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Notes -
What's Biden's survival path? Manifold's currently putting him at 41% chance, but I'm not seeing a likely way for that to happen.
Things look to me like:
Democrats express displeasure.
Biden refuses to drop out.
Democrats adjust convention rules to free up delegates.
Delegates reject Biden.
Are people thinking that Democrats won't allow the convention to nominate someone other than Biden? Or that delegates will vote for Biden?
Neither of those seem especially likely to me, especially when Kamala's an easy default option to unify around, even if her reputation is that she's unpopular. So I guess I'm not seeing where it's coming from. Are there convention rules that are problematic? I'm wondering whether them meeting early due to the Ohio deadline being earlier is a factor, but Ohio moved it back, so they can just cancel their early meeting, right?
But, this is not the best development for the Trump campaign.
I don't think RFKs polling means much. It's caused by Democrats shocked by Biden's performance looking for another Democrat to say they support. At the end of the day nearly all of those people will not vote third-party; they'll hold their nose and vote for Biden or they'll stay home.
And some who would otherwise vote Republican, because they like RFK's vaccine skepticism.
I live in a red tribe crank bubble- 0% of the people I know well enough to have talked about it with will vote RFK. The like two red tribe leftists will vote Biden and everyone else will vote Trump.
In real life republican conspiracy theorists have issues other than vaccines that they care about(abortion, guns), accept that Trump will stay within acceptable bounds on vaccines, and don't trust RFK.
I'm in a similar bubble in a blue state, but at least half of the red tribers close to me are voting RFK as a protest vote. My wife -- who campaigned against state vaxx laws a few years ago -- has an RFK sign and is putting it in our lawn.
I try to tell them that absent vaccines they would loathe RFK, but it's hard to draw that distinction when the other options are so revolting.
I've totally lost touch with almost everyone who got fired for not getting jabbed (a lot of them were basically migratory workers or ready to retire and leave this blue hellstate anyway). Are people still so single-issue about it?
Maybe that's the wrong way to put it... The whole thing just fed into my existing partisanship along with all the other 2020 insanity. I can't imagine picking out the vax as the One Thing that radicalized me about that year. Aren't lockdowns just as big an issue?
Kind of a shocking reminder of Scott's old "different worlds" essay (which, holy fuck, has a David Gerard quote in it, talk about bubbles)
Not quite single issue, but the COVID-19 vaccines are still a no-go in most of the Trump crowd. The phrase “turbo-cancer” has joined “died suddenly” in the vocab of people convinced the jab is the greatest threat to public safety since AIDS.
I mean unless you're a gay man or shoot up heroin, has AIDS ever really been much of a threat?
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