Barring unforeseen and unforeseeable political catastrophes on the campaign trail, I would say the only qualification for an opponent is that he or she be among the living.

I didn’t go into the horse race polling because it was outside the scope of my immediate project, but Trump’s support appears to max out at 41 percent.

There is one problem with the polling, sort of a reverse “Bradley Effect.” Because nobody with a three digit IQ is unaware of Trump’s buffoonery (although much fewer are aware of his norm-shattering on the serious side of things) it is theoretically possible that there could be a substantial number of voters who are ashamed to tell a stranger they favor Trump.

That was the theory put forward about the allegedly awful polling in 2016.

Awful? The final horse race polls had Clinton winning the popular vote by between 1 percent and 7 percent. That is scary close. My recollection, without going to the numbers, is that she won by a smidge over 2 percent — margin of error territory.

The average voter knows a lot more about Trump’s incompetence and dishonesty now than in 2016. Recall that the mainstream media AKA Fake News would not use the L word until after the election. Now there are a number of publications keeping running totals of Trump’s lies. The numbers differ with the standard for deciding what is a “lie” as opposed to other kinds of incorrect statements.

One way to predict the effect of that is to assume Trump’s support has not changed but will be even less likely to admit favoring Trump. Let that be so, the Democratic base is fired up now to historical levels.

To win, Trump would have to increase his base vote. He has not tried seriously to accomplish that and I have no reason to think it will happen by itself. His base may be small, but it’s loyal, so he not only can win, he will win if there is a significant enough third party vote. None of the people who floated the idea of running outside the Democratic Party have gotten any traction and most of them have folded.

But I’m not answering the question you asked. Maybe this opinion is an artifact of watching elections on the county level for too many years, but in those elections a substantial part of the money raised is spent building name ID. Biden has more name ID than any other Democratic hopeful, so his money will go farther — I would bet on GOTV.

In support of that analysis, I would call attention to the fact that he is the only centrist who is polling well right now. I take that to mean the Democratic electorate is not as centrist as it used to be. If it were, at least one other centrist ought to have some nationally significant following. Yet Biden, though out of step with the 2020 Zeitgeist, leads handily. That’s the power of name ID.

I don’t look at Biden and say it’s only name ID. I say to other candidates, what will you do to overcome it?

The debates really, really matter.