On the plus side, Democrat donors can take heart in the incontrovertible fact that Adam Schiff routinely lies, both publicly and privately. However, Schiff usually employs his prevarication on behalf of Democrat messaging. He infamously declared repeatedly that he'd seen intelligence confirming Donald Trump's collusion with Russia, only to get depantsed by Robert Mueller's conclusion that no such evidence existed.

In this case, though, there doesn't seem to be any upside to this messaging from Schiff to the Democrat donor base, as reported by the New York Times. It also suggests that the Dump Biden Movement may only be mostly dead:

Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who is running for Senate, warned during a private meeting with donors on Saturday that his party was likely to suffer overwhelming losses in November if President Biden remained at the top of the ticket, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Schiff’s remarks at the meeting.

If Mr. Biden remained, not only would he lose to former President Donald J. Trump, he could be enough of a drag on other Democratic candidates that the party would most likely lose the Senate and miss an opportunity to win control of the House, Mr. Schiff said at a fund-raiser in New York.

“I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Mr. Schiff said during the meeting, according to a person with access to a transcription of a recording of the event. “And we may very, very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House.”

Well, there's one upside to this messaging ... for Adam Schiff. He's basically telling donors to shift their funds away from Biden and direct them to his campaign and other incumbent Democrats in the House and Senate. 

That might be smart politics, even if it resembles back-stabbing of Biden in the process. Perhaps that's all it is, but the NYT report goes on to note that Schiff told donors that he'd tried to get Biden to see reality. The president has become too insular to comprehend the crisis facing the party, Schiff apparently told the donors on his call:

Mr. Schiff, who has been among Mr. Trump’s most outspoken critics, said at the fund-raiser that Mr. Biden and his campaign staff had been generally unwilling to engage the views of outside pollsters and political experts and urged them to do so, the people with knowledge of his remarks said.

That certainly fits with Biden's weird insistence that he's not trailing in the polls during his interviews with Lester Holt and George Stephanopoulos. One look at the RCP aggregate average for national polling shows Biden trailing most of the year, and at best coming close to a tie. It's even worse in 5-way polling that includes the independent candidates. Biden's polling is even worse in key battleground states like Pennsylvania (Trump +4.5), Wisconsin (Trump +3.0), and even Michigan (Trump +1.3). All of those are arguably in the margins of error, but Democrats usually dominate in these states in presidential elections -- especially by July, and especially incumbent presidents.

And now a poll taken in Virginia after the debate but before the assassination attempt shows support for Biden dropping, and Trump taking the lead:

Former president Donald Trump leads President Biden in Virginia by three percentage points in a new Virginia Commonwealth University-Wilder School poll, but the numbers reflect an anemic showing for both candidates and a decline in Biden’s support instead of a surge in Trump’s.

The results, which are within the poll’s 4.8-point margin of error, show Biden dropping from the 42 percent support he enjoyed in the last VCU-Wilder poll, released in January, while Trump was unchanged at 39 percent. The new poll was conducted between June 24 and July 3, so some of the results followed the June 27 presidential debate, when Biden’s faltering performance raised questions about his age and ability to handle the demands of the job.

Another poll taken in roughly the same period by NYT/Siena shows Biden up by three points, 48/45. But the takeaway here is that Virginia is clearly in play for the first time in 20 years. If Virginia's in play and so are the Blue Wall states, then Biden's in trouble -- and the polls coming up taken after the assassination attempt will likely look even worse.

This time, Schiff appears to be telling the truth.