Maybe they are possessed of self-confidence that accompanies millions of dollars’ worth of research and years of experience. Maybe they’re just putting a brave face on some rather uniformly cataclysmic data. Perhaps they’re simply oblivious. Whatever the case, Joe Biden’s reelection team isn’t sweating the polling that shows their candidate staring down the barrel of a legacy-defining humiliation in November.

Following a weekend in which the news was dominated by poll after poll revealing the depth of the hole in which the president finds himself, the New Yorker published a rare and spectacularly well-timed interview with the quiet sage behind the president’s reelection efforts, longtime Biden adviser and his 2020 campaign manager Mike Donilon. Recently dispatched to Wilmington to oversee the campaign’s “organizing” and “electoral mechanics,” Donilon previewed a total shift in the political narrative as the general-election campaign gets under way in earnest.

In the interview, Donilon burnished his own credentials. It was he who devised a campaign centered on restoring “the soul of the nation,” even though “our own pollsters told us” that was a “nutty” theme around which to build a campaign. “That experience fortified his belief that this year’s campaign should center on what he calls ‘the freedom agenda,’” the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos wrote. By the fall, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy,” Donilon told Osnos. “I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”

Woe betide those who convince themselves that the Biden campaign is a nimble, flexible apparatus that is capable of changing course if needed. Donilon assured his interlocutors that neither the candidate nor his campaign is much for changing. Recalling his experience with John Kerry’s 2004 campaign and its confused efforts to speak to the concerns of post-9/11-security voters, Donilon noted that he had resolved to “never be part of a Presidential campaign that didn’t figure out—with clarity—what it wanted to say and stick to it.”

Unsurprisingly, Donilon’s remarks didn’t quiet the Biden campaign’s critics. “I’m pretty certain in Scranton they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night,” onetime Barack Obama campaign manager David Axelrod told Osnos. Indeed, the campaign’s intention to focus on what Ruy Teixeira, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, derides as “boutique issues” designed to juice turnout among the Democratic Party’s increasingly degree-holding base might strike some observers as an effort to double down on faulty arithmetic. The “threat to democracy” that Trump’s candidacy represents resonates most among voters with at least some college education, and there just aren’t enough of those voters to turn the tide in a high-turnout general election that draws out lower-propensity voters.

Moreover, there’s plenty of evidence from this weekend’s polling that the Biden team’s messaging efforts just aren’t working.

In recent weeks, the Biden campaign has leaned heavily into the notion that Joe Biden’s self-evident physical and cognitive deterioration is roughly on par with Donald Trump’s relative mental decline. One of the Biden campaign’s rapid-response operations regularly features evidence of Donald Trump’s apparent confusion, slurred speech, and general cognitive impairment. But 44 percent of likely voters surveyed in the latest New York Times/Siena survey say Biden’s age renders him incapable of “handling the job of president.” Only 21 percent said the same of Trump. Likewise, a Wall Street Journal poll over the weekend found that, while 59 percent of all voters approve of a Senate supplemental bill addressing the crisis at the border, more voters blame Biden for that crisis (45 percent) than Republicans who scuttled that legislation (39 percent). The president’s last-minute attempt to shift culpability for the border crisis over which he has presided isn’t working either.

Bearing all this in mind, maybe Donilon’s remarks should be viewed more as a concession to their unfortunate reality. The Biden campaign has struggled mightily to reach voters outside the nucleus of its highly educated coalition of affluent urban voters and suburbanites — so far, to little effect. Maybe the Biden camp’s best bet is to make January 6 the center of their campaign and hope for the best. Of course, that strategy can only bear fruit if the economy improves to the extent that it is no longer voters’ foremost priority on Election Day, and Donald Trump himself leans into the notion that January 6 would not be his last attempt to undermine America’s republican conventions. If that’s the hand the Biden campaign hopes to play in November, they’re within an ace of it.