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5 hours later and there still isn't any announcement on Whitehouse.gov or joebiden.com, only twitter. All his staff are saying they found out from Twitter too. (Edit: an announcement popped up on Biden dot com about an hour after that)
I really am starting to wonder if Joe knows he's dropped out yet.
It would be interesting to go back and see when the paperwork for "Harris for president" was filed.
Don’t worry. Joe Biden dot com now redirects to act blue.
They probabaly held a gun to his head (figuratively) and he’s fuming mad and won’t/can’t get on camera.
Either that or the speculation of him being out of the loop in his own resignation are true.
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He knows. If you watch his last few press appearances, he's slow and he loses track of his thoughts frequently but he's clearly not so far gone that he wouldn't notice if people dropped him out of the race without consulting him.
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I don’t think he could make an announcement like that via WH.gov.
It does seem very odd to me that he announced this in twitter or all places.
There are some strong palace coup vibes here, in the sense that the decision of how to release the information wasn't Biden's, but on the part of whomever needed it released ASAP. If you want to put bad news, that'd typically be a Friday afternoon, not Sunday afternoon, and if you want a normal controlled release, you do it via press release on Monday business hours. Sunday afternoon is for if you want it done, and have a first-mover advantage when others are taken by surprise and not in work yet.
A more conspiratorial take might be that the release of the concession preceeded the actual capitulation- that Biden could have been shown the tweet and been forced into a position in which he'd have to reveal he lacked control of his own White House / social media platform if he wanted to compete against it, which would be further political kryptonite.
More likely, this is something more akin to the pro-Harris faction in the White House just marching it over to the Twitter-handler desk, which they could have access/control to, and releasing it as soon as Biden capitulated, but before any other planned event. This would allow the Harris-faction to steal that march on immediate coordinations to pressure others not to capitulate / not announce contestation this coming week.
(Harris has the lock on the Biden-raised money, reportedly, but several of the reported key players behind Biden dropping out are- allegedly- less committed to his replacement being her. Thus, the Harris-faction needs to work fast with the advantage of being the first aware of the concession.)
The whole bury it on Friday thing is old-fashioned in our era of 24 hour news and doesn't apply to major stuff like this anyway. Considering the major networks brought in their regular anchors and preempted programming, the day of release probably had little to do with anything. Waiting until today wouldn't have done anything, so they released the news as soon as the decision had been made.
The era of 24 hour news is precisely why the US political ecosystems continues to relies on the Friday news dump to bury bad news: because most people go home for the weekend, and by the time they come back the news cycle has passed on with at least 2x morning-news cycles having passed, minimizing the political impact. Not only the information proliferation muted due to fewer people tuning into it on the weekends, but the coverage is decreased as it's more 24-hour cycles out of date from being breaking.
Choosing to do it Sunday afternoon is the opposite, in that it makes it the primary topic of discussion for Monday morning news, which increases the political impact for shaping perceptions. It's an indicator that the people arranging for the timing didn't see it as bad news.
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I was stunned by Biden's withdrawal, though probably not as much as Biden himself.
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