Biden is polling well, possibly because people are nostalgic for a time before Trump, and Biden is permanently identified with that. I value Umair’s reminder that, regardless of how people subjectively feel or what they believe they remember about the state of the nation five years ago, something about the Obama/Biden years led us to the Trump/Pence years, in which case the road back is not the road forward, pretty much by definition.

I do question Umair’s phrasing of his claim that “every major indicator of social progress…fell during the Obama years.” He doesn’t give us a citation for this claim, and the word “every” is surely an overstatement. A similar error was made by Trump when he tweeted on April 29 that “every economic aspect of our Country is the best it has ever been!”, a statement that is easily falsifiable because of the word “every.”