I’ll be as succinct as I can and provide clarification as needed.
Timeline:
-T**** vs Biden debate: Biden shows poorly, despite bringing lots of facts and accomplishments, but low energy. T**** lies his ass off, also performs poorly; both lose points in subsequent polls.
-Large donors start calling Dem politicians to demand that they push Biden to drop out. Some of these politicians anonymously call that pressure “blackmail”, as it tied pledged $ support to Biden dropping out. If Biden didn’t drop out, no money.
-Polls continue to show a tie, even after the debate
-Large donors also publicly call for Biden to drop out, in parallel to some opportunistic Dem politicians and the previously mentioned “pressured” Dems.
-T**** assassination attempt
-Despite conventional wisdom that T**** would experience a surge from surviving the attempt, being (slightly) injured, and the fist-pumping optics, polls don’t show any improvement in his numbers
-Calls for Biden to drop out accelerate, even though every possible replacement publicly states support for Biden continuing
-RNC Convention: despite conventional wisdom (and historical data) that show both parties get a bump from their convention and from announcing VP picks, no such bump manifests for T****. Polls remain a dead heat.
-Biden steps down due to pressure from within the party. Note that his own description of this was that he felt “betrayed by people he thought were friends and allies.”
Again, I’m not calling out any individual voters on this. It was the pressure from large donors and the breathless coverage by the media (who are willing to risk democracy for clicks, or actively want T**** to win so that their corporate overlords can have low taxes) that caused this. And there are policy solutions to mitigate or prevent both in the future.
ETA: some citations
