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Notes -
Thursday's debate was the gift that keeps on giving for political horse race junkies like me. 2024's campaign was shaping up to be the ultimate snooze-fest. Neither party fielded competitive primaries. Neither candidate provided any sort of vision for the future. Two geriatric candidates were fighting a rematch over a tiny sliver of undecided voters. Despite the heated rhetoric, it was boring.
Everything is different now, and this is shaping up to be one of the most dramatic campaign seasons in history.
Biden's chances to win the Democratic nomination keep plummeting. On PredictIt, he is down to 50%! Kamala Harris's stock is surging - now up to 33%.
But while many within the Democratic media complex have called for Biden to step down (he even lost Brian Stelter!) elected officials have been much more circumspect. Nearly all prominent Democrats continue to support Biden in public. The knives are being sharpened, favors are being called in, backroom deals are being made. But the party unity hasn't broken. Somebody (Obama maybe) will have to strike the first blow. Until then, it's far too risky to stick one's neck out.
Biden's political instincts are stronger than many give him credit for. I've mentioned before how he's used the SPR to keep gas prices down, knowing that simple things like that matter a lot. Now he has a new mantra. Trust no one. Increasingly relying on his wife Jill, he is now apparently bringing in Hunter as an advisor as well.
Biden only needs to last a few more weeks. To appear on the Ohio ballot, Democrats must nominate someone before August 7th. He just needs to run out the clock. Big public speeches or appearances are a no no, as every senior moment will now be dissected in minute detail. Once he's the nominee, the media will come back onside to save democracy.
In any case, I can't get enough of the drama. Make election season fun again.
The biggest ballot deadline IMO is actually California, which is August 14, the week before the convention. A lot of the other ones would give Democrats a absolutely massive black eye if they didn't have any candidate appear symbolically, but wouldn't be strictly necessary for the electoral math (Ohio hasn't been in play for a few years). Or, North Carolina, which is August 2nd. They lost NC last time but current polling indicates it could still be in play this time.
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I see no new downside (electorally) to the Democrats replacing Biden with a younger, charismatic and relatively unknown center-left politician with no current national profile, someone like Obama in 2004. There will be wall-to-wall fawning media coverage and probably a short enough period for the honeymoon to stretch through the election before any real negatives can stick to them. It will bring back Democrats who were weary of Biden, Independents who were put off by age concerns or the stench of this re-run election between two guys with high negatives. If they pick well and find someone who isn't mired in dumb scandals, a family of grafters, or crazy fringe politics, that's even better. It's a hail mary, but like most sports fans, I would rather see my team try a hail mary when they're chasing the game in the fourth quarter than do nothing at all.
The other thing they could try, which might have a better chance of working, is to draft in a feel-good barely-political celebrity, like Tom Hanks, Oprah or The Rock, with a brief campaign as a "non-partisan" national healer. Like Trump did in 2016, this generates excitement and brings in new voters who are there for the star-fucking and don't care about issues.
In both scenarios, selection is key. The wrong person can go down in flames disastrously (like Sarah Palin, who brought in a burst of energy but faced a hostile press and was not prepared for it), but then they'd back where they are now, so no real loss.
A Hail Mary is probably the best chance Democrats have. Sticking with Biden (or Harris) is almost certainly a losing proposition. A generic Democrat also probably won't fair well (there are a million hurdles to overcome that almost certainly lean toward Democrats being disenthused and abandoning ship). But the right generic Democrat could make the party fall in love. It's extremely unlikely, and very few of the Democrats talked about at the national level really have this potential. But it's hard to imagine the Hail Mary play bad scenario looking worse than the current outlook. To he who risks all goes the glory.
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On the one hand, I keep hearing how bureaucratically difficult it is, by the rules of the DNC, to actually replace Biden. Bordering on impossible. And even if they did, supposedly all the money they've raised is for the Biden/Harris ticket. FEC rules state that it can't just be handed over to a different presumptive nominee except for Harris, which people seem to be trying to avoid. There is also the reporting that Biden has closed his circle extremely tight, essentially only listening to advice from his wife and his son. Nobody else is even allowed near him unless they say what Jill or Hunter want them to say, and both of them seem addicted to power and the wealth and protection it provides. I've seen other reporting indicating that Biden will try to rubberstamp his nomination ASAP to burn the boats. There is no longer any retreat, ride or die. And that completely ignores the fact that there was no real DNC primary. There were no debates, a lot of states didn't even bother with the formality of a vote. Nobody else has any sort of popular support or mandate, they'd be starting from scratch. Well, I should amend that statement, nobody the DNC wants has any sort of mandate. I'm sure people would love RFK Jr as the nominee.
Every now and again, Saagar Enjeti will comment that Trump appears to be truly blessed by God. Going into the debate, all I heard was that Trump's claim that he will debate any time, any where, any rules gave away too much. That he had completely gimped himself having CNN moderate the debate, mute his mic, take him away from an audience he could do crowd work against, etc. There were conspiracy theories about the fact that other press were not allowed in the room to corroborate any mute-mic comments the candidates made, allowing CNN to spin with impunity as the only source present. Analyst were saying the debate was too early to have any impact on the election, and that historically it's difficult to say if debates have any influence at all.
Barely 10 minutes into the debate, and it's like reality collapsed. Something truly historic and unprecedented occurred.
Yeah, that debate moment is going in the history books as one of the biggest ever.
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Well, Texas rep Lloyd Doggett just became the first Democratic politician to call for Biden to step down. Call me crazy, but I honestly have a sneaking suspicion that this was all planned out ahead of time. Biden looked awful during the debate. But at the after party he seemed fine, and he was beck to his old self the next day in North Carolina. I think Biden always intended to be a one-term president but that's not the kind of thing you can pull off these days barring death or permanent disability. He would have had to announce he wasn't seeking the nomination some time around last summer, at which point he would have immediately become a lame duck where he lost whatever pull he had with congress and saw half of his administration overshadowed by the other Democrats jockeying for position. There was also the traditional incumbent's advantage to consider. And there was no guarantee that whoever the Democrats ended up nominating would be better than Biden. He had to run again.
At this point, the entire Republican apparatus has had a year to prepare a campaign against Joe Biden. The attacks are pretty standard at this point — he's old, he's demented, he caused inflation, he fucked up the Afghanistan pullout, the "Biden Crime Family", etc. What happens if, at the eleventh hour, Joe Biden is no longer the candidate? Suddenly, a year's worth of planning is down the toilet. Now they'll find themselves likely up against some "Generic Democrat" on whom they will have no opposition research, no idea who his base is, no idea what his policy positions are. Meanwhile, the Democrats could have been planning this for months and have ready solutions to all the problems out there. Plus they can run on the idea "that he knew when to step aside", unlike somebody else. This is a person who didn't have to spend primary season pretending to be further left than they really were and didn't have the misfortune of months of oppo research from members of their own party. A candidate who's optimized for winning a general election.
Then there's the matter of the debates. Trump was eager to debate Biden. Maybe a little too eager. He agreed to an unusually early first debate and to a format that stripped him of the ability to interrupt his opponent and to draw on a supportive studio audience. If a new guy comes in soon, there's the possibility that he pushes for two more debates with the same rules. Trump really isn't in a position to refuse given how adamant he's been about debating. If he wants his mike permanently unmuted then he'll get criticized for being afraid to let the public hear what his opponent has to say — "He agreed to the rules for Biden because he thought he could win against Biden; if he wants to change the rules it must because he doesn't think he can win." Maybe give him his audience back as a token of goodwill. Now he's got to go up against someone who's much younger and more adept at pushing his buttons than Sleepy Joe.
The major downside is that the country collectively goes "Who?" and votes for someone they're familiar with. But this is overrated, both because Joe Biden is massively disliked in some circles and because most of the people who will ultimately decide the election aren't really paying attention until after Labor Day. Trump can and should run his "Who is Lou Lipschitz" routine for a couple months, but after that it starts to wear thin and make people think "Is that all you've got?" I don't actually think this is what will happen but I hope it will. It would make this fall much more interesting than another slow descent into a Trump presidency.
I think the main question with this is what it means to be 'back to his old self'. I did not see much of him in NC except the short clip that his campaign blasted on twitter. Best I could tell just from that, it looked like 'back to his old self' meant that he was back to reading from a teleprompter rather than hearing unscripted questions and comments from others, mentally formulating his own thoughts on the fly, and constructing cogent responses. It seemed to me like everyone in the campaign knew it was absolutely vital to survival to have some clip where it looked like he had 'energy', apart from such mental faculties, and the result was more like yelling what he read on a teleprompter than even just reading from a teleprompter. If 'teleprompter yelling' is 'back to his old self', and what we can expect in the future is competence in teleprompter yelling and not much other activity, I'm not sure that's particularly encouraging.
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This is too clever by half. Swapping candidates puts the new candidate in an impossible position unless it is Harris, who is unpopular and subject to plenty of attacks as it is. The new candidate, like Humphrey, will be tied to every Biden policy without the advantage of being the incumbent. They'll have all the downsides of incumbency, tied to unpopular policies in Israel and at home, while having few of the advantages. If people feel good under Joe Biden, do they automatically think they will feel good under Big Gretch? Idk.
It's important to note that the one example we have of this happening, the Dems in '68, it was a complete disaster.
On a smaller scale, it also happened twice in 2002-2004 when MN Senate candidate Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash just before the election and a NJ Senator had to drop out due to corruption charges after the nomination deadline passed. The results were mixed, but there was a wave of sympathy for Wellstone which just fell short, and a burst of enthusiasm in NJ that carried the replacement candidate to victory.
With Biden, however, there is no upside to sticking in the race because the optics are horrible, and it threatens to taint the entire party if they try to push him over the line and it fails because everyone can see how desperate it is. So do you stick with an obvious and likely losing deceit, or do try something more positive?
In Missouri in 2000, Senatorial candidate Mel Carnahan also died in a plane crash just before the election, and he won.
It seems that sometimes a tragic death can be electorally beneficial. (I hope that just saying that doesn't bring the Secret Service down upon me.)
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The problem with this theory is all the likely Democrat candidates are poisonous in their own right.
Newsom comes up constantly, but California and his governorship of it in particular is practically a cautionary to the rest of America. Virtually the entire comedy scene had to flee his state due to mismanagement and talks about it all the time on podcast, interviews, standup specials.
Gretchen Witmer comes up, I can't tell why. The only thing she's notable for is participating in one of the few FBI entrapment plots/misinformation events that was so bad it actually did get thrown out of court.
There is Harris, but while Biden at least has the excuse of dementia, it's unclear what Harris' excuse for her constant word salads are. She polls worse than anyone.
Buttigieg I guess still exist, but has overseen possibly one of the most disastrous 4 years the Department of Transportation has ever seen. Rail disasters, air disasters, bridge disasters, you name it. It's hard to imagine failing up with that public a record of incompetence.
And that's more or less all the contenders unless Bernie Sanders wants to give it another go. But after how the DNC ratfucked him to position Biden as the nominee in 2020, I sincerely doubt they'd tap him for 2024, even if he is politically the least toxic candidate.
There is always RFK Jr... but the DNC ratfucked him in the 2024 primaries as well, and will almost certainly not tap him either.
There's another suggestion I see mooted pretty often that isn't on your list: Michelle Obama. Mostly, that she's got name recognition, a lot of the same identity politics positives as Harris without some of the latter's particular negatives, and she's only 60. I'm not sure how plausible the argument for her as a candidate is though.
Another one I've seen raised a couple times, that I do think is rather implausible, but which I'll also include for completeness, is to replace Biden with Biden… that is, with Jill Biden. Besides the usual "first woman president" thing, the argument goes that, as she's clearly one of the main people actually making the decisions and running things, she can run on this "job experience."
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Beto is the best shot. He won’t win, but his actual scandals are a drunk driving charge that got dismissed under funny circumstances. He’s a normal white guy who at least tries to talk to proles, so he won’t come off as DEI, and the dems are enthralled enough with his lackluster political performance to bypass those concerns. He’s too dumb to try anything overly clever and willing to play towards the middle. He can at least get dem normies to show up well enough so he doesn’t throw Virginia and Colorado and lose senate races that should go dem.
I donno. He has a habit of confidently blundering onto third rails as though the entire rest of the country consist of his political consultants. Instead of mealy mouthed lies about "common sense gun control" that might at least fool enough people who care to win, he just goes all in with "Hell yes we're coming for your guns!" for example.
As bad as the "coming for your guns" is, it's nothing compared to "we should tax religions I don't like." Beto has been one of my go-to examples for why the Culture War is terminal, and the counter-argument previously was that Beto was a minor, dead-end presidential contender of no consequence. I was assured that his naked appeal to intolerance, for which his audience cheered and which the press responded to by stroking their chins thoughtfully, should not be taken as representative of Blue Tribe generally. Charitably, we shouldn't see him floated as a serious candidate now, because of course Blues wouldn't rally behind such an obviously unfit candidate.
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Sure, but at this point actually winning the election is a tall order, it’s about giving normie dems and dem leaning independents someone they wouldn’t be ashamed to vote for so trump doesn’t win blue states and Kari Lake stays out of the senate.
Yeah, I have heard some of that talk. Replace Biden not to win the presidency, but rescue the down ballot races. Breaking Points keeps covering polls indicating that down ballot dems are doing fantastic even when Biden is polling horrendously, the theory being there might be significant ticket splitting. Personally I think it's more likely people just stay home.
I just struggle with the notion that run of the mill liberals could get excited about anyone nakedly appointed by a cabal of donors and party insiders. But then again I'm not a liberal, so what do I know? The same thing more or less happened with Biden, and I'm expected to believe he got the most votes of anyone any in history.
‘Willing to vote for’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘excited’.
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Newsom’s California reputation isn’t as bad as you suggest nationally. If someone brings up how badly California is run he can reel off richest state, home to big tech, home to entertainment, major tourism destination, economic powerhouse of America, yeah it has problems but it’s the best of what America can be etc. Trump fires back by calling cities violent dumps full of crime and homeless tents, but almost all people who believe that and really care about it either live in deep blue cities in blue states (and Trump isn’t going to win California or NY) or already vote for him. Gavin can also reply that crime is much higher in red states (reasons are unimportant and even Trump isn’t going there).
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It’s actually a bummer that Amy Klobuchar has completely and permanently disappeared from this conversation. I’ve said before that I was enthusiastic about her candidacy during the 2020 primary season. She’s still only 64 - an absolute spring chicken compared to the current candidates - with a long and unimpeachably successful political career. Now, in the intervening years she has revealed herself to be less moderate/non-progressive than she appeared in early 2020; she was an intense COVID hawk, and has been absolutely abysmal on free speech/“fighting disinformation” issues as of late. However, I would still compare her very favorably to all of the individuals you have listed. I can imagine a future timeline in which I would consider voting for her, if the Republican nominee is wacky/unqualified enough. The “moderate, technocratic wing” of the Democrats might be in full thrall, at least rhetorically, to the wacko wing at this juncture in time, but if it ever reasserts itself, she’d be a great representative on paper.
However, she appears to have been permanently blacklisted from consideration due to the absolutely pathetic complaint that, in her former capacity as county attorney in Minneapolis’ Hennepin County, she didn’t terminate Officer Derek Chauvin after some (almost certainly specious and worthless) complaints were lodged against him. Even though the Dems have largely stopped talking about George Floyd and the “Racial Reckoning”, she’s still too toxically adjacent to it to ever be a choice that the progressive base would accept. Yet another thing the Summer of George permanently stole from us.
Amy Klobuchar couldn’t name the President of Mexico over a year into his term. She sat on the Senate Commerce Committee at the time, and Mexico was our largest trading partner
(Nota bene Klobuchar doesn’t show any recognition when given López Obrador‘s name - she doesn’t go “Oh, AMLO, of course!” like anyone with passing familiarity to the leader would, but rather stares daggers at the host)
Given technocracy refers to rule by qualified experts, I’m puzzled why she of all candidates is meant to exemplify those traits?
I don't know much anything about Klobuchar, but I wonder if there exist any politicians, regardless of the smarts level, who hasn't committed at least one gaffe like that that can be conveniently brought up to go "Wotta idiot!" by the opponents.
AMLO is, if not quite a household name, someone that the politically informed could be expected to know of in the USA(although perhaps knowing what it stands for is too much).
I guess I'm not politically informed, then.
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What about that former astronaut? Mark Kelly.
I mean, what about Santa Claus? The nominee will never be Mark Kelly.
Why not?
The Democratic Party is all in on identity politics. They can't put some random white man on the ballot ahead of Harris.
Only a heavy hitter like Newsom could do it, and it would be a major struggle.
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That's why it has to be an unknown with no slate of known negatives, or a celebrity who can drown out the negatives with new voters.
If either Oprah or Clooney was willing to do it they’d have been drafted in years ago.
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The Wicked Witch of the Midwest is also known for being one of the 5 governors to send COVID patients to nursing homes (Newsom is another), and for COVID restrictions which were arbitrary and capricious even by blue state standards. This is significant in that it means she provides no hope of bringing pre-debate RFK Jr. supporters back into the fold.
My theory is this would be a positive for Whitmer: Blue Voters don't care if the experts may have accidentally been a tiny bit overzealous in saving the world from Covid, and if Red Voters hate it, she must be onto something!
I suspect most pre-debate RFK Jr. supporters are COVID single-issue voters from the blue side of the aisle.
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Normies know about the debate. The double haters, who can’t stand Trump but think Biden’s performance has been awful, know he belongs in a memory care facility. They’re paying attention right now, not after Labor Day.
Trump has also not historically taken much time to start attacking new opponents.
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I agree. I've been glued to the news after having been checked out for months. I recall a discussion on here several weeks if not months ago related to Biden and his age and competence. Someone said: "Call me when /r/neoliberal/ is ready to change horses". Well, that day has arrived.
The only observation I can offer that I havent seen discussed much is related to Jill and Hunter's role in all of this. It seems to be widely speculated that those two are the most vehemently against him dropping out. It would make sense considering those two perhaps stand to lose the most in the event of a Biden withdrawl. There was news today that Hunter is now sitting in on all of Biden's meetings. It seems very clear that Hunter's plan is to stick to his father like glue so that noone else can whisper in his ear that its time to quit.
What's been reported about Hunter's life is widely known, but it seems that Jill is being utterly exposed right now. There was another report that the Biden's have declined the White House mansion's resident staff. This is apparently extremely unusual. I dont know how this all works, but it sounds to me like this means that the Bidens do not let any cleaners or cooks into the residence, lest they might observe some damaging behavior by Biden.
I go back and forth on what I think will happen in the next few weeks, but as of right now, I think that Biden will not be withdrawing - mainly because his wife and son are making sure he stays on.
edit: here is a supposed internal poll showing stat of the race as of Sunday and alternative candidate polling. the full PDF is in the replies.
https://x.com/umichvoter/status/1808204695548448807
Crazy story if true.
Since I gotta throw a Roman Empire reference into everything, this paranoia reminds me of the book "I, Claudius". Read it, if you haven't!
The emperor Augustus has had a long and prosperous reign, but his scheming wife Livia wants to kill him to ensure that her son Tiberius inherits the throne. Augustus is afraid of assassination so resorts to eating only fruit that he picks off trees in the garden himself. Ultimately, Livia offs him by poisoning a fig on the tree and convincing him to eat it.
Of course, in this case, it's not Biden's wife that wants him gone, it's a pack of hyenas in his own party. And instead of killing him, they just want him to be seen looking senile in public. Every public appearance from now until the nomination is a potential trap. Paranoia is warranted.
Seconding the recommendation for I, Claudius.
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I don't know if the book differs from the TV show here, but in the show she simply poisons all the figs. No special convincing needed.
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This was the main reason I was hesitant to call him senile. Closing the border was a smart move. It neutralizes one of Trump's strongest arguments for moderates. It could be that his aging brain can't handle the bandwidth of spoken conversation. Maybe we need to put Biden in a Stephen Hawking chair for his own good. We could even give him his old voice back via AI.
Was it?
There's no way that he can actually compete with Trump for the "no more illegal immigration" vote, and it is just going to hurt his numbers and dampen enthusiasm with his actual base. Furthermore, the manner in which he did it isn't going to convince anyone in the moderate camp - that claim will only last as long as it takes for someone to pull out a smartphone and google what he actually did.
Cross pressured voters are real. Someone out there might think "Trump's tariffs are going to be disastrous and wreck the economy, but this border situation is such a mess, we can't keep doing this." If Biden can make the border seem like not such an urgent problem, that voter then gets freed up to vote on the basis of tariffs.
While I can actually agree with that, I think that such people are a very small minority - and I also don't think he closed the border in any way that matters. The situation is still a mess, and Biden can't even begin to offer a real answer because his donors and political cohort want to make sure that the problem stays a big problem (because that big problem is incredibly profitable for them).
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But he didn't really close it. Thousands are still getting through. Maybe it makes a nice sound bite, but I don't think it actually convinces anybody.
The worst part is that it's such an obvious political ploy. He had 3.5 years to fix the border and he's fixing it now!?
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The chair would probably help. IMO, Joe's physical decline is a lot worse than his mental decline. I have a relative about the same age who has mild Parkinson's. His condition seems remarkably similar to what Joe has.
I actually agree here, he just doesn’t present as having the cognitive deterioration of someone with even moderate stage dementia. The debate and his flaws in it would be completely different if that were the case, he’s have been much more aggressive, more confidently wrong, speak many more sentences that were forceful and well-delivered but made little or no sense. Biden’s issue seems more like a physical degeneration, which is more congruent with the fact that in the morning or early afternoon when he has more energy and is presumably better (not necessarily more) medicated he can driver a more competent performance.
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I’m not particularly impressed by the “stay in the race” faction, as they seem to have very little grasp of exactly what their situation is. To put it bluntly, their candidate for president sundowned in the presidential debate in front of 50 million TV viewers, in fact he did so badly that the reporters hosting the show said in front of those same 50 million viewers that Biden should step down. Most of the “stay and fight” faction hinge their arguments on history — they trotted out a historian who said incumbents tend to win unless the economy is bad. Except that any historical prediction is based more or less on the status quo. Once you get past that, it’s not helpful. Sure historically the offspring of this racehorse have done well, which works until you enter a three legged horse on the assumption that it has good pedigree. Yes, but it only has 3 legs, it can’t actually run that fast.
And frankly it’s going to give Trump the presidency simply because he doesn’t have to do anything to be better than the alternative. Biden is a pitcher who cannot throw a strike. Just stand there and take the free walk.
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PredictIt is a terrible source of information because the position limits mean dumb retail traders set the probability, but polymarket's odds are like 45% (biden drops out) so not much better.
Can we really attribute that to Biden, did he come up with that or drive the implementation? I think it makes more sense to credit Employ America or staff for that, with Biden approving it. Whereas something like the Afghanistan withdrawal can significantly be credited to Biden.
It seems like the choice is entirely in Biden's hands, and his inner circle and family, those who'd have the most influence, appear to be supporting him so far. There's some level of opposition from his party that'd force him to pull out, but I agree it's not enough so far.
Biden will be interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC this Friday we'll see if that goes better than the debate. Since the debate he's spokento the press - and to his congressional and governor dem allies - surprisingly little.
After he’s just demonstrated an inability to speak coherently, why is it surprising that he won’t speak to the press?
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