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Notes -
US Election Updates – Democratic Infighting + Project 2025
Some “top” House Democrats met yesterday to discuss the ongoing situation within the party. Besides an Asian Congressman being confused for another Asian Congressman, nothing really happened – House Democrats remain divided on how to proceed. Biden reaffirmed that he was running in a spicy letter to House Dems and told Dems to challenge him at the convention if they had a problem. Biden refused to acknowledge himself as “the elite,” using populist rhetoric to separate himself from the establishment that has defined his career. One Congressperson is pissed about leaks from the call, having wanted the opportunity to speak candidly amongst peers.
Some Senate Dems were supposed to meet today, but concerns over leaks led to Warner cancelling the tentative plans. Speculation grows they will instead discuss at the caucus meeting tomorrow. Schumer told Manchin to back off of publicly calling for Biden to drop out. Manchin, generally a maverick, obeyed, for reasons that are unclear.
Horseshoe theory is validated in real time. Biden’s misstating polls. Convicted felon Hunter Biden supposedly gatekeeps access to his father. Democrats are increasingly frustrated with the media and pundits are reluctantly acknowledging health issues that they previously called conspiracy theories. New conspiracy theories around Biden potentially having Parkinson’s have popped up. Democrats seek to redirect anger to Project 2025 to keep the heat off Their Guy, even as Trump disavows Project 2025 and instead seeks looser abortion restrictions in the Republican party platform - a direct contradiction of what Project 2025 seeks.
The hysteria over a think tank’s wish list astonishes me on a personal level; the involvement of previous members of Trump’s administration by no means indicates Trump signed onto the project or even knew about plans to direct his platform. Trump isn’t really one who likes to be controlled. But the rhetoric from the Twitteratti (X-eratti?) from “vote blue no matter who” to “vote against Project 2025 at all costs” – even though Project 2025 isn’t actually on the ballot.
I don’t see the Democratic party going as far as invoking the “in all good conscious” clause at the Convention to pick a different candidate, as that hits a level of party disunity I don't think we've seen from either side in recent memory. There’s funding issues that make Kamala the easiest option to continue campaign machinery, and Kamala isn’t very popular. Kicking both Kamala and Biden off the ticket makes it unlikely either one of them will direct their campaign funds back into the DNC. There’s also still enough DEI vibes floating around the Dems to maybe not want the optics of kicking a Black woman off the ticket. A brokered convention is messy, and it feels, in this moment, inevitable that Trump wins. Polls skew towards Democrats, after all, and Biden is still behind. Further intra-party chaos won’t help.
At the same time, Trump is only leading by an average of three points, and he beat Clinton when she was only ahead by four. There’s another debate on Sept. 10 (maybe), during which time Biden can possibly turn it around (so long as the debate is held between Biden's "good hours" of 10 am and 4 PM). Eight days after the second debate, Trump’s sentencing is set to proceed (pending evidentiary issues spawning from the SCOTUS immunity ruling); jail time will surely mess with the campaign, although polling around the impact of Trump's convictions is mixed.
Is there enough time before the election for Democrats to rally around Biden and wipe this mess from the minds of voters? Will Dems rally around Biden, or will the Lord Almighty Himself come down and remove Biden from the ballot? (as a side note - invoking God as the head of an increasingly a-religious party is an interesting choice). Is Project 2025 enough of a Bogeyman to overcome the very valid concern that Biden might not even be currently running the country? Is the average voter’s goldfish brain enough to move on from this mess in time for the election? While the conversation around replacing Biden has become a 24/7 media circus, extending over a week since the debate itself went down, how much is the average voter actually paying attention to any of this?
The most fascinating part of this, to me, are the Democratic attacks on a media that skews left. Turning against one’s historical allies is fascinating at a time when large Democratic donors are demanding Biden drop out. What a fun few months of culture war ahead.
While polling errors of that size are entirely plausible, it's worth noting that Trump's structural advantage in the electoral college is non-trivial. If he leads by 3 in the national polls come November, Trump is very likely to win. Realistically, Biden needs to be in the positive column in the national popular vote to have a good chance in the six key swing states.
Still the chances of Trump going till November from here without some sort of scandal either emerging or being manufactured are essentially nil
Will a scandal actually hurt Trump at this point? Anyone who's actually willing to vote for him doesn't care how many times he went to Epstein Island.
Because the answer is zero
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Yeah, there's not much they can pull. Politically incorrect language? Baked in. Rape claims from decades ago? Baked in. Shady deals? Baked in. Conspiring with Russia? Who considering voting for him would believe it this time?
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Sure, variance is baked into the cake of any reasonable projection this far out. I don't think that's any more likely than something absolutely insane occurring with the sundowner on the other end of things though.
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It's too confusing anymore. People I talk to literally think the SCOTUS overturned his conviction because the prosecutor was fucking the judge.
They've been reading ahead to next session.
Don't you put that evil on me, nybs. If we have to hear about a THIRD disgusting love affair in the process of these cases...
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I have no problem taking the other side for 2 reasons.
Scuttlebutt has it that his campaign discipline is due to his co-campaign manager Suzie Wiles; an accomplished politico who used to be a big DeSantis booster until he alienated her in 2023 at which time she switched to Trump.
He’s also Trump. He’s definitely burnt people before. Maybe grifter types (Cohen, Scarsmucci). I don’t think he was great at listening to people. Even if she’s very good he has also realized he needs that person.
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Going by Nate Silver's model, Biden needs something like +2% in the national polls to have a 50% chance of winning the electoral college. Trump being up by 3% in the polls on Election Day gives a ~99.9% chance that he wins the election.
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It sounds like the Biden Democrats are using the same style of populist rhetoric that Republicans are using to try and deflect from Biden's poor debate performance and his responses to calls to step down.
Biden has never been a favorite of the Democratic elite; he's always been an old white man with a tendency to go off the rails when let off the leash. In 2008 the elite favored Obama and Clinton over him, and in 2016 they (including Obama!) favored Clinton over him. The only reason they ended up jumping to his side in 2020 was he was the only moderate positioned to beat Bernie.
From his point of view, he's always been kind of shat on despite paying his dues for decades, and now these disloyal bed wetters are freaking out because of a couple of bad polls (when his likely replacements show no real signs of doing any better than him). At least Hunter has his back.
Note that I'm not advocating this POV--he is obviously too old, and at the least shouldn't be running for re-election, and from a purely electoral point of view it makes more sense for Democrats to go with the high variance strategy of replacing him with an unknown. But his populist rhetoric isn't cynical and comes from genuinely held feelings of aggrievement.
I think you're correct.
It is fascinating how both Biden and Trump do exude what, as far as I can tell, are genuine feelings of personal aggrievement when both of them have had objectively stupendous lives. Biden was either the youngest or second youngest Senator of all time. His initial victory was narrow and surprising, but then was so incredibly solid that he never faced any legitimate challenge to it. True, he "failed" in his prime-age bid for President in the 1980s. But he simply went back to that Senate seated and just waited and waited before stumbling into .... the Vice Presidency.
Trump was not only rich, but he lived a cartoon version of a rich man's life because of his deep entanglements with media and entertainment. He wasn't some financial engineer who spent 20 years in balance sheets and came out of the other side holding a huge fortune. Between opening casinos and flying on his private jet, he was getting cameos in movies and, eventually, turning himself into a reality TV star (personally, I would detest this life, but I admit it at least seems like it could be compelling to those interested in glamour and fame)
Of course, yes, if you jump into the details, both men have had some personal tragedy. Biden's first wife and her car accident, the loss of Beau Biden. Trump's brother drank himself to death and I feel like his mother / father's deaths were maybe harder on him than has ever been reported.
But, still .... how the hell are either of these guys mad about anything? I can understand "I am a political leader and I am emoting in a way that relates well to my base" but neither of them comes across that way to me. These dudes seem bone-deep rageful at life sometimes.
Most people on the internet find getting into the weeds and dirty details of the various bad faith prosecutions of Trump to be unbearable - imagine having to live through them. I'm honestly surprised he isn't angrier when I picture myself in his position, sitting across from someone who knowingly lied in order to start a fraudulent criminal prosecution against me while threatening my family, reputation and legacy. Throw in the fact that he's now a constant target for mockery in public and in culture, and I can absolutely see why he's angry.
Trump spent large parts of his career running his business in a way which intentionally invited litigation (of both good faith and bad faith varieties). You can't stay out of court entirely as a real-estate developer, but Trump's "so sue me" attitude to contractors expecting to be paid is an indication that he is more comfortable in the courtroom than the average guy who isn't a lawyer or a career criminal, as does the aggressive tax avoidance.
He is also notoriously sue-happy as a plaintiff - to the point where the ABA tried to spike an article about his litigation history because of the fear that he would sue the ABA for saying how sue-happy he was! And of course he didn't have a problem instructing people to file numerous frivolous lawsuits based on patently false claims of election fraud. (Even if you think the jury is still out on whether there was fraud somewhere in the 2020 election, the specific fraud alleged in the key post-election lawsuits didn't happen, and he probably knew this).
Trump's behaviour is entirely consistent with someone who sees the litigation against him as kayfabe, and is entirely comfortable responding without breaking kayfabe. This is easier for him than it would be for you or me because it was already clear by January that even if he was convicted he could gum things up for long enough that he wouldn't be reporting to jail this side of the election.
Indeed, it is entirely plausible that the whole Trump persecution complex is kayfabe - Trump knows what storylines play well with his MAGA fanbase, and "They're coming after me because I'm fighting for you" with himself as face and Uncle Sam as heel is one of the best. My out-of-posterior probability that when he is around family and personal friends Trump is enjoying himself like you would expect of a rich powerful old man who can buy anything and anyone and expects to be protected from the consequences of his behaviour by his popularity is about 25%. This would explain his apparently counterproductive litigation strategy - provoking judges to slap him around a bit makes the shoot more impressive, and he assumes that any verdict against him is reversible (if necessary after he wins the election, where given what we know about him he will be even more confident of victory than the bookies).
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Important caveat I missed up front - I feel like Trump was like this before 2016.
I can understand why he might have a bit of a persecution complex since then.
I thought the usual argument there was that Trump has always wanted to be recognised and respected by New York high society, and he never has been. He's tried to use money and fame to buy his way in, but he's too fundamentally lacking in class or tact. I could imagine that, internally, what it feels like to be Trump is to be always excluded from the inner ring. He wants to get inside that ring, but no matter of power, not even being president, is enough to generate acceptance or respect.
The cartoon bit is important, I think. Trump is very rich and powerful, but Trump is also a clown in a way that real high society elites aren't. Trump's status has always depended on his ability to perform, the ability to get a crowd to hoist him on to their shoulders in a rush of popular enthusiasm. That's not how it is for the real upper class. The real upper class may be popular, but they don't need popularity, and in fact ought to mildly disdain it.
Money, fame and golfing ability. Elite golf is part of WASP high society (Steve Sailer has written a lot about this), and Trump embraced it and it embraced Trump (rejecting him only after January 6th). I don't think you are excluded from the inner ring if a club like Winged Foot not only grants you membership, but also tolerates blatant cheating.
I can absolutely imagine that Trump needed the single-digit handicap (which he earned legitimately when he was younger) to get into clubs that old money is allowed to shoot 90s at, but if the bluebloods see you as actively undesirable (at the time Trump was learning to golf, "undesirable" mostly meant "Jewish"), you need to be winning majors to get in with pure golfing ability.
This is a choice. Not many real high society elites make that choice, but the ones who do don't get kicked out of the club.
Trump doesn't need popularity for business reasons, he craves it for personal reasons. Fred Trump never courted popularity, and nor do most commercial real estate guys. Trumps third and fourth careers (reality TV star and politician) were choices made by a man who was already rich enough to do what he wanted.
Of course, the ultimate test of whether old money accepts you is who your kids marry, and the results for Trump are interestingly ambiguous.
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I would never have imagined using the word "equanimity" in relation to Donald Trump, and yet here we are. His ability to weather these storms borders on superhuman.
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It's never about objective quality of life; it's always about a sense of unfairness. Trump wanted to be accepted and feted by the Manhattan elite, but in the end he will always be the uncouth son of a slumlord in Queens. Biden always wanted to be President, but he was always passed over because he was a not-especially-bright stuttering kid from a small state who went to Syracruse.
I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's entire decision to run was in retaliation to him being humiliated by Obama (so loved and feted!) at that comedy gala in front of all the people he wanted to like him.
I miss when our elites would just slam an axe into each other's skulls and then payed the weregild afterwards. Made things easier for the masses they ruled over.
Well, I am not longing back to idea of elites being able to slam axe into my skull and pay (much smaller) weregild
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I can definitely see this.
If it is the Truth, I feel genuine pity for both of them. Living life with, "Because fuck you! that's why!" as your primary motivator has to be constant chaos.
Someone who mostly wants to be happy can find a low-intensity job and raise a family. Someone who embraces gluttony and lust have much easier paths to satisfy those urges than high level politics.
Bitterness and hatred, however, are impossible to satisfy, and the only thing that even approaches satisfying them is wielding power over your enemies.
Yes, basically. My life makes me happy, but hatred is an entirely separate category. There's no amount of money you could give me to make me stop hating the things I hate, because I hate them for a reason, not because I'm dissatisfied with my bank account/sex life/penis size/whatever sneer is being used.
The idea that "hateful people are just upset about something else/losers/defective deplorables that belong in camps" is just a scummy leftist tactic to distract from people's real, valid grievances. Bulverism, pathologizing dissent, whatever you want to call it.
I'm sure Trump and Biden (and Musk) are similar. They have a drive for power or status or change that isn't satisfied by living the good life or having lots of stuff.
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Project 2025 is just a project to develop technocrats of the right.
Exactly. It's a pretty bog standard ThinkTank wishlist of policies and politicos that they want to put into some of the literally thousands of political appointee positions that follow any election. Every other major ThinkTank does this.
The "fear" of Project 2025 is a strange media / twitterati / very-online-people invention. I think it allows a lot of vague gestures to the idea of shadowy planning by unnamed (but somehow very influential) "party insiders." They kind of did this with the Federalist society people after Kavanaugh and Barrett got confirmed. It's quite literally the same as, all of a sudden, telling you friends, "Did you know that the GOVERNMENT is, like, storing all of these old BOOKS in these, like, secure buildings and you have to get an official identification card to ACCESS them?!"
All you've done is dramatized a dusty old library
I was kinda shocked when Trump felt the need to distance himself from it publicly. Really bizarre behavior. From what I saw, he distanced himself from Project 2025 harder than he distanced himself from a lot of much worse things.
Trump needs to distance himself from a number of unpopular items on the movement conservative wishlist to be electable. In particular, he can't afford to be associated with "Cut Social Security and Medicare in order to cut taxes for the super-rich" - something that was a huge part of why he polled better than the Goldman-Aramco Republicans in 2016 - and he doesn't want (for good reasons) to be associated with the likely consequences of actually making an abortion ban stick.
Project 2025 includes entitlement reform and a big federal push against abortion (e.g. enforcing the Comstock Act) so Trump benefits from publicly rejecting it.
It strikes me as a Bad Move on his part, though I will confess that Donald is a significantly better political mind than me, possessed as Asimov put it of a tremendous instinctual understanding of psychohistory.
Attempting to distance himself from it will reduce or blunt Democratic attacks on him precisely zero, any more than Conservatives are less apt to attack Biden about the 2020 riots because of his public denouncements of defunding the police. He won't succeed in persuading anyone who has heard of Project 2025 and can process what it is that he isn't tied to it, he's more likely to succeed in convincing people who like the Heritage Foundation that he isn't a reliable executive for that purpose.
Trump has been an incredible maverick about that kind of thing up to this point. He's notable/notorious for his refusal to full-throatedly denounce some really out-of-the-mainstream support he gets. This is a guy who had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner, he's not afraid to charm people who are way outside the norm, he doesn't tack to the middle the way most politicians have, to the chagrin of media blobs and to great electoral success. Appealing to the extremes has gone well for him!
It strikes me as odd, because I've had the conversation with my wife, far more liberal than I am, and we both found the liberal obsession with Project 2025 groan-inducing. It's a very inside-baseball, extremely-online liberal attack, similar to the ever-idiotic analysis of party-platform positions. We're seeing the Trump campaign neuter the party platform too.
Maybe he's smarter than me, but I always think of this kind of stuff as more editorial page nonsense than having a real impact.
Maybe, but it could conceivably make him far more palatable centrists anyways. Think of Clinton and his Sister Souljah moment. Breaking publicly with your party's activists can win over that swing voter, if you can do it without making too many of your own people stay home.
I have to be honest, I don't know what sister Souljah means.
Here ya go.
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Trump has never reacted particularly well to the traditional small-government/social conservative/hawk conservative fusionist tendency, and there's a lot of that - particularly the free market libertarian streak - in the policy bits of Project 2025.
There’s also a lot of actual social conservatism, it’s highly disingenuous to criticize it as some libertarian / tea party thing.
I'm not treating it as a tea-party thing. To the contrary, it's a fusionist document. Trump doesn't like that stuff - he's pushing the GOP to the left on abortion, entitlements, and foreign policy all at once.
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Could it be about Trump trying to avoid getting trapped by a faction among his supporters? I'm thinking of a scenario where an independent right wing group publish their own "Here is what Trump is going to do." story. Some Trump supporters like the story and vote for Trump on that basis. Trump gets elected and then fails to do some of the things; they were never part of his plan. But his supporters are upset, claiming that he promised and is letting them down.
Sometimes this is fuss about nothing. Other times it is a bad look and Trump comes under real political pressure. So he wants to get out in front of the problem by being clear that it is not the official Trump manifesto.
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My two competing theories:
Trump read Project 2025 as "telling him which people to hire." Not exactly wrong, but also not right. If Trump hates one thing, it's being told what to do. He'll always slam that.
(tin foil hat) Actually a coordination between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign to create separation between the two. Trump doesn't need them to win the election (they aren't a campaign vehicle at all!) but they can bring along "bad vibes" because the Heritage Foundation always rubs some people the wrong way. Then, after the election, Trump can just ... hire everyone they recommend without every saying "Thanks, Project 2025!"
Trump thinks in terms of zero sum transactions. That's part of his frankly bizarre constant obsession with NATO spending. In looking at Project 2025, there's zero loss to him for bashing them and zero gain to endorsing them or growing closer. So ... just get it off the balance sheet!
Weirdly his obsession with Nato spending is my single favorite policy position of his.
His admonishment of other NATO countries for underspending on defense was prophetic. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine they are doing it of their own accord and non-NATO countries around Russia are rushing to join. The media likes to make fun of Trump saying Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he was president, but if Europe had built up it's armories back then, Russia would have thought twice about attacking and might have been defeated in the early stages of the war.
My impression is that most NATO countries want a prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine and so are not sending much of anything.
Here's how many main battle tanks NATO has access to:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294391/nato-tank-strength-country/
Here's how many they've sent to Ukraine:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1364974/ukraine-military-aid-tanks/
More military investment doesn't make financial sense because there is no real enemy worth fearing. An actual war between NATO and Russia would be little more than a cleanup operation.
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Zooming out just a bit however, don't you think it's actually a good thing we are seeing greater emphasis on examining these non-official but still influential groups and what they actually do to policy within governments? Perhaps not, of course, panicking over it and we need to view it all in context, but isn't this still preferable to ignoring the whole thing as is historically the case? For example, if people had paid more attention to the Federalist Society's influence, they wouldn't have been as "surprised" about some of the actual Supreme Court picks that came out of the Trump years. While it's always tricky and potentially unfair to lump non-official positions in with official ones, the simple fact is that these non-official positions that are nonetheless strongly associated with one of the two major parties, and that's relevant info for a voter.
An analogy would be: you don't just marry a person, you marry their family too (in-laws). Factoring in what their family is like into a marriage decision might feel a little unfair, but it's eminently reasonable, because it's actually pretty hard to ignore the family in practice (and, even beyond that, this is the family that raised your potential spouse, so at least some of their ideas and values will have rubbed off).
I think this is what these kind of orgs would want you to think.
My opinion is that, in truth, all of them a far, far less influential than they want to be. I see big think tanks like Heritage, Brookings, CSIS etc. as something more like under performing charities that release ho-hum reports on various issues.
They do often function as halfway houses for former staffers who are (a) waiting for the next Congress / administration to come around and (b) Need to actually make some private sector levels of income before they go back to the goofy "salaries" of Congressional / admin staffers. But even that reveals something; if you have to find a bench to warm at a ThinkTank, and didn't get some actually big time job at a bank / law firm / lobby shop / tech company etc....are you that influential?
I once did some consulting work that dealt with illegal finance networks (terrorists, drug cartels etc.) I was doing a bunch of IT work for it, but wanted to get some degree of subject matter understanding. I asked which CSIS report I should read. The company laugh and introduced me to about four totally under-the-radar specialists in the space. They sell their research privately to firms who need it. It's higher quality, more quantitative, dispenses with policy "recommendations", and is generally delivered by folks who have worked outside of downtown D.C.
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The average voter is assuredly paying attention to Biden being way too old. That includes people who have no intention of supporting Trump but who now can’t support Biden either- no small number. I agree that democrats are between a rock and a hard place but the idea that this can all blow over if they ignore it is not the best of a bunch of bad options.
Instead there’s a senile old man who’s closest adviser is a crack addict and who’s obvious successor is an obvious bimbo widely perceived as selected due to her(frequently disliked by the general public) race and gender. Leaving that in place is probably worse for the democrats than any possible replacement, or possibly even multiple replacements. Unironically it’d be better for democrats to have a Newsom v big gretch v Biden/Harris fight than to have a straight Biden v Trump showdown.
It only a rock and a hard place because they lack the will to do anything about it. If they wanted Biden out, they’d have pushed him out. If these were republicans, he would be out by now simply because republicans are much more focused on winning the election. Instead, they’re publicly hand wringing while the clock ticks down and they lose support from average people who don’t want to be ruled by a guy who can’t string a paragraph together. It’s really hard to sympathize with an entire party too worried about being mean to a guy with obvious dementia to kick him out and take control before their chances tank completely.
...Huh? What Establishment Republicans are you talking about who are very good at getting candidates who don't help them win elections off the ticket? The same ones who kicked Trump out, along with Oz, Mastriaono, Masters, and every other nincompoop that threw away a winnable seat in 2022?
Yeah I’d argue republican elites have even less control of their party. The GOP is captured by the % of the base who loves Trump.
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I read it as Republicans are disciplined this round. And observably the friendly fire and unforced errors seems pretty D in 2024 in a way it didn't in 2022.
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Who is "they" in this? Team Biden has all the cards here; any attempt to get him off the convention floor without his consent is likely (certain?) to fail. Even if there were a way to, there would need to be some leader for people to coalesce around as an alternative, and anyone who took up that mantle would be trashing the remainder of their political career. And even if someone successfully navigated all of that, there's still the small matter of actually beating Trump in the wake of a nasty, chaotic convention (losing to him also being the end of a political career).
As someone who thinks Biden should go, I think you’re wrong about the division simply because if they beat Trump they are heroes. And I think given the urgency most of the rank and file feel about Trump, I think once they have a candidate, the sniping stops in short order.
As far as going after Trump, democrats can’t do that now. Biden lacks the mental capacity to turn the conversation to Trump, he can’t even get the focus off his dementia symptoms even on the left (lots of speculation on the cause with a lot of people saying Parkinson’s or Lew Body dementia). All of the energy from the party from here until election night is going to be spent on defense — proving Biden fit — rather than trying to defeat Trump. And all the while, Trump can spin every attack in him as a desperate attempt to deflect from Biden being unfit for the job. That’s unwinnable to my mind.
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At this point, it's unclear to me that Kamala is worse than Biden. All of that was based on polling from back when the media and party thought the age issue was manageable and so tried to contain it. The cat's out of the bag now.
Though I have to grant that there is a risk that she'll be framed as the worst of all worlds: complicit in Biden's deception but not in his actual successes.
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