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If Democrats are so strong then why do they have some a lack of POTUS level candidates? I agree they control institutions but that always felt like the not elite people and the midtwits.
The GOP has a much deeper bench of Presidential people while I see nothing on the Dem side. How can the 10 people in the federalist society at Harvard out produce top tier talent than the other 99% of Harvard? Ted Cruz I think is cringe in his public persona and he’s quite far down the GOP bench but my guess is he’s more intelligent than anyone for the left. Same with Romney.
Only thing that I can come up with is leftist elites personal ethics turn off too many people in their own base to rise. AOC is the only one on the left besides Biden who seems to come off likeable though her weakness is she’s probably a bit mid intellectually.
I’m concerned I’m grading on a curve of my own biases but
they nominate someone with serious Alzheimer questions without serious challenges makes me think I’m not making it up.
Or is their coalition too difficult to manage so their is a lack of potential national candidates.
OK, guess I have to speak up as probably the only actual social democratic partisan Democrat here -
The reason Joe Biden is running for reelection is because he's the incumbent President and wants to run for reelection, and primary challenges agains incumbent President's go badly, and most importantly, nobody would beat him. Like, contrary to popular opinion, there is no secret Deep State Cabal of Obama, Hillary, and whomever running the country. No, it's the codgy old guy, the people who have been around him for years, and a bunch of former Warrne staffers. Secondly, even if he did step down, Kamala's the nominee because she's the VP, still has good approvals among Democrat's, and so on.
Now, we're probably going to disagree on the fundamentals on who's smart or not, but going to the bench - the thing people miss is much of the current Democratic bench is in the states - Whitmer in Michigan in the same state Biden barely won, wins by ten, and also turns the Michigan legislature entirely blue for the first time in decades, Shapiro in PA wins by a landslide, Pritzer in Illinois's a little more controversial but you beat a bad billionaire with a good class traitorous billionaire, there's Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina who has won two terms in a light-red state, while running as a standard issue liberal, Andy Beshear in Kentucky is a pro-choice and pro-LGBT Governor of that state about to win reelection, Tim Walz has been a solid governor of Minnesota, and for more well-known folks, there's Newsom in Cali, and for the more moderates/neoliberals, Polis in CO. In the Senate, even then, there's Raphael Warnock, a pretty down-the-line liberal Senator who won in Georgia.
Like, on pure electoral talent, 2022 shows the Democrat's have plenty of it, simply looking back at the historical record of midterms.
I also, frankly, think people have gone so over the board underestimating Kamala, that they'd assume she'd lose in some 40-state landslide. As a social democrat, she wouldn't be my preferred candidate in 2028 (Whitmer or Warnock for me), but at worst, Kamala loses the EC 312-226, and even then, still only narrowly loses the popular vote, and that's if the GOP doesn't nominate somebody Trump-adjacent or somebody with no charisma like DeSantis. So yeah, a boring ticket like I don't know Brian Kemp/Kim Reynolds probably wins that election that way, but Tucker/Vivek, or something like that - Kamala can totally win because people will choose cringe they're embarrassed guy by the weirdos, and as seen by some of the right's reaction to the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce thing, they're entirely too much the weirdos.
Finally, probably most controversially, Fetterman. He outran Biden in Pennsylvania and has the look much closer to the median American than anybody else. Hell, polling showed the stroke made voters more sympathetic to him, as the elite media was telling him to withdraw, savaging his debate performance, and so on.
I'm not somebody who says the GOP can't win in 2024 or 2028, but this weird idea, because Biden's the nominee there is no bench is simply false, and I'd make the opposite argument for the GOP. Whose somebody that can win a primary with a Trumpian base, that can actually win a national election?
Most of those people won because their opponent sucked. Some of them even got to choose their opponent, like Pritzker.
I don't think any of these people could get serious traction nationally, except maybe Shapiro or Newsom (and Newsom has some hard caps nationally). The rest would be running, at best, as 'Generic Democrat'.
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Assuming trump’s not running, Hawley, Youngkin, Cruz, Abbott, all come to mind as normal candidates who can win the trump base.
To say nothing of the fact that based on current polling, the winner of both the trump base and the general is… trump.
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Gop does have a bit of personality cult now which helps trump.
Perhaps no one has emerged since there is an incumbent but it still feels weak to me and Joe wasn’t all there in 2020. A lot of the GOP generally does like Trump while Joe always felt like a figurehead and why there couldn’t be some Harvard trained PMC to take the job from him in 2020.
Especially at the top the Dems field looks low IQ to me. None of the top 3 went to an elite school. While all the GOP top 3 went to the schools you would expect them to for a highly motivated high IQ person. Yet people are telling me the left owns the institutions.
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Aren't the super-delegates effectively a cabal of elite officials that have significant influence on picking at least one major party's presidential candidates?
Super-delegates are now prevented from voting on the first ballot. They only come into play if the primary voters don't give any candidate a majority of pledged delegates.
Aha, well that's a good change.
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They literally had to go out casting for AOC. If anything she's a perfect example of their lack of talent.
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There are a few reasons for the lack of candidates...
First the racial organizing that the Dems do. It's worked out well for them for the past 40 years, but there is a problem. It's hard to make a jump from being the top black organizer or the top hispanic organizer to being a leader of the entire state. So the ethnic organizers can't jump into leadership, but they are also too powerful and experienced to be thrilled about falling in line behind some white guy in his 40s. So boomer politicians (and earlier) tend to dominate because they have influence going back to before ethnic organizing was dominant.
So big rich blue states that should have deep talent pools have past their prime senators occupying space who can never launch a presidential run. To name some names, Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray. Old Republicans like Mitch McConnell tend to represent lower gdp states where a replacement won't have the resume to launch a presidential run.
Next the Obama effect. Obama was more popular than his policies, he was dragging them into power with his charisma. However at the state governor level he was toxic. Dem politicians without his charisma or ability to excite black voters had to run defending his policies. So purple states were not generating politicians that could make presidential runs.
There are other factors. The two Obama terms were expected to be followed by two Hilary terms, so anyone planning to run for president before 2024 just didn't get involved.
There's also a split between how left wing the press expects a D nominee to be and where the country is. Keep in mind that Obama campaigned in 2008 as a prays every day Christian who believed marriage was a union of one man and one woman.
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Who is in the White House now? Does it matter if they can produce the votes?
ppl used this argument in 2020 and it failed. The vast majority of voters don't care if the president is not mentally at 100%. For either Biden or Trump. Outside of a small subset of people on Twitter, average people do not care about the gerontocracy, or even welcome it. Rather than old people being seen as competition or incompetent, old people being in power gives hope to others that age is not a limiting factor to success, and that it's not too late.
For the right at least, IQ does not win general elections .
There’s mentally not 100% and there’s barely aware. Biden is pretty far gone into dotage. The guy who scans an audience looking for dead people, who needs to be told how to exit a stage, or apparently falling asleep in a memorial service for victims of the Maui fires is pretty far gone.
And part of why the mental acuity of Joe Biden never became an issue is that unlike Trump, there were not really any large scale public appearances where his mental decline would be on display. He didn’t hold rallies or big campaign events where he’d be expected to speak without preparing a speech. Or where someone might notice that he needs help to exist a stage. His campaign was largely social media and traditional ads where his speech and behavior could be edited for coherence in a way that can’t be done at a live event.
Of course this was massively helped by the constant drumbeat of “voting for anyone other than Joe Biden and Democrats is a vote for literal nazi fascist ideology.” That sort of discourse makes critical evaluation of the candidates much harder. Biden never really came off as a good candidate, even among the democrats I talked to. Nobody was excited about him. The entire thing was about Trump and the importance that Trump not win.
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Causally related. Because every Democrat is treated to a friendly media environment they all have artificially boosted popularity, which erodes in a national campaign, because, 2020 excepted, you still have to actually campaign to become president. Basically, they all are running for office on easy mode, and for a presidential candidate, that can't be fully maintained. Sure, national media is still a D++ advantage nationally, but I seriously doubt they could win in Illinois without the media bias. At the state level its worth like 20 points in the polls.
I think this would have been true before internet, social media and cell phones. Biden essentially had to avoid live events as much as possible to get by, and even then people noticed that Biden was doing few live events. Any future candidates will have to appear in public and the public will be perfectly free to post and comment on anything he says or does amiss. Short of another pandemic, Biden can’t win because he’ll have to go do live events and rallies and his failures will be filmed and obvious.
I think the same goes for anyone else. Yes a friendly media helps, but given how easy it now is to share information, I don’t see any way to prevent negative things from coming out. Even with Twitter bans and a press eager to squash the story, most people had at least heard about the Biden Laptop. It was “suppressed” but everyone who cared about it could easily find at least some information about it. Which means that the media isn’t that good of a filter for democrats at the moment.
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Democrat intellectuals are completely unpalatable to the general public. They have to have plausible deniability when it comes to the Marxists who hate the United States and want to teach preschoolers sex-ed. The media can tell you not to believe your lying eyes when it comes to schools putting strap-on-sucking books in libraries, but a presidential candidate would be hard to run cover for.
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Does it? Trump stomped the 2016 field and appears poised to do the same in 2024 for a reason, and it isn't that the Republicans have a great bench. Looking at his closest competitors, DeSantis appears to be a walking charisma deficit and clueless at the art of campaigning, which is a shame because I like the job he's done in Florida a lot more than I like Trump's record in office. Ramaswamy possesses a brain and is willing to say interesting things, but is a transparently flip-flopping con man. Nikki Haley is only getting attention because the other options (Is Youngkin even running? He's undercooked even if so IMO.) are total non-entities (Doug Burgum? Lol.).
I'll grant you that the Democrats have troubles on their end (though I think Newsom is underestimated at one's peril), but it's more because being a successful Presidential candidate in the TV and post-TV age is HARD. Since Nixon (who more or less won 1968 by default as the Democrats imploded; note that he lost in 1960 against better put together candidates), the Republicans have had one great TV politician (Reagan) and the Democrats two (Bill Clinton and Obama). 2016 Trump gets half-credit because he created enemies as fast if not faster than supporters and only barely beat Hillary. Dubya IMO was passable but had the fortune of running against weak opposition (He barely beat Al Gore, the personification of boring, and still enjoyed the rally around the flag effect against Kerry.).
Gore still seems traditional even if boring. Harvard, served a little in Vietnam, Senator first. Just feels like elite but more relatable background. Actually looks like someone who would end up dissident right Republican today.
Maybe the issue comes from not having white straight men coming up in the party. I don’t dislike Kamala personality as much as others but her background doesn’t feel like the higher IQ type.
I do respect Blinken but I’m not sure if guys like him are capable of being on the ticket today.
Trump somehow got popular with the new right. I agree I like Desantis a lot and the GOP still has a few of his types that could be promoted without a trump. I do see guys like him available to the Dems.
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