You’re missing option: 3. Completely ignore reality and pretend Biden has a snowballs chance in hell of wining.

Yes. Biden can still win.

The Easter Bunny and Santa are real too and know you’ve been good so you’ll get lots of presents.

It’s because we’re talking about two entirely different groups of people.

More and more Democrats are calling for Biden to withdraw because they don’t believe he can beat Trump.

Republicans are happy to stick with Trump because they’re fairly sure he can trounce Biden.

It’s silly to talk about a “pundit class”. It’s not like they’re a group with any coherent ideas, much less any sort of persistent group loyalty. They’re just people with opinions and a platform.

This article tries to make it sound like he’s a really popular candidate and there’s some shady group of kingmakers trying to block him.

The main reason that people are pushing for him to step aside is that they don’t believe he can beat Trump. It’s not that people were grumpy about a raspy voice. There was already a lot of suspicion that he’s going senile. He got the benefit of the doubt and the debate was his chance to prove the doubters wrong. Instead he confirmed their deepest fears. Since then, he’s provided a steady stream of examples of his diminishing mental capacity.

A formal cognitive assessment might lay those fears to rest but, at this point, it’s unlikely. For many people, the conclusion is clear; the evidence is in and he forgets what he’s talking about mid-sentence. Many people look at the polling numbers around that just want someone who has a chance of beating Trump.

do they think anyone else realistically could, at this point, other than Biden?

The answer to that is clearly, “Yes.” The calls for him to bow out are coming from all corners; various mainstream media outlets, donor groups, alternative media, pundits, and even sitting Democratic politicians.

The people calling for Biden to drop out are completely different from the people who want Trump to stay in the race.

Democrats want Biden to drop out because they don’t believe he can beat Trump.

Republicans want Trump to stay on the ticket because they’re pretty sure he’ll crush Biden .

It’s a news aggregator that links with multiple independent assessors to automatically assign bias, accuracy and ownership metadata to articles. They then sort them by topic so you can easily see multiple views on the same issue together with some quick metrics on how trustworthy those views are.

The question is typically described as “the historicity of Jesus”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

There are similar debates for other famous ancient figures.

The general academic consensus on Jesus (and many similar figures) is that they did exist and many of the details have been fictionalized.