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Hot Swap time?
On the All-In podcast, a couple of the podcasters have been making bold claims that Biden would be "hot-swapped" out for a different candidate (presumably Gavin Newsom) after the first debate. I thought their claims were pretty outlandish, but after last night they are seeming a lot more, um, inlandish.
I concur with a lot of the Mottizens below that Biden's performance was not that bad. I thought he landed some decent punches and fought Trump mostly to a draw. But expectations matter. Like most people here, I am well aware of Biden's state of decline, whereas perhaps the average voter is not. I was not expecting vigor, so was in no way shocked by Biden's lack of it. Furthermore, Mottizens tend to actually listen to the words that are said. Normies react more to feels. Biden's blank-eyed stare and gaped mouth said more than words ever could. If this was your first exposure to Biden in the last 4 years, it would be unsettling.
What I was shocked by was the immediate consensus by CNN's post-debate panel that Biden's performance was a disaster, and the immediate speculation about a new candidate. I had expected them to rally around their leader. There was a plausible argument to be made that Biden did okay. Instead, they threw him under the bus.
The timing of the debate certainly seems a bit suspicious. This was the earliest Presidential debate in some time (ever?). Conspicuously, it comes before the convention, but after the primaries. If Biden can be pressured to resign, the DNC will be able to handpick their preferred candidate without the pesky need for voters.
As Bill Ackman and others have pointed out on Twitter, everyone in Biden's inner circle knew that this was Biden's ability level in 2024. They didn't have to agree to a debate. Why did they send him out there to get slaughtered?Seen through this lens, Obama "helping" the elderly Biden off the stage a couple weeks ago take on a darker tone.
Shares in "Biden 2024 Democratic nominee" crashed during the debate and now trade at just 63%. Newsom is at 22% and Harris at 13%.
I don't know. All of this seems very conspiratorial. The real world is messy and boring. I doubt that the DNC are sitting around in a smoke-filled room, twirling their mustaches. But, however it shakes out, odds of Biden being replaced are shooting up. This seems very undemocratic. There was a time to replace Biden, and that was during the primaries. However it shakes out, the election season just got a lot more interesting.
This line going around today feels like a motte-rat ingroup circle-jerk. Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance! It's a presidential debate, there is little substance, the words have always been made-up and meaningless. Does Biden debate Trump to a draw because, although he looked horrible, and although nobody is persuaded by anything he said, he did manage to say things? I feel as though people have always been a little disingenuous about debates. Everyone pretends that there is a reified debate format, where people say things like, "Well, Biden's answer doesn't convince me, but it's an objectively-strong argument and might move somebody else." But there is no imaginary modal voter. There are not actually rules for deciding who won. It becomes an exercise in imaginary terms that nobody is actually thinking in, but everyone assumes everyone else is thinking in. This is all a little too self-congratulatory for me.
Nobody is impressed with the substance of Biden's answers. Nobody even really cares what they were. Obviously, we all already know what Biden's policies are and what his candidacy means. For that matter, nobody cares what the substance of Trump's answers was either. It's an intellectual exercise. I don't care what Trump did on January 6th, you do care what Trump did on January 6th, so does anybody care that Trump gave this answer instead of that answer? Is there some hypothetical voter who does?
The style is much more important. Bring back the smashing and yelling and interrupting and crass. I actually want to see Trump walk all over the other guy kicking and fighting. Show me that Jeb actually can't stand up for himself when called out and attacked. Give me the Hillary who glowers but doesn't back down. What did Andrew Yang say in the first 2020 debate that showed how impressive his policy credentials were? Who even knows. I do remember Chris Christie decimating Marco Rubio over repeating the same canned stock phrase on three separate occasions. I don't remember a damned policy argument Amy Klobuchar ever made, just that she was boring, and uninspiring, and lacking the actual qualities of a leader.
Imagine how boring politics would be if we all went back to this frame: Biden tied Trump because, when you strip away how he spoke, how he looked, how he stood, how he argued, and how he lead, his stock canned prepared statements were just as technically sensible as Trump's, or maybe better. No, Biden lost, because he looked like an old man who didn't even know what room he was in. He froze up. He couldn't get the words out. He made uncomfortable faces when he wasn't speaking. He sometimes didn't know what he was saying. He looked old. Trump lightly bullied him and except for a few moments he couldn't fight back. This is how politics works, this is literally what matters. The motte-rat insistence on some sort of Nixon-Kennedy radio interpretation of disembodied words floating in space actually feels deeply anti-rational, because it is obviously not how things work. Nobody cares. The exercise in imagining that we can care about "the words that are said" but also imagine the mindset of "the average voter" is vanity. No!, actually. Those things literally do not exist. They are endless rationalizations. If you live in this plane of unreality, you could completely swap Trump and Biden's policies and ideas and visions, and it wouldn't matter.
Thinking about these policy wonk ideas isn't a more elevated form of politics stripped from emotion and chance. It's actually a degeneration. Because this is what people care about. A robot could make the words, it's the emotions that count.
Relative to the general public, we probably do. I don't think it's circle-jerking to say this forum is, on average, more intelligent, more educated, and more political aware than the average American (or the average redditor or Twitter poster). That doesn't mean we're a bunch of geniuses or that people here don't fall into the same predictable mindkilling partisanship as everywhere else, but yeah, the entire point of this forum is to try to make discussions more than exchanging insults and memes. The majority of the flack we mods get is because someone just wants to shit on his opposition and then feels mistreated when told he can't.
To answer your real question:
Yes. The overrated "undecided" or "swing" voter. They exist. They may be less than 10% of the electorate (maybe 5% or 6%?) but they are the ones who decide the election in battleground states. You're right that most people in the general public, and also most people here, are very unlikely to change which way they're going to vote even if Biden shits his pants or Trump eats a puppy on live TV. But there are people who are still swayable, and they're the ones who matter, basically.
You may also underestimate the impact of actually getting the vote out. A lot of people may be unwilling to vote for the other candidate, but if they find themselves thoroughly disgusted and demoralized by their candidate, they can just choose not to vote. Speaking personally - I do not like Trump, and do not want him to win (although I have to admit that if he does, I will feel a tiny frisson of schadenfreude enjoying meltdowns in certain quarters), but I am so unimpressed and unenthused about Biden that I'm almost in the "fuck it" camp myself.
Pretending that canned practiced debate lines is meaningful is worse than insults and memes. It is actively refusing to understand. The guy making memes has a better worldview: he sees Biden looking old and lost, and he feels panic or glee. Only in this highly reified artificial fake turfwar debate do we say, "Aside from the stuttering, the mumbling, the bad faces, the halting voice, the aged walk, and the glazed eyes, how did he do?"
I appreciate that the Motte is smarter than average, which makes it even more frustrating to argue made-up intellectual exercises. The guy posting memes of Biden in a diaper has a better understanding of the debate. The guy saying he doesn't care because he hates Trump has a better understanding. The guy saying Biden looked horrible and needs to drop out has a better understanding. The guy saying that Biden did fine, because he did better than he expected, has no understanding. He has negative understanding. Normies are just seeing Biden's decline for the first time, but I'm smarter and world-weary and cynical and jaded and I can judge Biden's real performance. Using more intelligence asking the wrong questions means a worse answer. That's what we're doing.
Your whole premise is flawed. It might make sense if we had some rule that everyone has to watch the debate but we don't. Normies wouldn't be caught dead spending over an hour watching two old people spittle on each other. CNN seems to have claimed somewhere between 50 to 80 million people tuned in, many of which could be internationals. What does influence normies is what their politics brained friends and collogues tell them happened and that is downstream of the words and the performance.
I think normies tune in for the first thirty minutes or so.
A single poll before the debate very roughly broke it down into one third of US adults were very/extremely likely to watch live. Slightly more than that were going to watch clips or analysis after the fact. Due to splits in response, this was a bit over half overall of respondents who were very/extremely likely to get some form of debate content, and only a quarter who weren't going to tune in or look after at all.
Anecdotally, even some of the more politically-engaged people I know only tuned in for about 15-20 minutes, in most cases near the beginning, and in many cases a random stretch out of curiosity only. The actual viewership implies that the poll was either a significant over-estimate, or there were a lot of people why couldn't bring themselves to watch despite intending to. Probably the former, this kind of survey is not very accurate for this type of question, in part because the question reveals the simple fact that there is a debate happening! A fact most are only vaguely aware of, much less the exact day. Plus maybe some survey bias and personal overestimation of probability. I'm betting a massive chunk of the viewership were these already extremely-likely people.
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