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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.
The Biden nomination relies merely on Democratic indecision and cowardice which... Seems like a generally good bet. For the most part good strategy is to turtle, run out the round, and be saved by the bell. For the most part I agree that it might be too late to win the presidency, and every week that passes it's later.
In particular Biden just needs Democrats to collectively hesitate out of a sense of MAD, which can be achieved by empasizing that some voters would only vote for Joe. There apparently exist people like that. I can't comprehend it. But showing enough of them makes Biden unremovable. If removing him costs 5% of the vote, it's pointless to try.
I think the logic of Biden's team is sound here.
While Biden is losing, there is a lot of time before the election. If he can get the nomination, the media will rally to his corner. Maybe there will even be an October surprise like a war with Iran or they can gin up another Donald Trump hoax. All in all, if Biden gets the nom, he still has something like a 30% shot of winning. It's not bad.
If the Dems knife him in the back and overturn the will of the voters, it's going to look bad. They will probably lose a good share of their elderly base who look at Biden and see themselves. The odds of winning go down.
So I think MAD works here.
What surprises me is that Biden doesn't step down "for the good of the country". Sure, he wouldn't be President anymore, but it secures his legacy. With the academy fully captured by the left, Biden would go down as a Top 10 President who defeated the evil Donald Trump and stepped aside in favor of a woman of color.
This was somewhat surprising to me as well. Obviously, I can't know how I'd feel in the same situation since no one can, but I imagine that if I were 81 years old with as storied career as Biden's, I'd figure it'd be a good time to sail off into the sunset, hoping I have at least a decade or two left to spend with my grandkids and great-grandkids, instead of spending all my time and energy working what is reasonably considered one of the toughest, most scrutinized jobs in the world. Heck, even if it were a disgraced retirement instead of one where the history books will lionize me as the Fascist-Defeater who seamlessly transitioned the USA to a new, golden age of a black female POTUS, I'd think that'd be worth it.
But clearly, Biden thinks differently. I find myself thinking that there really are people who are just fundamentally different from most of us in terms of their ambition, that they would see working, again, one of the hardest jobs in the world, until their dying breath to be worth it for the... what, prestige? Status? Power? even if it means sacrificing a relaxing, luxurious, and potentially love-filled retirement. I see that in Trump, too, in his own political ambitions in the past decade, though he doesn't look quite close to his end as Biden is to his. Or maybe I'm just the unambitious weird one, and actually most of us would do the exact same thing and consider holding onto that power until my last, exhausted breath to be well worth the sacrifice. There certainly seem to be no shortage of rich and well-respected celebrities who have ruined themselves or at least severely harmed themselves by risking things to reach for even more.
It's legacy, that's what they want, at that level. No one wants to be a one term president that handed over a massive mess. No one wants to be the next Jimmy Carter.
Neither Trump or Biden has secured a positive legacy. Trump wants to be remembered at least like a Reagan, a president at least half the US remember fondly, not a one term president impeached twice. Biden's legacy if he doesn't win is that he's the guy who people elected to replace the Big Bad Trump but was such a failure that the people prefered re-electing Trump over him.
If Trump wins, and the Democrats get the House, I predict he'll be impeached at least three times (one additional one), with the NY felony conviction being the stated reason. That's gotta be some kind of accomplishment.
As for Biden, he started out looking like Carter (high inflation and a disastrous military operation) and still does.
If Democrats had allowed some sort of positive legacy to survive from the Trump presidency and hadn't made it so personal with the lawsuits, maybe he wouldn't be so incentivized to run again. But they went and reversed everything and even deny him the objective foreign policy wins that aren't partisan politics. Likewise, for Biden, if he wasn't running against Trump the election wouldn't feel to him like a direct referendum on whether he ended up being worse than the guy he was supposed to fix the messes of; if he was facing anyone else, or was polling above Trump, he could ride into the sunset with the satisfaction of having done his job.
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