But in recent months, amid polling that shows concern among voters about ending private insurance, several of the Democratic hopefuls have shifted their positions or their tone, moderating full-throated endorsement of Medicare-for-all and adopting ideas for allowing private insurance in some form.

“What I think has happened in the Democratic primary is people recognize that some of the concerns about single-payer are not coming from special interests but the public,” said Neera Tanden, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton and now president of the Center for American Progress. (A government-run health system is sometimes called a single-payer system.)....

Now some Democrats warn of the perils for their party in taking a position that, to important groups of voters, could seem just as disruptive as the GOP’s push to kill the ACA.

“There is nothing more personal to people than their health care,” said Kathleen Sebelius, who consulted on Harris’s plan and served as health and human services secretary in the Obama administration. “Anything that calls for the vast majority of Americans to lose what they have — that’s a very dangerous place to start a conversation.”....

Other surveys have found less support. About 8 in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in a Pew poll in July said the federal government has a responsibility to ensure health coverage, but less than half said it should be through a single government plan.

And in a July poll of Iowa voters by CBS News/YouGov, two-thirds of Democrats said they preferred a government health program that competed with private insurance, compared with 34 percent who favored one that replaced private insurance entirely.

But concerns about Biden’s age and mental fitness are likely overblown, according to experts on aging and the brain, as well as actuarial tables used by the insurance industry to estimate the health and longevity of customers.....

“He is every bit as sharp as he was 31 years ago. I haven’t seen any change,” Kassell said. “I can tell you with absolute certainty that he had no brain damage, either from the hemorrhage or from the operations that he had. There was no damage whatsoever.”...

Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, said in a statement provided by the campaign that “Vice President Biden is in excellent physical condition. He is more than capable of handling the rigors of the campaign and the office for which he is running.”

Kassell, who performed brain surgery on Biden, went a step further: “I am going to vote for the candidate who I am absolutely certain has a brain that is functioning. And that narrows it down exactly to one.”

For the first time in two decades, the state’s House of Representatives could flip control.

As recently as 2011, Republicans held a 101-49 supermajority in that body. But that advantage has been cut significantly in recent elections. Today, the legislature is split 83-67. That’s right: Republicans have lost 18 house seats this decade.

Six Texas state house seats flipped blue in 2016, even as Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Another dozen followed in 2018, as the suburbs of Dallas, Houston and Austin grew more diverse and college-educated women turned decisively against the GOP.

Democrats now need only 9 more seats to win the majority. And make no mistake, they have a path to get there.

Maybe anti-Biden Democrats — and the other candidates — think they’re being coy by using Biden’s gaffes as a proxy for concerns about his age. No reason to get tarred with allegations of ageism, they figure, or to risk offending older voters who turn out in big numbers in the primaries. (Also, if the candidate they prefer to Biden is Bernie Sanders, they have the further problem that Sanders is a year older than Biden at 77.)1 Show rather than tell, as the maxim goes: Plant a few seeds and let voters build a narrative about Biden’s age on their own, without you having to give them the hard sell.

This strategy might even work! It’s still fairly early, and Biden’s age is perhaps his biggest risk factor — bigger, in my view, than his policy positions, which are often more in line with the views of the average Democrat than those of the more liberal candidates.
But especially in the era of Trump — who, of course, has already begun to question Biden’s mental fitness — there might also be something to be said for saying the quiet part out loud. In a poll conducted shortly after the first debate, a lot of Democratic voters explicitly used Swalwell’s “pass the torch” language when asked an open-ended question about why they didn’t want to vote for Biden.

And they were much more likely to explicitly mention Biden’s age than to use vaguer responses, such as that he was “out of touch.”
There’s also risk to anti-Biden Democrats in drawing voters’ attention to gaffes or other incidents that voters view as relatively minor. Biden remains an extremely well-liked figure among Democratic voters; 75 percent of them have a favorable view of him, according to Morning Consult’s latest polling. So three-quarters of the electorate is going to start with a predilection against sympathizing with critiques of Biden. If those critiques aren’t really bringing the goods and instead seem like petty grievances, those Democrats may conclude that the case against Biden is a lot of hot air.

Meanwhile, if the false alarms continue — Democrats on Twitter or on podcasts predict Biden’s demise and the polls are unmoved — the media may come to view Biden as a Trump-like “teflon” candidate who isn’t greatly affected by gaffes and scandals. That could reduce their appetite for covering them in the future — even if more serious ones occur than what’s taken place to date.

For Republicans who already face a steep climb to blunt Democratic dominance here, the possibility of Trump’s absence from 2020 primary ballots threatens to suppress turnout at a time when they need every vote they can get. That risk conjures another scenario that’s keeping conservative strategists up at night: Republicans getting locked out of general election races thanks to California’s primary system, which allows the top two vote-getters to advance to the general election regardless of party and regularly produces Democrat-vs.-Democrat contests.

“We all know that the top of the ticket generally dictates the turnout,” California Republican Party Chair Jessica Patterson told POLITICO. “If the Democrats have a huge intensity — which they likely will, because our primary is so early — and Republicans don’t have their likely nominee to turn out to vote for, this could really affect our legislative and congressional races, where two Democrats could end up in the general.”

The newly signed law compels gubernatorial and presidential candidates to disclose financial information if they want to appear on primary ballots. It drew nearly immediate legal challenges from Trump and Republican groups, including the California state party, who decry the law as an unconstitutional exercise in partisan politics.