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Silvers main point is if voters punish “their” party (by not voting, or voting third party), even if it means the enemy gets into power. He thinks yes, because that is how he felt:
I really don't like how commentators act like this was a choice when there was no political reality where he could conceivably not run for reelection. The only way this could conceivably make sense is if there was some obvious candidate who wouldn't draw any opposition and who would be running as a continuation of the present administration. In other words, they would have had to name Kamala Harris as heir apparent and hope nobody credible wanted to challenge her. They weren't going to get that. The administration's shortcomings were manifest enough and Kamala's popularity weak enough that at least one squeaky wheel would emerge who would seriously threaten to derail the whole thing. At that point you're just guaranteeing a repeat of 2016 or any incumbent who faced a serious primary challenge.
On the other hand, you could (probably) keep Harris out and have an open primary with the usual large cast of candidates. But when do you start this process? Most candidates announce in the spring or early summer of the year prior to the election, and the first primary debates are held in the late summer or early fall. But the candidates need time to form exploratory committees and the like and get their campaigns together before they announce, so add an additional month or two of lead time. It's worth noting that Trump's nomination was not a fait accompli at this point, so there was a reasonable concern that the GOP candidate would have an advantage in the general if given more lead time. The latest Biden could have realistically waited to announce that he wasn't running would have been May or June of 2023, but more realistically it would have been made in March or April.
At this point, his presidency effectively ends. any new legislative proposals or foreign policy initiatives are now political hot potatoes that are discussed more in terms of their effect on the primary election than on their own terms. Support from his own party is no longer guaranteed, so better just to ditch anything the least bit controversial. This isn't good for the party, either, since changing candidates doesn't exactly guarantee a Democratic victory. This is put more starkly when you consider that the second half of Biden's presidency went much better than the first. Inflation cooled, the border crisis subsided somewhat, and COVID and Afghanistan were increasingly in the rear view mirror. Any attempts for the party to win back voters or simply do what they feel is right go up in smoke; they've effectively conceded to half a term. And to compound the error, Biden's tenure as president is frozen at that point, and it becomes the record that Democrats are running on, including those who would be willing to question Biden's decision making.
A Biden candidacy wasn't ideal, but he had already beaten Trump once and there weren't any candidates who could step in and make an obvious improvement. If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins. Conversely, if Biden doesn't run and Trump wins anyway then the pundits are writing articles about how the Democrats sacrificed 2 years of power in order to expose intraparty divisions and nominate a candidate who was stuck with Biden's record anyway and had no real chance of winning. So pick your poison.
It was a choice, period. Biden is a free man and not some kind of slave, nobody constrained him to choose to run. He would not have been thrown in prison or something. You talk about "political reality", but the man is in his 80s. His life is almost over, let alone his career in politics. Acting like political calculus means he "had to" run is just absurd.
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This logic is why democrats lost. Having a mentally competent commander in chief is more important than ensuring everyone sticks to party talking points. Having an open primary is not some optional feature you only do when it's convenient to rev up enthusiasm. Perhaps the party wouldn't have needed to win back so many voters if they didn't betray the nation's trust.
I believe the Democrats also lost because they didn't have a competitive primary in 2020. Or 2016. Actually, the last time the Democratic party had an actual competitive primary where they truly let the party membership decide who they should nominate, the people went against the Clinton machine and picked Obama, who won in a landslide and then won again, despite intense oppositon.
And when the Republicans last had an open primary, they picked Trump, who won in 2016 in a surprise victory and then won the popular vote in 2024.
Open primaries win elections. Machine politics loses them. 2020 was the singular exception, and it was all due to COVID, an unprecedented social disruption.
How was 2020 not an open primary? There were like 700 candidates.
Obama forced a lot of people out of the race through back room dealing.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/biden-polling-trump-votes-harris-election-b2644079.html
In that world Trump gets 400 electoral votes.
What map do we think Trump can have 400 electoral votes, even against a dementia patient?
If we assume Trump v Biden, electric boogaloo, flips Virginia, New Mexico, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine, that's nowhere near. If we throw in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, you're still not there.
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I see this mentioned a lot and I want to push back a little bit. As the article notes, the claim was made by Jon Favreau on Pod Save America. I happened to be listening to this shortly after it came out, and it's clear from that context that Favreau wasn't sharing this to show, as we say in the law, the truth of the matter asserted. He was trying to make a point about the Biden campaign and their contention that he still represented the candidate most likely to beat Trump. There is no other source for this number; no one has produced the poll or polls in question, and Favreau isn't likely to have seen them himself. The context was consistent with him casually tossing off a bit of Beltway gossip that wasn't intended to be taken literally.
What I think is most likely is that one poll or set of polls showed Biden losing certain states that correlated to Trump getting 400 Electoral Votes. Unless this is the only polling they did, its mere existence doesn't really say much about Biden's chances of winning. Hell, it doesn't even say much about Favreau's original argument. To the extent that such a poll probably exists, it's probably an outlier and was probably treated as such. It seems highly unlikely that internal polling was repeatedly showing a 400 EV Trump win. If that were the case, it would mean that either they or the publicly available polls were off by an order of magnitude heretofore unseen, or that the internal polls were flawed, and common sense would point to the latter. Paying to much attention to this would be like Trump changing his campaign strategy based on the Selzer poll.
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The graveyards are filled with indispensable politicians, which is to say there are no indispensable politicians, merely politicians who don't want to let go.
There absolutely are political realities in which Biden didn't run again, starting from untimely death of old age and going to political competence. Biden's choice was a result of ambition, not urgency.
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Pick your poison? Between letting supporters of the Democratic party pick a nomination for president and then dealing with the challenges that arise, or predicting the challenges you expect, doing a cost benefit analysis and then deciding to coronate a drunk because you literally have no choice after the cognitive decline of the guy you have been claiming is sharper than ever becomes so apparent that gaslighting no longer works, as a result forcing your supporters to spend the next hundred days claiming things like her inability to give candid interviews/string three unrehearsed sentences together isn't a deal breaker when you already know it is then using every event that occurs to justify your decision because you claim to be data driven as you poison the data with more lies, which means you have actually just been wish casting this entire time?
One of those isn't poison, it's medicine.
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Granting all this is true: it's still Biden's fault and he should have stepped down.
I'm sorry, I thought he was the adult in the room? Part of being an adult is being blamed for your decisions, not acting like they're sudden currents that swept you away for no reason.
He, the grownup, chose not only an unqualified but deeply unpopular and incompetent candidate. And he did so for explicitly racial reasons. Whose fault is it? The VP's only essential duties are to break ties in the Senate and to stand as a second for the President.
I also reject the self-serving notion that Bernie is what did in Hillary. She's always been unpopular and Bernie being relevant at all was the public desperately begging Democrats to take their money. Democrats didn't lose in 2008 because someone actually challenged at a primary instead of letting the party grandee be anointed. The party could also have leaned on Kamala to allow an open primary.
So if Biden wasn't Biden it'd be okay?
Like, this is part of what drove me crazy about the media spin on this. They made it seem as if Biden's mental decline was nothing more than a campaigning issue . So I suppose, in that light, it can look as a bad roll of the dice, bad tactics, a very good but rare counter that knocked Biden out. Some sort of July Surprise? Shit happens, move on.
No, Biden was unfit, physically and mentally. The reason the debate settled the matter is that it was undeniable proof of what people were told wasn't happening (and they had to keep being told because they didn't believe it). Biden hid the extent of this for months upon months not only from the public but from some of his colleagues and the media. This likely affected not just the campaign but his administration (given all of the reporting of stage-managing) Biden then couldn't hold it together under the stress of a full campaigning season, like Democrats like Dean Phillips warned ahead of time. By the time it finally came out, it was too late.
That is still Joseph Biden's fault. Why are we talking about this stuff like it just happened to him? Even if he could have white-knuckled it, he shouldn't have. Because the office of the President is too important to be left to a convalescent. And Biden, as the adult, should know that.
All of this happened against a backdrop of voters making it absolutely clear his age was an issue. Biden pushed through, thinking some combination of his policies (both the ones he claimed and the ones he tried to row back from), Trump's legal cases and general unfavourability would all win him the day - essentially holding the voters hostage, as Silver puts it. He gambled, and lost.
It was not at all practically impossible for an old President to step down and let the party battle it out. I understand that it felt that way psychologically for Biden. But Biden's political judgment doesn't seem to be so self-evidently sound that we can take it as Gospel.
We're hearing now from Democratic insiders like PSA that his polling showed a 400 Electoral College loss and even then he had to be dragged out. What about this implies some sort of judicious weighing of the options? It's just ego. He's way more like Trump than the media hagiography has implied. Worse: Trump actually does seem to be irreplaceable to his base.
There is one main reason it's not especially Joe Biden's fault: he's not in his right mind. One of the things about senility is that it can remove your ability recognize that you are senile.
The blame should be spread far wider. This is the fault of everybody else around him, who absolutely did know the condition he was in, and lied about it anyway. Most centrally, Kamala herself had a responsibility to say something, but she covered it up on the calculation that it was better for her personally. But she's hardly alone. Obama must have known. Pelosi must have known. Surely every senior Democrats in DC who interacted with the president knew, along with staff.
They all covered it up. The only party leaders who can claim they were not involved are governors and minor House members.
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The question is how many months. Remember, we're not talking about whether or not Biden should have dropped out earlier, but whether he should have run in the first place. He announced he was seeking a second term on April 25, at which point there were only two groups of people arguing that any kind of age or cognitive issues should keep him from running. The first was Republicans, but they had been arguing that Biden had dementia since at least 2019 and thus had no credibility on the issue. The second was people like Dean Phillips and James Carville, along with a bunch of rank and file Democrats, but their arguments were just that he was too old generally and not that he was experiencing any kind of specific decline. If he had instead announced that he wasn't seeking a second term then he would have been a lame duck immediately and all the problems I mentioned above would have come into play. Hell, his cognitive decline wouldn't have even been noticed, for precisely the same reason that no one is looking over his appearances from the past four months to find signs of further decline.
I don't know what the big deal is about this. It's not exactly a secret that running mates are chosen more due to political considerations than anything else. Hell, Trump's choice of Mike Pence over the more well-known Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie was pretty much a naked ploy to shore up his unsteady support among the Christian Right, yet I never hear criticism that he was chosen for religious reasons. By your criteria, he's an even worse choice than Harris, as his chances of winning a national election as second in line are roughly on par with Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee. Harris, for her part, chose a white guy after only considering white guys and after pretty much every commentator said she should pick a white guy, yet I never heard any criticism of her for choosing Tim Walz for racial reasons.
I agree with you there; Hillary was a bad candidate, and the Democrats should have seen that in 2008, but you go on to conclude
First, it wasn't Kamala's decision but that's not my main point. For all the talk I've heard about about having some kind of contested primary, I don't see any scenario in which it wouldn't have made the situation worse. Suppose Biden drops out immediately after that debate; what then? The convention is in less than two months and the election in just over four. The mechanics of scheduling new primaries in all 50 states less than a month after the last ones were completed is a tall order in and of itself, but even assuming the problem could be overcome it only distracts from the real issue. Who is going to jump of the couch to contend for a presidential nomination with that kind of lead time? Remember, nobody other than Biden has any fundraising apparatus or campaign staff at this point. You're asking candidates to start from scratch on short notice. And for the winner, what are the spoils, exactly? The opportunity to run an abbreviated campaign as part of a reclamation project.
Even if they were to dispense with actual elections and simply have a contested primary where candidates would lobby delegates, I doubt the party's best and brightest would be the ones signing up. Do you really think that an up and comer like Josh Sapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is going to waste political capital to take over the presidential bid of an unpopular incumbent? Why not wait a few more years to become more seasoned and make a normal bid where, if nominated, you have the time to run the campaign you want and you're going against a GOP running someone other than Trump for the first time in a dozen years? A contested primary or convention that only attracts b-listers and also-rans only makes the party look even more incompetent, in addition to exposing the internal divisions I spoke of above. Is Deval Patrick or Marianne Williamson a stronger general election candidate than Kamala Harris? Is Kamala a stronger candidate after beating one of those two? Easier to just endorse her and lobby for support rather than open up the clown car.
So the Republicans said he'd drop out (which was a "conspiracy theory") then he did but they just got lucky? Okay. Maybe. Maybe they simply have a clearer view into their opponents, unclouded by sympathy, but it's possible.
As for Philips and Carville...even if they said it that way, so what? Ezra Klein, in his little push for Biden to drop out, also said he thought Biden could do the job but couldn't campaign for the job/convince people. This seems like bullshit to me. Campaigning for a second term while juggling other balls has always been the job. People gave Obama a bit of a pass on the first debate due to the "rigors of the Presidency", but after he proved he could win on the next one.
Why frame it this way? Because, if Biden is incompetent-incompetent, the Democrats are guilty of malpractice beyond the electoral kind and that's a discussion no Democrat wants to have because it indicts some of their fellows, people they're on a first name basis with. Questions would need to be asked about how the administration runs. Better to - absurdly - pretend that Biden's condition is a merely electorally damaging one.
Long story short: I think it's absurd to believe that Dean Philips burned his rep taking the extraordinary step of primarying his President with just a generalized fear of age. It's that he's of a particular age and is showing decline enough that the voters are noticing.
Because it was a bad choice. Grownup, remember?
Biden trapped himself looking for a unicorn: a connected, nationally palatable black female because he kept stacking identity classes of who he would pander to. First it was a woman, then it was a black woman. He didn't need to lock in a woman, or then insist on a black woman afterwards.
You can pick a base-pleaser. The problem here is that it's a) unclear that Kamala was even a base pleaser. It may be what Jim Clyburn wanted but how much did it shape the general? And b) if you're old you should maybe factor in that this person may have to take your seat.
I don't think it should have come to that. He should have never run for a second term, and he should have announced that earlier. It should never have come to the debate.
Even dropping out on the day he announced (and he should have dropped out earlier) would have been better in terms of letting people dip their toe into a primary.
Remember: I think Biden was clearly declining before he admitted it/the debate utterly discredited any argument against it. He would have had good days and bad days. But he would have seen it creeping up on him. The principled thing to do would have been to drop out before.
The incumbency damage cannot be known given that they actually would be a fresh candidate, unlike Kamala. I'm inclined to think a lot more Democrats and Democrat-leaners give them some slack compared to Kamala.
They would also have an independent staff - which Kamala didn't seem to have - which would allow them more leeway in shaping their own image.
I'm picturing a longer time period than you since Biden, in my view, should have dropped out earlier. Even in the shorter view, there is an argument for putting candidates under pressure. Bernie Sanders wasn't seen as any sort of national politician before he resonated with voters. Kamala likely would have been filtered out.
Trump has high unfavorables. It's not outside of the realm of possibility that even on a narrow window ambitious Democrats get involved. It's much more likely if Biden drops out early: as much as he hates the guy, he could coordinate with party grandees like Obama to feel things out.
In many ways the last minute scramble to see someone willing to burn their turn is just another result of Biden's malpractice. Imagine if he came out early and stated he wasn't running. Imagine if he put out signals even before that. You think no one would bite? Everyone was run off because 2028 was there anyway and no one wanted the perception of having kneecapped a stubborn President. He pulls out early and it's a different ball game.
I thought he actually did at one point.
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For having no credibility on the issue, the Republicans seemed to have gotten it right. Maybe you are wrong and they did have credibility but you didn’t listen.
It's a fascinating setup:
R: Biden is senile!
D: How dare you to say such things without any evidence!
R: Here's evidence Biden is senile
D: Bullshit, this is just stutter.
R: Here's more evidence that Biden is senile, also he never had any stutter before
D: Bullshit, he's perfect and anybody can make a mistake. Trump said "covfefe" once!
R: Here's more evidence that Biden is senile beyond anything that anybody who is not senile have experienced
D: Well, maybe he occasionally looks imperfect, but it's just shallow looks, on the substance he's great, the best president ever
R: His every public appearance is a disaster, he can not be effective President.
D: Sure he can, and he will be for the second term too, and anyone who says otherwise is a crazy Qanon!
R: Here's more disasters from Biden
DNC+Obama: Biden, GTFO
Biden: OK, I decided to GTFO
R: Told ya so.
D: You had no credibility on the issue since when you first told us so, we did not agree with you.
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Being eventually right isn't the same as being right. My grandmother had dementia in 2014. If I had continually said she had it beginning in 1995, I would've eventually been right, but only after nearly 20 years of being wrong. Additionally, the claims were always beyond anything that's been demonstrated thus far. While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia. His debate performance was bad, but the actual answers he gave weren't anything one wouldn't expect from a garden-variety bad debate performance. The criticism was more on his energy and demeanor than anything substantive. From my experience with the disease, this is not what one would expect from someone with that kind of cognitive decline.
Or, alternatively, Democrats lived in denial for years and dismissed every evidence, until the mountain of evidence got so large it was impossible to ignore anymore, and then they decided this is the moment from which credibility is counted. Very convenient for them, except some people still have memory and can notice that there was plenty of indications and plenty of evidence.
Bigger point is it doesn't matter at which point the medical diagnosis of "dementia" is supported. Maybe he will never be medically diagnosed with it. The point is he was mentally unfit for the rigors of President's job when he was elected, and he only got worse since. And that's exactly what Republicans were saying and Democrats were denying. Pretending like Republicans just got a bit of blind luck because perfectly fit Biden suddenly became unfit in some random freak accident is just bizarre cope by this point. It is absolutely clear Republicans were right from the start and Democrats were lying from the start (those - and there were many - who knew) or were deceived by the former category and willingly accepted the deception despite the evidence in front of their own eyes.
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Yes — in your hypo sure. But if you started mentioning grandma is slipping in 2010 you would’ve been correct. That hypo is closer to reality.
The republicans did talk about lack of energy (he did run a basement campaign after all) but pointed out he kept on making weird gaffes (eg confusing his wife with his sister, losing his train of thought). It got worse over his presidency but there was a pretty clear line.
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