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Or, alternatively, it's re-affirming the original argument by not letting the counter-argument smuggle in assumptions (such as that a party-annointing must occur in advance of primaries) that are neither necessary nor disprove the previous argument.
Do you believe that the winner of the 2024 presidential election will only win because they were anointed by voters on November 8th? That seems like the weakest-possible stance.
It's a good thing that is not my stance, then.
If you would be willing to explain where I am wrong or even lay out what your belief or thought is I would be happy to read it. Hope this helps.
The anointment argument is not that Biden was anointed by voters on November 8th, but in the Democratic Party inner-party coordination during the Democratic primary before Super Tuesday when the Party establishment successfully coordinated the majority of Biden's centrist rivals whom he been stuck amongst to drop out and endorse him. This was done in a context where this needed to happen to consolidate the centrist share of the party vote, who no one had been dominated to that point, vis-a-vis the insurgent Bernie Sanders, who up to that point had been on a Trump-esque trajectory of being one of the biggest minorities.
Between the coordinated pullout and endorsements of Biden, and the tactical stay-in by party institutionalist Elizabeth Warren that split the party left/Bernie-base vote, Biden was basically uncontested by any significant rival (except Michael Bloomberg) to the right of Bernie/Warren going into Super Tuesday, which inevitably produced an overwhelming victory on his behalf, as opposed to the forecasted muddle if the earlier-primary patterns had held. This provided the contested primary that Mozer was referring to that Biden won, as the counter-argument to @Mewis's critique of the Democratic Party relying on designated successors instead of (intra-)party democracy.
Mozer's argument was that Biden won a contested primary, and thus there was no anointing, and uses the endorsements during the contested phase as proof of this position. This relies on the assumption that an anointment must happen before the primaries, with any contested phase disproving there being an anointment.
This is an invalid assumption. There is no requirement for when an anointment/successor designation has to occur. It doesn't even counter what a successor / anointment can be considered to be.
The anointed successor argument is that the party coordination to clear the decks is the anointment, to the benefit of the designated successor. It's the institutional-driven, rather than voter-driven, pressures to determine a primary winner. Biden did not win Super Tuesday, and then other dropped out as is/was the normal causal relationship in primaries with a healthy intra-party democracy- rather, others dropped out, so that Biden could win Super Tuesday.
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