I know people will say this is bad, a new campaign will be rushed, etc. But I think we all know Biden was an excuse for many not to vote, or worse, to vote for Trump. Withdrawing will be his legacy when we win, not his failing.
Nobody who would consider voting for Trump is going to vote for whoever replaces Biden. Nobody. This is about getting apathetic voters off their butt. Which I hope works, but every part of my being is telling me they’re going to pick someone who apathetic voters wouldn’t vote for anyway.
People have done more with less campaign time and he will go down as having listened and done what was requested of the people and party I honestly think this says a lot of good stuff about the democratic party and Biden once we get the spin right.
It won’t be hard. Kamala is going to be able to put a bullseye on Trump and republican politics like Biden simply wasn’t ever able to do. She’s going to be able to hyper focus on the deeply unpopular beliefs of the base and it will be hard for Trump or others to really deny it without losing their core supporters.
Further, because she’s relatively unknown there’s really not the same baggage as there was with Hillary. Most people don’t know who she is and I think that really plays to her favor.
Let’s be honest here, Trump will never lose his core supporters. He could literally turn out to be the devil incarnate, and his supporters will say it’s their god’s will. He’s a 34-count convicted felon and they see that as something to boast about.
The issue in this country is that the less educated are following those with a playbook of getting the less educated to vote, to vote for them, and in areas that games the electoral college system.
We were a hair’s breadth from another Trump term in 2020 by 11,000 votes in GA. Not to mention his coup attempt.
It cannot be that close again. It must be decisive. I hope Harris, if she is the nominee, can achieve that.
Biden absolutely did the right thing and, perhaps, the most courageous thing.
Democrats would have coalesced around him if decided to keep going but we’ve been begging him to step aside. This is a key difference between Trump “fans” and Biden voters. We’re not drawn to him as a personality.
Once a candidate is selected, I don’t care who it is, we must support them because not doing so is voting for an end to democracy.
I would have preferred him to stay on course. While I don’t care what sex they are or color or whatever, a fuckload of garbage twats in this country sure as fuck do. Biden was also likeable in public appearances. I have fuck all idea what Harris is like, and 5y of time vs like 4 months to win public opinion, oof it will be an absolute blitz. And I consider myself rather knowledgeable and up-to-date on US politics. I have friends that have no idea what’s going on at any given time, or why.
I need to research her now and become familiar, but I see this as a big negative for chances, not positive. Anxiety spiked hard about what’s to come.
“How Democrats would pick a new candidate if Biden drops out, step by step”
One [possibility] is a virtual vote that would lock in a new nominee in early August, and the other is an “open” convention, a scenario the party hasn’t experienced since 1968.
A convention is open when no candidate arrives with a clear majority of delegates, so the event turns into a mini-primary in which contenders scramble to persuade delegates to vote for them…
Some states have August deadlines to get on the ballot for the general election, and early voting begins in some places in September. So party leaders probably would try to settle the nomination before the Democratic National Convention begins Aug. 19.
There are two types of Democratic delegates. Pledged delegates commit to supporting the candidate state voters chose, although a “good conscience” clause in the party’s rules gives them a bit of wiggle room.
Automatic delegates, often called superdelegates, are the party’s highest-profile leaders. They have the role because of the offices they hold (or held), and the group includes former presidents and vice presidents, Democratic governors, members of Congress and party officials. They are not pledged to any candidate and are not allowed to vote on the first ballot at the convention.
Dumb question. Why didn’t they just schedule the convention prior to all deadlines regardless who runs for office? Is there any benefit to meeting so late?
It is before the deadlines but just barely. Typically the candidate is known before the convention, so you already have enough signatures to get on the ballot in every state
a scenario the party hasn’t experienced since 1968
because the 1968 Democratic Convention went swimmingly – oh, they’re also holding this year’s convention in Chicago again you say? with increased police presence as well?
Bro I went below Bidens twitter post and it was so bad. How can anyone seriously clown on Biden. I highly think of his decision and think that this really is what it means to serve the country. Better late than never!
Ever since the debate, people have been calling for Joe Biden to step down from the presidential race and give the place to someone else.
Now I read the comments and everyone is criticizing and accusing the Democrats of not knowing what they’re doing? Are you for real? They’re doing EXACTLY what people have been asking for. They’re doing EXACTLY what needs to be done if they want to win.
Fucking hell you guys, make up your fucking mind.
Sincerely,
A Canadian with severe anxiety over your next presidential election.
Well, to be fair, he should have stepped down a year ago, or at least 3 months ago. I vaguely remember him saying he was going to be a 1 term candidate in 2020.
Anyway, I respect Biden. I honestly think he was a better president than Obama, Bush, Trump and Clinton. Perhaps the best since Carter or JFK.
Another top Biden adviser put it this way: “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection.’ But he’s not going to publicly make a one term pledge.”
That source does not say what you’re claiming it says.
So add those together and it implies he doesn’t think Harris has the chops. But, to be fair, if that was actually the plan, they would’ve given her much more PR over the last 4 years.
If it weren’t Trump running I think he would have stepped aside. He believed in 2019, and probably still believes now, that he has the best chance against Trump and that Trump is a singularly existential threat.
Or that he changed his mind. Or that his assurances to aides that he wouldn’t run for a second term were just to shut them up.
Power is seductive, and I think it’s pretty likely that once he became president, he convinced himself that he was still the best one for the job, and that he uniquely deserved to continue to govern.
He very specifically did not say publicly that he would be a 1 term president. Talking through the idea with aides and someone leaking it does not equal a campaign promise.
This is a new decision, obviously. He is going to be a 1 term president. But he never promised it.
I vaguely remember him saying he was going to be a 1 term candidate in 2020.
He specifically denied that when asked. To be fair he did say he was a “bridge to a new generation” or something, that’s where I think a lot of people are getting this one term commitment thing from.
All the sane countries can do their elections in less than a year, possibly because the stagecoach is no longer the best transportation or communication option anymore. If you guys didn’t run it like American Fucking Idol, maybe it wouldn’t be this difficult.
Now I’ll go sit in the corner and hope for the best for you guys while waiting to see if my country shits the bed in a year.
Yes some of us been paying attention to who is backing him and who wasn’t. Some of us had noticed that all the leftists in the party were still behind Joe Biden while all the neoliberals weren’t. Some of us have noticed that the president who has protected worker rights and expanded consumer protection and wants to tax the wealthy is getting pushed out by the corporate Democrats.
Just like everything else? They also contested the 2020 election but that doesn’t mean they actually had the truth or law on their side. I don’t know why you’re giving any weight to what Mike Johnson says.
It doesn’t matter. They can make up whatever justification they want and drag it through the court system. Maybe they get it up to the Supreme Court and get the win handed to them like in Bush v. Gore.
If you think things are that off the rails then it doesn’t matter whether this is the inciting event or something else because they’re completely disconnected from even the premise of law.
In most European countries governments are elected for 3-6 years (though they may end up happening more frequently since, most places, it’s possible to call early elections). The campaigning only really happens for 1-2 months before the election.
The fact that the US essentially spends 1.5-2 years campaigning for a 4 year position is insanity to me!
That’s pretty interesting, thanks for sharing. It probably also has to do with a more strict balance of power. Our president is now our king, but really it’s only the presidential election that has constant campaigning for the next election. It’s ok now though, we’ll no longer need that, as our king will choose the next one
Our president is now our king, but really it’s only the presidential election that has constant campaigning for the next election.
This isn’t really true. Campaigning takes up a large amount of time for even house members. They have two year terms and they spend much of that fending off primary challenges and then campaigning for the general election.
Maybe that’s internal? I don’t see much house or senate campaigning until the months lead up to the elections (ad spends, yard signs, rallies, etc) though I will agree they are likely working on it the whole time
It’s portions internal for sure, but yeah it’s happening the whole time basically. Increasingly all elections are becoming nationalized and about national issues rather than something about the actual locality being “served”.
Most house politicians spend all of the time they aren’t in Washington doing fundraising and other campaign related activities. Some (like AOC) try to actually help their communities during these times and fundraise or organize on that basis.
It’s also not true because, in England/the UK, at least, the King was established as not being above the law by the Magna Carta and when Charles I tried to dispute that they cut his head off. The autocracy that the USA is setting up is far worse than a monarchy.
The US “election cycle” is insane. You don’t need to be running a candidate over a year before the election. 3 months is more than enough time to tell people who your candidate is and what they are running on, and you have more than 3 months.
Yes, it would have been better to announce earlier, but jesus christ he is too fucking old for this shit. Stepping back now is still better than pushing through.
Especially with how calcified the voting population is. Each candidate has something like a 44% floor of people who already know they’re going to vote for “the Democratic candidate” and the only question is how many of them actually go to the polls and what the remaining randos decide. And only in a handful of swing states. Most of the system is already predetermined.
You can’t just launder $2B of campaign contributions overnight. You need a year or two to filter it credibly through pundits, consultants, pollsters, and advertisers.
I agree the timeframe isn’t the main issue. It’s more concerning that the nominee isn’t getting selected through the primaries/caucuses where actual voters are involved in choosing the nominee.
One thing I appreciate about Canadian elections is how quickly they happen. An election is called, campaigning is like a month or two and then we find out the new government just hours after casting our votes.
You’re a non-global superpower with a total population smaller than California, 90% of which lives 100 miles or less from the US border. It would be bizarre if your elections were as complicated as the United States.
Are American politicians visiting each citizen individually? The internet exists, population size does not limit how quickly you can get information out.
The United States isn’t an exception here. There are many other countries with larger populations and/or that have dramatic geopolitical influence. Canada just isn’t one of them.
US elections are definitively complicated, but for no good reason. It is a lot because of the complex old laws, traditions, first-past-the-post and that primary elections don’t happen together but individually in different states over a period of one year.
If we would just use the popular vote to decide the election and use ranked choice voting we would have election done much faster and would pickup a candidate, that most people would be happy with.
RCV already showed in Alaska that it makes it very hard for the least desirable candidate to win when there are two better candidates that people are divided over (i.e. with FPTP Palin (who most Alaskans hate) would normally win)
It’s been chaos in the comments for a while now this is just catharsis for a lot of people and reaffirming for some of the naysayers.
You are gonna see a lot of takes from a lot of terminally online types.
Now just comes the actual work and it’s gonna look chaotic for a while. I hope we get it together.
IMO what is happening are disinformation bots trying to discourage people from voting.
It was first that you should stay home and not vote, because Democrats put an “old geezer who is not aware what is happening around him”, now the same bots will be saying how Democrats were cheated by deciding their candidate without input of the voters, trying to replicate the upset that was over Bernie in 2016.
IMO I think Biden was excellent at governing, and no one will be as good as him when taking with foreign leaders, as he knew them all and had a good relation with them.
Having said that I will be voting for whomever Democrats put up (Kamala or anyone). I already got fooled to vote 3rd party in 2016 and won’t make the same mistake.
All of this should have been done a couple years ago for presidential hopefuls to gather resources and prepare for the elections. The assumption that Biden was seeking a second term stalled a lot of minor steps needed to build a campaign. Biden stepping down a month before the DNC is gonna be a shit show. Who’s gonna run for becoming a candidate? How are they gonna fundraise quickly enough to get the word out? This is a clusterfuck of poorly timed decisions and I only hope the new candidate can gather enough support to win the presidential election. Given the Democratic party’s penchant of favoring people from their inner circle, I doubt they’ll be well received by the general public to begin with.
Obama won pretty hard though despite the racism, there were more people excited to see a black president than there were racists (although obviously there as a lot of vocal racism as well).
If Kamala tells a convincing story, I could see it working well.
Kamala can have access to Biden’s fundraising, and now all the GOP talking points are mute. I think it’s actually quite effective if they run Kamala. Also, she will eviscerate Trump in a debate, unlike Biden.
Many of the people involved in such agitation are not arguing in good faith. They simply want to attack the ‘libs’ at every opportunity, and reality be damned.
I haven’t known what to do since the 2016 election. The “Fuck your feelings” bunch are clearly in their feels and ignoring documented events in what most of us call “reality “.
The Democratic Party hasn’t known what to do since the 2016 election…at least
The Democrats have won nationally in 2018, 2020, arguably 2022, and like 85% of special elections since 2016. What the fuck are you talking about? They’ve been basically non-stop winning elections since 2016.
Not only that, Republicans often begin undermining their opponent’s reputation from day one, spending nearly four years focused on convincing the public that Biden is ineffective. Now, all that effort is erased at the most crucial time of the election. They no longer have years to shape public perception. This sets the stage for a fairer fight, and Harris is a more compelling speaker than Biden. I believe It was a good play.
And yet we still don’t have abortion protections, gunshot wounds are the #1 cause of death in children, the housing market is on fire, the “minimum wage should be $15” conversation has been going on for so long that it should be nearly $30 now, there is an activist republican supermajority in the SCOTUS, and there are openly fascist candidates as republican front runners because the Overton window has shifted so far right.
Democrats haven’t been winning elections because people have been excited about good democrat candidates; They have been winning because democrat voters are terrified of a republican in office.
Biden was perfectly fine and IMO and him and his team do an excellent job at governing l, both domestically as well as with foreign policy (this looks like it was mostly him). He just let go of the pressure.
I would vote for him (not just against trump, but I genuinely think he was good at his job), but will vote for whomever will be the replacement (because I don’t want trump to win).
It was becoming more and more apparent that Biden didn’t stand a chance of winning, so staying in would’ve just handed the presidency to Trump. Now that he’s dropped out, the Democratic party can at least do something.
That was the narrative pushed by media and bots. According to www.270towin.com it doesn’t look like even assassination attempt had any impact. Also the polls really start to matter after conventions.
Lemmy posters are not a monolith. They are many monoliths interacting with the internet via psychic emanations from atop lonely hillocks in places where mankind fears to tread.
Personally the best news I’ve heard in a while. I think there is a little bit of a knee jerk reaction happening because a lot is on the line and people are scared because it’s such an unknown right now. When things settle more and the smoke clears I think everything will be more positive.
Lemmy, as opposed to reddit, has seemed to be very much on the Keep Biden train for some reason.
I for one will be happy with any candidate that can do two to three campaign appearances per day for the next four months and doesn’t have the Genocide Joe baggage. Everything else is gravy.
I personally just said last week that I believed only Biden was capable of beating Trump, so I’m feeling pretty sick right now. God, I hope I’m wrong.
We haaaaaavvvvvve to see this example and set a damn age limit for people to hold such high positions in our country. Old dude may have very well just sent us down an irreversible and utterly destructive path by seeking the office in the first place.
I know Bernie Sanders is old too, but damn I wish he had won the nomination. We wouldn’t be in this crisis right now. Still though, it’s a gamble electing people who are already waste deep in their grave.
Man
What a strange and historic month this has been. We’re all living in a very big moment in history right now, just, all the way around.
I think part of the reason it feels like “wtf are you doing?!?” is because we were really saying “Joe needs to step the fuck up or step aside” and then in the last week he’s thrown some absolute hard hits at Trump making it look like “holy shit, we got old Joe back!”. Then suddenly after appearing to wake up, he goes “nah, I’m good.”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s stepping aside. But it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster and not a very consistent message. They kept telling us to shut up and follow Biden and anyone who doesn’t is supporting facism and then suddenly, “nah, not Biden, it’s cool”? You can’t pump a rhetoric machine up and then expect the brakes to stop it instantly.
I just worry about who they select as replacement…. Unfortunately Kamala doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell since she’s a non-white female, one of those features is maybe surmountable but both eliminates so many so called “centrists” from casting a blue vote to do their misogyny and bigotry.
If the democrats nominate Kamala it’s just handing Trump the win since so many of my countrymen are racist or misogynistic
I don’t think it’s the same people wanting him to drop out vs sad that he did drop out. Or they did want him to drop out because he’s aging but they are sad that he did because he was a good president.
This was an astroturfing campaign covering our media and also via bots on social media.
I watched the debate and while he was slower, and mixed up words he actually was aware of US goals and challenges (despite what media tried to imply), trump was more energetic but he was constantly spewing nonsense, and while part of it was lying as usual, part of it was clear that he was actually getting lost.
I even wrote that in certain that if Biden steps down the same bots will start campaign how Democrats were cheated to discourage them from voting (like it was worth Bernie).
I’m definitively voting for Kamala now no matter what ridiculous bullshit they will come up on her on September-October (you can be sure there will be some scandal that will turnout to be nothing burger after election). I got fooled (like a lot of people) in 2016 to vote 3rd party and we got trump.
Republicans are actually a minority they can only win if they discourage enough people from voting. That’s why they are against laws that that make voting easier.
I actually was hoping Biden would run as he has great experience with foreign leaders as well as very successful reaching compromises and passing bills that otherwise wouldn’t fly.
As I say though I will 100% vote for Kamala (or whomever will be the democratic candidate), definitively not the fascist party and in fact anyone on Democrats side looks good.
Holy shit you think you’re anxious? Some of us are stuck living here. It’s not actually that easy to emigrate to Canada (bet you guys did that for a reason…).
I think people are angry about the timing. It feels like too little, too late. If he had made the decision at the beginning of the year, then sure. But now it’ll be rushed, and people won’t be able to agree on a single candidate. And people are worried that, due to the resulting lack of agreement, a split vote will hand the win to Trump.
It’s because progressives were tripping over themselves to agree with AOC yesterday. Now that it’s been shown how out of touch she is, they are backpedaling to argue Biden should not have dropped out.
It’s just an anecdote, but I’ve experienced a lot of people saying “I’d vote for a dead dog over Trump”, who for some reason still wouldn’t back a democrat that didn’t look like and sound like a mummy.
Lemmy isn’t a monolith, including the ones in this thread. I’ve seen as many people calling for him to drop out as those saying he should say. End of the day, none of us have anything valuable to say you should be relying on for insight.
Goes to show how many of these people were disingenuous and never actually wanted the party to win regardless. Some of those people operate on the far right. Some of them were just Trumpers in disguise, foreign operators, bots, etc. It’s a lot of bullshit. I’m looking forward to supporting Kamala though.
I want to see actual demographics of the various Lemmy instances for this reason. There are tons of very loud and confident opinions but based on the simple facts they get wrong, there must be a large number of non-Americans or edgy teens who can’t vote or wouldn’t vote anyway.
I think this is a side effect of sharing and discussion these events online, especially in a link aggregator like Lemmy. You can you see inconsistent views presented in multiple threads yet they feel as if you’re interacting with the same group of people.
Some people are happy about this turn of events while others are not. I expect that you’re seeing differing major opinions from separate groups of people.
People are scared. Most of the ones calling for Biden to drop out were just parroting popular opinion, with the rest uncertain where him actually dropping will take us. I think your feelings are valid here, though to give people some credit: At least we made the right choice. Immediately after the debate I wasn’t sure if Joe dropping out was a good idea. After the Miss Heard Around the World I strongly felt he had no choice.
Time for Part whatever on this several part series, I guess. BOOTSTRAPS IT IS.
There’s going to be people pushing on both sides pushing either way, some with honest intentions/beliefs, some just bots/bad actors trying to amp up the chaos. It’s impossible to tell how this plays out at the point though, but it does have the potential to be a really good thing for the Democratic campaign. Unfortunately, Democrats have a way of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, so I’m not overly optimistic of our chances. I hope they get somebody smart, younger, and charismatic who just completely blows the Right out of the water this election and completely changes the trajectory of this country… but I’m not going to hold my breath. I’ll vote for whomever is not Trump, to try to prevent the takeover of literal fascists.
Ever since the debate, people have been calling for Joe Biden to step down
Yes, some.
Now I read the comments and everyone is criticizing and accusing the Democrats of not knowing what they’re doing
Yes, others.
Different people speak up on different days. This is especially true in social media where often people won’t speak up if they know they’re going to get jumped on.
Stomach isn’t enough. If you’re not actively campaigning and donating for her–or whomever the candidate is–then you may as well have been a Republican.
EDIT: Nevermind. Clearly the hivemind wants to stay in our armchairs. Who can blame us, right? We’ll continue this conversation in November. I hope it’s not I-told-you-so.
Squid, I appreciate your contributions to putting content on the platform, honestly, but I couldn’t be any less interested in that take. My history speaks for itself, and anybody can read it who cares to. Everybody must vote. I don’t think I could be any clearer about that. I was a staunch advocate for Biden, and I’ll be a staunch advocate for Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, or anyone else who carries the Democratic party forward.
But every single one of them polls down from Biden. To the extent any of the whining on social media since the debate hasn’t been astroturfed, advocacy for Biden to drop out resulted in this news, and it means that the party has now voluntarily given up the single biggest proven advantage a candidate historically has in a presidential election: being the sitting president.
I’m encouraging people to vote, but you know as well as I do that people who were going to vote anything-blue were going to vote for Biden no matter what anybody said on almost-reddit. Harris has to move the needle further than that, and that means that all the armchair it’ll-be-better-if-he-drops-out analysts now need to step the fuck up if they want this news to mean anything other than “The DNC just handed Trump 2024.”
Everybody knows that the kids screaming “oh if the candidate were just younger, the Dems would have it in a landslide” were full of shit, and now we’re about to see just how big a deficit we’re actually running. I’d love to be wrong! I’d be delighted, ecstatic, beside myself to discover that next weeks polls put all these convention front-runners up 10 points on Trump. But I’ve studied this stuff, and it doesn’t take a veteran pollster to realize it doesn’t work that way. Actual campaigning has to happen.
If you cared enough to want Biden out, but not quite enough to want Harris to win, then you were going to hold your nose in the ballot box either way and it doesn’t fucking matter: Trump would still win. That’s not discouraging. That’s statistics.
Telling people that if they don’t go out and campaign, they might as well be a Republican is just counterproductive. Insulting people is just never a way to get them to do what you think they should do.
I don’t know why so many people think that’s the right tack. Have you ever been insulted into doing something?
You know, Squid. You’re right. This whole time I’ve been venting because I feel like we’ve been completely outplayed by astroturfing foreign propagandists and bots, and it feels like I’m the only one who realizes it. This stuff has real, serious consequences for real people–but why would I expect a bunch of NEETs and children to get that?
Everybody who swallowed it still genuinely thinks they won something, so I guess it’s not fair to lash out. I don’t really want to get anyone on my side because my side doesn’t exist here anymore.
I have to thank you for finally getting me off the platform. It’s just not worth it.
With people like you it shows why Trump won culturally even if he doesn’t win the election. He turned a substantial part of the vocal Democrats into Blue-MAGA-hats. It is the same attitude that attacked people who pointed out the mere fact, that Biden is not mentally fit for office anymore. If the Blue-MAGA wasn’t so big, Biden could have left the field to a younger and better candidate half a year ago.
So you think calling everyone that does not campaign and donate to the Democrats a secret Republican is somehow normal?
To me it is the same cultish bullshit like the blatant denial of Bidens old age and mental decline. It is the same “follow your leader no matter what” insanity that is apologetic for Trump on the other side. So yes, this kind of behaviour is MAGA behaviour and if it is done for the Dems instead of the Reps it is blue MAGA
The “hive mind” probably just can’t figure out what the fuck you’re even trying to say. So, what, everybody who doesn’t actively campaign for their preferred candidate just supports fascism by default? I’m guessing your stance isn’t anywhere near that stupid, because that is an extraordinarily stupid stance. So maybe you’d have a better reception if you clarified your point.
Absolutely not. I will spend my time and energy and money supporting my local Democrats. The national level isn’t as important to me because Republicans in my state have veto-proof majorities in both houses and they hold the governorship. Regardless of what happens at the national level, implementation of Project 2025 began in my state about 3 years ago.
I was vocally saying biden would never drop out and we just had to swallow the poison pill. I was dead wrong. I will be voting for [insert DNC candidate] and will be excited to do it!
While I don’t think Kamala is the best the Democratic party has to offer (I would have much preferred Biden endorsing Hakeem Jeffries, for example), I’m over the moon that he’s finally decided to step aside. And you know what? Harris is better than Biden in pretty much every metric that matters. I was going to vote for the Dem nominee either way, but him stepping aside in favor of a better candidate has me feeling all kinds of relieved.
This is so incredibly reckless and foolish. Democrats just handed victory to Trump because they seem incapable of party unity. There is no better candidate waiting in the wings and Biden was polling very competitively against Trump.
He dropped over 2 points to Trump since the debate and I doubt more public appearances from him were gonna help especially since he already committed to another debate. He’s outside the margin of error for winning any sunbelt state and losing everywhere in the rustbelt. It’s not impossible that he would have won but seems pretty improbable.
It would have taken some big, unexpected developments for him to win at this stage. Especially after the failed assassination attempt invigorated and united Trump’s cult further.
I mean, reading between the lines, something else is wrong with biden. His age wasn’t all that helpful in the current situation, and then he gets sick? If he has only Covid, then we were in for 2+ months of a foggy candidate who already had questionable levels of clarity. No, this is not reckless, this is trying to save the election from an almost assured trump win.
The only recklessness I see is waiting til the 11th hour to read the writing on the wall. Someone posted in a different thread that Biden even stated in 2019 that he was only going to run a single term. The party leadership has had 4 years to choose a proper successor but chose party over country instead.
It seems reckless, but the people who were pushing it were party insiders and big donors like George Clooney. I am not sure if it was a good idea, but I figure they must see things we don’t.
I just don’t understand this with a non-felon, non-rapist candidate. Biden and those Democratic Congressional candidates are running on the same platform.
If you want lockstep unity you get to be fascist, too. Just like the republicans.
The best thing about Dems and libs is their general inclusivity. We want to have everyone to have a voice and a place to exist in the government. Shared control over the direction of the country. We want to exist and have lives free of violence, prejudice and misogyny, among other things, and to be who we are. But that’s also a drawback. Every group has their special interest. That’s hard to work with. If they don’t feel that their special interest has been advanced in some way they tend to sit on their hands. Vote third party. Not vote at all. We have a LOT of people all pulling in slightly different directions at the same time.
The republicans? They really have only one simple agenda, and that’s god, guns, and fuck the liberal agenda. And they show up to vote to do just that.
Would have been better if he did this last year, would have allowed for a normal primary, rather than the clustefuck that is going to happen over the next month.
Both candidates are experiencing decline, and if Biden were elected and incapable of doing the job it would have resulted in a Harris Presidency anyway. It's such an odd thing to object over. We've had presidents in decline before and the country kept running just fine, (FDR, Reagan.)
Biden did a fine job in office, I'm especially proud of his union support, and his policies were spot on in my opinion. To throw him under the bus like this seems really shitty.
I think I remember reading an earlier analysis that says that Trump has no reason to accept debates with any potential new candidate, as it just gives them more visibility.
To be fair, most people really don’t know much about her yet. She’s mostly stayed in the shadows as a VP. That could change, for better or worse, when they know her better.
People don’t know much about Kamala yet. That will now change very dramatically. Biden had hit his ceiling, a known quantity that everyone already knew very well. Harris has room to climb.
That’s something I think some people just missed when Biden dropping out was debated. Of course, the other potential picks were polling behind him at that point. But he was showing clear signs that he had peaked, and would only be able to fight not to drop further. His most powerful argument had been not being Trump - which any candidate can wield. And any candidate with charisma and the ability to speak, debate and campaign has a lot of room to move up, whereas Biden was fighting not to move down.
Its extremely worrying he didnt announce who is replacing him. This election might wnd up being decided by the supreme court after republicans challenge the replacement in the courts
He just gave media something to speculate on for the next couple hours or days. It’s much more effective that way because who cares about Trump right now?
Harris had a meeting with the financial backers a few days ago. It would probably be easier for the funds to go to her campaign then if someone fresh started. One of the arguments for Biden to stick around was that the new candidate would have to raise nearly a billion dollars to even have a chance at winning.
Biden’s campaign recently reported $91 million cash on hand. Allied Democratic campaign committees brought the total at his disposal to more than $240 million. Campaign finance experts agree generally that Harris could control all those funds since the campaign was set up in her name as well as Biden’s. If Democrats do nominate someone other than Harris, party accounts could still benefit the nominee, but the Biden-Harris account would have more restrictions. For example, legal experts say it could become an independent expenditure political action committee but not simply transfer its balance to a different nominee.
Well, the Trump team has been panicking in anticipation of this happening. They have already started launching law suits trying to stop it. The biggest scare they had was Biden’s age and that may have just vaporised?
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