We spoke to Cornell Belcher, a political strategist and pollster who worked for the Democratic Party on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns.

Matt Frei: It hasn’t happened yet, in terms of Joe Biden, do you think it is now inevitable?

Cornell Belcher: A couple of things I want to level-set with your viewers. Right now, you are leaning in on all the polling. I hope that we’re not setting a standard that if a candidate’s three points behind in the polling they should be ousted, right. Because right now you’re still, on average in American polling from credible news sources, it’s a two or three point race either way, just like it was before the debate. Look, if you go back in history, 2012 at this time, Barack Obama was also in a tossup race. Depending on the poll, two or three points behind Mitt Romney. So I hope we’re not saying we forced someone out because they’re behind in the polls.

Matt Frei: This isn’t just about percentages, though, is it?. Even Barack Obama has said, reportedly, ‘please, it’s time to go’. Senior Democrats in the Senate, in the House have said it. The opinion polls, the internal polling in the Democratic Party, doesn’t look pretty either.

Cornell Belcher: I’m an internal poller of the Democratic Party, and again, if it’s a three point race, we don’t force people out. Here’s the other thing, Barack Obama didn’t say for him to leave. He told him, again like a lot of Democrat leaders, they’re saying ‘you should think about this’. Whether or not it’s time to leave or not. But in the end, we’ve got to be careful what we ask for. Because in the end, a convention that is thrown into chaos where they try to step across and over Joe Biden’s VP in Harris on national television would be an absolute disaster for us in energising and mobilising our base and grassroot.

Matt Frei: Let’s assume for a minute that this is all going to be over in the next 24 or 48 hours, and I may still be proven wrong and so may many other people. Do you think that the most elegant and the best solution for the party would be Kamala Harris taking over at the top of the ticket? Or once the dam has burst, could it, should it be someone else?

Cornell Belcher: I’m just going to play it straight here, right? I don’t have a dog in this fight. I will say this, there’s 14 million voters who have voted in the Democratic primary for Joe Biden. In this process, there’s a process for the voters having a say in who the candidate is. If we’re going to throw out 14 million votes and have a few people pick the candidate to be at the top of the ticket, I think that’s really problematic and it becomes really tough for us to energise and mobilise voters, particularly if that someone is not currently a part of that ticket in Vice President Harris. I think it would be absolutely disastrous if they try to jump over the first African-American woman of colour VP and pick, to be quite blunt, a white guy, for the top of the ticket. Given where the base of this party is, I think they will be handing Donald Trump the White House.

Matt Frei: Do you think that Kamala Harris could beat Donald Trump? Because here they’re very confident that she can never do that.

Cornell Belcher: Who are they, right? Again, I worked for Barack Obama. You know what they were very confident about? That Barack Obama, one, couldn’t beat Hillary Clinton, and two, this African-American with a Muslim sounding name certainly couldn’t be elected president of the United States. Stop with the polling. Polling is not predictive. Polling is instructive, it’s not predictive. A 3 or 4 point race, you build a campaign to overcome that and you tell that story.