Of course they didn’t. They literally had every establishment democrat coordinatedly drop out of the primaries in exchange for cabinet positions to throw their support behind Biden when Sanders started winning the primaries in 2020. Like, it’s been clear they’d learned nothing. And thanks to the idiotic two party system, they got rewarded for that maneuver with the opportunity to say “we told you so! Look, we got trump out of office!” And when they lose this time…they won’t learn a goddamn thing. Again.
luckily, they won’t have to learn a thing if trump wins, because MAGAts will stack the odds so much in their favor that no dem will win a presidential election in many years. yay project 2025!
Why doesn’t anyone call him out on lying about running for a second term? I very vividly remember hearing him say in 2020 that he would not seek reelection and yet here we are.
Yeah, I don’t get it. I was confused and not happy when I saw he was running again. He could’ve gone out like a heavily watered down LBJ, instead he’s going to be forever remembered as the lost nursing home patient who wandered onto the debate stage. This is an unmitigated disaster, and the only way forward I see now is have Joe step down and let Kamala be the president. I’m not excited for that prospect, but I assume she can at least win a debate against a potted plant.
Just went ahead and Googled it and I can find no credible source that he actually said these words at any time. So, if you'd like to bandy out that source, I think we'd all appreciate it.
No, your own source states that that was never announced. It was talked about within the party. There was never a public announcement to the American people stating that he would not run as an incumbent. Every source reporting on that was and is reporting on unsubstantiated hearsay never set into stone.
I would vote for a wet sandwich before I vote for Trump, but Jesus Christ, it would be nice if the democrats fucking tried.
why should they? you’re going to give them what they want from you anyways in november and multiple novembers into the future; there’s literally no reason for them to ever bother.
Remember when a bunch of people didn’t vote because the Democrat candidate was a piece of shit? And then trump won? And then the democratic party said “oh wow we should put up actual candidates instead of decrepit neolibs” except they didn’t because they didn’t learn shit.
Democrats suffer from a condition that I’ve come to call “Democratic Realism,” named after Capitalist Realism. No matter how much they get their shit kicked in. No matter how badly they do. No matter how little they accomplish. No matter how badly they look or do in debates. Democrats always believe, beyond a shred of doubt, that they’ll win elections without trying. Not because of their own merits, but because they’re just the only “real” choice; they simply can’t fathom anyone willingly voting for their opponents.
Hillary barely campaigned in the “flyover states” that she needed to win because she couldn’t be fucking bothered to actually try. It wasn’t worth the effort to try and persuade people she thought of as her lessers. And the DNC just went “well, it’s obviously her turn. She’s been waiting for the chance at the presidency for 20 years now. We should go ahead and let her be president.” Because that’s the mentality. They don’t have to “win” elections. They just pick a candidate and they get to win, because there is no “real” alternative. That Bush and Trump won don’t indicate that, yeah, actually, you do have to fight for the people who are voting for you, otherwise they’ll vote for the schmuck that appeals to their basest and most venal instincts. Those were just flukes…right? And you don’t have to inspire confidence and admiration in others, because they should just recognize how smart and accomplished and inoffensive their candidates are, and that they’re told to vote for them by people that are smarter than they are, so they should just shut up and do it.
It’s a party driven less by any kind of ideological goals and more by a pervasive sense of smug, impotent, lazy egotism. And, yeah, they’ll get a shitload of votes in the elections because the alternative always seems to be someone who is one goose-step shy of a literal Nazi. Biden will probably even win the popular vote. Y’know…just like Hillary did…
Good essay. I don’t know if you remember after Obama won in 2008 a bunch of democratic party apparatchiks came up with this idea of “the coalition of the ascendant” and that they pretty much had the government locked in for a generation, due to support that would never waver for them amongst immigrants, yuppies, tech bros, etc. They didn’t need the working class anymore and the Republicans would be the minority party for many years.
Two years later the democrats were wiped out in the midterms.
The coalition of the ascendant concept is kind of insane when you remember for a moment that the popular vote is kinda worthless in winning elections. The electoral college is structured in such a way that conservative whites have a larger share of the electorate relative to their minority peers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lock for California and New York (enclaves of coastal elites and minorities alike) if you lose the entirety of the South, Southwest, and Midwest, enclaves of…the opposite of those things, really. This 538 article on it has links to other discussions related to this and represents a fascinating look into the relationship between popular votes and electoral votes. fivethirtyeight.com/…/what-a-difference-2-percent…
They think they don’t have to, they just have to keep you scared enough of the GOP that you’ll vote for them out of terror. It’s how Biden won the first time, after all.
You misunderstand the dynamic. Most GOP voters are going to vote and are going to vote for the Republican, regardless of how awful that Republican is. Voting is a civic duty and party above all are kinda core ideas for them.
Dem voters are a lot more flighty in general. Any barrier to voting no matter how small (even having to rise from the couch) impacts Dem voters more than GOP ones.
There are more Dem voters than GOP ones except maybe in very red states. It’s about turnout - US voter turnout is God awful and it’s worse among Dems than GOP.
That’s why the debate was so bad for the Dems, because it’s not about whether or not it pulls voters to Trump but about what it does to Dem turnout.
I see, sorry for misunderstanding. I’ve also heard about the problem with voting turnout. As a European, the whole US voting system just seems kinda obscure in general. Although, to be fair, the right party voters are also way more likely to vote here than the ones from other parties.
There was a show primary but candidates were essentially stonewalled from participating and voters browbeaten for not supporting Biden, which is why only wackos like RFK Jr are the only other people who ran.
Up until tonight, there really was little point. Biden already beat Trump, has the incumbent advantage, and has had a successful term. I’m still not convinced that replacing him suddenly this late is even remotely a good idea unlike a lot of people seem to be
Not American, but a furby surrounded by Biden’s team would still be preferable to Trump to most people, so I’m not sure this changes much. Americans around here seemed to mostly be in the “hold your nose and vote for Biden” camp anyway. Not sure how representative that is.
I see your post is missing the required 20,000 word essay in how the Republicans are worse then democrats… thus you are a secret Russian Republican antisemite!
I do love having to give a 2 paragraph disquisition of caveats about how I didn’t vote for either major party candidate in 2016 or 2020, before I can make literally any comment on either of these people or the current state of US politics, lest I be downvoted into oblivion or accused of being an evil Repub shill.
Ironically when we do this on Lemmy we are qualifying ourselves to a cohort of mostly people who didn’t vote at all, or aren’t even Americans.
And remember how they made a big deal about Bernie’s age in 2020? They asked for medical records, and even after getting letters from two or three doctors, that wasn’t enough. It was like the birthers all over again: when they got what they asked for, they moved the goal posts and wanted the long-form documents.
Meanwhile, not a peep about Biden, who is Bernie’s junior by fourteen fucking months, as if that made all the difference.
And then, four years later, it wasn’t an issue anymore. Just run the guy again.
On top of that, the DNC would condescend to anyone left of center about electability.
The only word salad moment(as of 15 minutes ago when I just had to turn it off) was near the start when Biden just kinda trailed off saying random words.
It was him showing America how much he cares about women’s rights, equality, & democracy. So much he’s willing to put us at a significant risk of losing those things for decades if not longer. God, I can only hope something causes Kamala to become the candidate or he steps aside for someone else.
Kamala would 100% lose. Her campaign didn’t have a single victory in 2020, and she was one of the first to drop out. If the Democrats had held a primary, we might have found a candidate that could beat him, but as it stands now, our best hope is that Trump finally finishes eating himself to death before the election.
That was certainly the worst of it, but it didn’t get much better for him, he fumbled over a lot of his delivery. It was much harder for him though, he was using facts and figures while Trump was just saying whatever lie popped into his head.
I think that’s the biggest danger with Trump. Even though he’s less with it than Biden, what comes out of his mouth sounds more coherent if you’re not concerned with the facts of the matter.
I was a bit concerned with Biden when he would say the wrong word or trail off, but at the end of the day it’s less about who the president is and more about who they hire. I really wish the DNC had ran a different candidate.
Yeah, this is pretty painful to watch. Trump is a piece of shit, but he’s way more forceful and even somewhat coherent. Meanwhile, Biden’s just above a whisper and is somewhere between stuttering and rambling.
If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.
The whole malarkey shit they are trying to push like it’s a great image is so fucking dumb, it would be cute if my grandpa in hospice said it but it’s fucking incredibly out of touch when the president of the United states says it.
Just imagine for a short … Biden takes drugs. AND still has the better answers to all our problems than this un-drugged (?!) 3yo mind in a slightly younger body. Wouldn’t THAT be a real game changer? Shouldn’t DJT then too use drugs? No?
