Here's something we can agree with the Democratic Party base on: presidential candidate Julián Castro is loathsome.

According to Nate Silver's outfit, FiveThirtyEight, Castro was the big loser of the third Democratic debate, based on his sneakily age-ist and downright dishonest attack on Joe Biden.

Castro lost big points on favorability and the willingness of even left-wing voters to vote for him, according to FiveThirtyEight:

So after Ipsos polled voters before and after the debate, we calculated the change in candidates' net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating). O'Rourke may not have picked up many potential supporters, but he did improve his net favorability rating by more than 8 points with his debate performance. Castro, meanwhile, took the largest hit, dropping 6.7 points in net favorability, which could be related to his heated exchanges with Biden.

He lost nearly a third of his support, if you look at FiveThirtyEight's fourth chart, with Castro at the bottom, the only one highlighted with red line, based on how badly he lost support compared to the others.  He went from an already miserable 19.7% favorable rating to an even more pathetic 13% favorable rating in just one night.  None of the others saw that kind of tumble.  Castro really turned off a lot of voters.

What's more, Castro, in FiveThirtyEight's third chart, is one of the candidates least likely to be Democratic voters' second choice — pretty much every candidate is considered more of an option to Democrats than this guy.  There are a couple of tiny exceptions, such as Amy Klobuchar's voters being more repelled by Bernie Sanders, and Biden's supporters not being interested in Andrew Yang, but Castro overall is rock bottom, and he's particularly hideous to Bernie's supporters.  (It's an interesting chart.)

All it took was one debate, and now even the Democrats, having gotten a good look at him, want no part of him.  We couldn't stand him anyway.  Now even the Democratic voters have come onboard.

This is quite a fall.  Less than a year ago, FiveThirtyEight, which slants left but tries to be fair because of its focus on forecasting (which it still sometimes gets wrong), was hailing Castro as a guy who could win the Democratic nomination, based on his appeal to Latino and Millennial voters, along with a slice of what it calls "the left" (obviously, he lost the Bernie people, so somewhere along the line Castro offended them earlier).  He was less strong with black voters and a group they call Democratic "Party loyalists" — presumably nice Democrats you run into in places like rural New York or outback Texas — the much eclipsed Clinton-era-type moderate Democrats who quietly won much of the House in the last midterm.

It's made Castro the one big loser out of the Democratic debate, done in by his attack on Biden's age, which offended Democrats — certainly older Democrats, who, like Republicans, are a large bloc of voters — and probably a lot of others.  For me, the dishonesty of how he represented Biden's remarks — aggressively misrepresenting Biden's remarks and then calling him old and forgetful — even though everyone knew what Biden actually said, was just despicable.

Then, to make matters even worse, he lied about it.  Get a load:

Julian Castro Defends Controversial Attack on Biden: 'I Wasn't Taking A Shot at His Age' https://t.co/r5FuvvekMK

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) September 13, 2019

CASTRO: "I wasn't taking a shot at his age, I was taking a shot at the fact that he had just said the words 'Buy-in,' you would have to buy in. So I said, 'Look, you just said that you would have to buy in.' He said, 'No, I didn't.' I said, 'You know, I mean, did you forget that you just said that you would have to buy in?'"

REPORTER: "Yeah, right. 'Did you just forget what we said two seconds ago?'"

CASTRO: "Right. So what I'm saying is, when you read the transcript and you understand the health care policy and the meaning of that, the significance of that, the difference is that 10 million people would get left out under his plan. That's why that's so important. It's not an attack on Vice President Biden. It's not something about personality. It's about the health care policy. That was my focus."

This is the same kind of lie his no-good twin brother Joaquin made when he first doxxed the Trump voters in his district (which included some of Julián's) and then dishonestly claimed he had no intention of wishing them violence.  Nice business you have here...

This raises questions about why Castro was in the debate at all.  He's clearly not ready for prime time, and now he's mercifully scuppered his own hideous political career. He was in the bottom-of-the-barrel position at the end of the debate lineup, way over on the end, and that signals his support was already very low, possibly lower than the threshhold of qualification. Was he placed there as an affirmative action concession? To make the stage look diverse? I wouldn't put it past the Democrats, who already have been caught rigging even this nomination process. 

It's time to give this clown the hook, and cripes, keep him away from any public role whatsoever.

Image credit: Twitter screen shot from Mediaite.