Biden is winning --- media hype is wrong and age concerns are baked in.

Maybe, in the end, the doom-selling media and doubters in the Democratic party will be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. Turns out, Democrats and voters in swing states are still ridin’ with Biden.

President Joe Biden registered his best showing yet in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states, even as voters and the media offered criticisms of his debate performance against Republican presidential opponent Donald Trump.

Trump led Democrat Biden, 47% to 45%, in the critical states needed to win the November election — which represents the smallest gap since the poll began last October.

According to Bloomberg: Biden now leads Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin. He’s within the poll’s statistical margin of error in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, and is farthest behind in the critical state of Pennsylvania, where he’s from.

Pennsylvania likely will be decided by urban center votes, and Biden will need to reclaim the Black vote he received in Philadelphia and its suburbs to win.

Swing-state voters thought Biden acquitted himself poorly in the debate, with \r than one in five respondents saying the 81-year-old was the more coherent, mentally fit or dominant participant.

Still, voters appear willing to stick with Biden, who has vowed to protect democracy, women’s reproductive rights, strong climate change policies, gun legislation and more — as Trump and the GOP trot out the alarming Project 2025, a 900-page plan to dismantle federal agencies and democracy, while restricting reproductive rights and contraception, banning books, attacking public education and the LGBTQ+ communities as they institute a form of Christofascism, enabled by an extreme Supreme Court.

After Biden’s rambling debate performance, some congressional Democrats — many anonymously — have doubted his ability to beat Trump and a few have called for him to step aside, likely for Vice President Kamala Harris.

But in an interview with ABC on Friday, Biden defied them, insisting that he beat Trump in 2020 and he’d do it again, while saying internal Democratic polling was more positive than public polling.

Democrats appear to be sticking with Biden, even though nearly three in 10 said he should drop out of the race — far more than the 9% of Republicans who said Trump should bow out. Biden’s campaign and others have said these numbers are to be expected, because when a campaign hits a bump, replacements are often seen like backup quarterbacks: Everyone believes the backups can play better, but few rarely do.

Why has Biden moved up in key polling?

“This suggests the age matter was already baked into most voters’ minds: The only difference now is more Democrats are acknowledging it,” said Eli Yokley, U.S. political analyst for Morning Consult.

After Biden’s interview with ABC on Friday night, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania appeared on MSNBC to scold Democrats who want to “panic and piss our pants.”

“My money’s on the guy that kicked [Trump’s] ass in 2020, and and now I want to be clear that it’s going to be close. It’s always going to be close. It was close in 2016. It was close in 2020 and ‘24 it’s going to be close in 2024,” he said.

“Donald Trump is back, and what do Democrats do? We panic and piss our pants. After a bad debate and after 34 convictions — felonies — the Republicans show up and they dress like him and go all in on Trump.

“Maybe we could learn something here and just say, ‘Stand by our president through this.’ After 50 years [of public service by Biden], and after almost four years as a great president, I think he’s entitled to make his case after a debate that we can all agree was rough. But I know what that’s like. I am not the sum total of a bad debate, and certainly the President isn’t either,” he added.

In his interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden blamed his debate performance on fatigue and a cold, saying, “I was exhausted. I didn’t listen to my instincts in terms of preparing, I had a bad night.”