the Union address.

And a lot of Democrats were quite fired up by it.

Certainly Biden seemed pretty fired up.

It seemed to reassure a lot of

doubters as to whether he was capable of giving a speech at all. And you would normally expect,

after such a response to a speech, to see a little uptick in the polls for Biden, at least.

And it seems that just hasn't happened. Why is that? Why has there been no noticeable impact in the polls?

Well, I think what you just described about the reaction to the state of the union is accurate.

But I think the reason why that might lead someone to think it would produce a bounce in the polls for Biden is that it's a conversation

among Democrats, you know, kind of trying to psych themselves up about the upcoming election,

make themselves feel better, placate anxiety and things like that. And the problem is that most Democrats still support Biden.

We'll probably talk in a little bit about the fact that that is not all Democrats,

but something around 80 percent say they're happy with Biden. So the fact that that 80 percent

of Democrats were all really jazzed up by this speech doesn't really

...