This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

After holding an emergency meeting over President Biden's ailing candidacy on Tuesday,

House Democrats walked out of the gathering largely convinced that Biden will survive.

Most Democrats now appear to have accepted this eventuality,

even as many also seem fairly convinced that he will lose to Donald Trump in November.

What happened here exactly? We don't think this is quite over yet. There are still scenarios in which Biden could end up stepping aside,

but as of now, this is mostly being portrayed in the press as a sign that Democrats just dutifully fell in line behind their leader,

or that they didn't want to take him on publicly.

We think the story is far more complex than that,

and on that score, the American prospects David Dayan has a good new piece called

Why the Bid to Push Out Biden is Losing.

So he and I are going to try to parse through all these real complexities right here, right now.

Great to have you on, David.

Thanks for having me, Greg.

Let's just step back and set the scene.

A few days ago, it looked as if enough Democrats might privately tell Biden

that his chances of winning have evaporated after that awful debate performance,

perhaps inducing him to step aside, or that Democrats might mobilize to try and oust him,

if necessary. In that case, we'd all but certainly have Kamala Harris as the nominee,

though I suppose some kind of open process would be conceivable. But your argument is that ultimately

Biden has been able to largely shut down this movement because it really is in some sense a movement

...