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Given the lack of public presence and the, uh, unorthodox manner of announcing the withdrawal, what's the possibility that Biden has actually died and this is all a smokescreen to make sure there's not an open convention due to the DNC's rules around death of a presumptive nominee?
What would there be for the Dems to gain for hiding Biden's death?
I'm reminded of the time when Kate Middleton went on an extended media hiatus and the odd behavior by the British royals around it led to a host of conspiracy theories, ranging from relatively benign "they're divorced" to the raving ones like "They've harvested her for organs to keep King Charles alive". Or when Putin was absent from publicity for some time in late 2022 and there was fervent speculation that he had died and there was a power struggle in Kremlin. In both cases the supposedly dead party eventually turned up and the speculators, well, at least didn't come out looking so good afterwards.
Of course it is entirely possibly that it does turn out that Biden has died or been seriously incapacitated by Covid, but again, why wouldn't they just come right out with it to get sympathy points and make Kamala's road to nomination even easier?
His staff / family delegating power to their allies before the jig is up, perhaps?
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If Biden is dead then the Democrats don’t have a tie breaker vote in the Senate until a new VP is confirmed.
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You're right that it's irrational, but it's not unthinkable coming from a severely dysfunctional organisation where there are very strong incentives to lie.
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Who knows. Maybe they are so addicted to lying, it's so much their first and most natural impulse, that they do it even when it serves no purpose what so ever. This has been shown to be true for Hillary Clinton and all the made up stories she tells, Biden was a habitual liar his entire political career and it tanked his Presidential run in the 80's, Kamala has been caught plagiarizing stories and adopting them as her own. I was listening to Dan Carlin, one of the Supernova in the East episodes I think, and he mentions Roosevelt had a reputation as "a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well" or something to that effect.
It may be time to consider that most politicians are just congenital liars.
I think Kamala would rather campaign as an incumbent, even an unpopular one, rather than as a veep.
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Possibly to prevent a new VP that might be forced upon her by the Congress, so she can run with whoever she wants?
Well sure but that doesn't affect the ticket, just the last few months of the current administration.
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Kamala gets to appoint her own VP if Biden resigns/gets 25th Amendmented. It's subject to congressional approval but it's still her nomination.
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If he actually died surely he would have also ‘resigned’ as president for Kamala?
Can a president resign via letter on Twitter? Sure, they can announce their intention to resign, but there are formal constitutional requirements to actually resign that a dead Biden would be unable to fulfill.
And would the optics be as believable as a gradual acclimation to Harris and a later handoff? Biden being presented as succumbing to external pressure to withdraw, then dying days or weeks later with his life's work completed (or of anguish at Washington's betrayal) is much more palatable than "I resign and withdraw immediately" via Twitter without a public appearance or recorded statement with a public death announcement a few days or weeks later. The latter is just a transparently papered-over coup whereas the former at least provides plausible deniability and media massaging.
Per the Nixon precedent, it requires a letter to the Secretary of State, on which someone willing to run this conspiracy would happily forge Biden's signature. (It isn't deliberate, but it is useful the SoS has probably seen more wet-ink Presidential signatures than anyone else except the National Archivist because they countersign documents that require sealing). You can publish the letter on Twitter, but it isn't effective until someone couriers the wet-ink original to Blinken's office. If Blinken isn't on board with the conspiracy and refuses the letter until Biden authenticates it in person, then you probably didn't have enough support to pull it off to begin with.
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