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Nate Silver wants to share what he wrote in his journal with you - LINK -
He's couching it as a "Reader Q&A" but it's a self-reflective series on him, his substack, the election, polls, and politics in general. If you're already fed up with Mr. Silver, it could be an exasperating read. I am not, however, and do find Nate's straight political takes (without any of the bulllshit "data journalism" or woo-woo risk and gambling stuff) to be better than the average pundit.
Just before the paywall, Silver concludes with a paragraph that reveals the rot at the core of the PMC-liberal elite;
Dishonesty has a price. The Liberal/Left coalition has been held together by ducktape, glue, and the continued adherence to the idea of a "better tomorrow" as guided by the experts. But they're all inveterate liars and the American people finally called them out on it. Is it a full moon, Nate's turning into a self-awarewolf.
Silvers main point is if voters punish “their” party (by not voting, or voting third party), even if it means the enemy gets into power. He thinks yes, because that is how he felt:
I really don't like how commentators act like this was a choice when there was no political reality where he could conceivably not run for reelection. The only way this could conceivably make sense is if there was some obvious candidate who wouldn't draw any opposition and who would be running as a continuation of the present administration. In other words, they would have had to name Kamala Harris as heir apparent and hope nobody credible wanted to challenge her. They weren't going to get that. The administration's shortcomings were manifest enough and Kamala's popularity weak enough that at least one squeaky wheel would emerge who would seriously threaten to derail the whole thing. At that point you're just guaranteeing a repeat of 2016 or any incumbent who faced a serious primary challenge.
On the other hand, you could (probably) keep Harris out and have an open primary with the usual large cast of candidates. But when do you start this process? Most candidates announce in the spring or early summer of the year prior to the election, and the first primary debates are held in the late summer or early fall. But the candidates need time to form exploratory committees and the like and get their campaigns together before they announce, so add an additional month or two of lead time. It's worth noting that Trump's nomination was not a fait accompli at this point, so there was a reasonable concern that the GOP candidate would have an advantage in the general if given more lead time. The latest Biden could have realistically waited to announce that he wasn't running would have been May or June of 2023, but more realistically it would have been made in March or April.
At this point, his presidency effectively ends. any new legislative proposals or foreign policy initiatives are now political hot potatoes that are discussed more in terms of their effect on the primary election than on their own terms. Support from his own party is no longer guaranteed, so better just to ditch anything the least bit controversial. This isn't good for the party, either, since changing candidates doesn't exactly guarantee a Democratic victory. This is put more starkly when you consider that the second half of Biden's presidency went much better than the first. Inflation cooled, the border crisis subsided somewhat, and COVID and Afghanistan were increasingly in the rear view mirror. Any attempts for the party to win back voters or simply do what they feel is right go up in smoke; they've effectively conceded to half a term. And to compound the error, Biden's tenure as president is frozen at that point, and it becomes the record that Democrats are running on, including those who would be willing to question Biden's decision making.
A Biden candidacy wasn't ideal, but he had already beaten Trump once and there weren't any candidates who could step in and make an obvious improvement. If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins. Conversely, if Biden doesn't run and Trump wins anyway then the pundits are writing articles about how the Democrats sacrificed 2 years of power in order to expose intraparty divisions and nominate a candidate who was stuck with Biden's record anyway and had no real chance of winning. So pick your poison.
Granting all this is true: it's still Biden's fault and he should have stepped down.
I'm sorry, I thought he was the adult in the room? Part of being an adult is being blamed for your decisions, not acting like they're sudden currents that swept you away for no reason.
He, the grownup, chose not only an unqualified but deeply unpopular and incompetent candidate. And he did so for explicitly racial reasons. Whose fault is it? The VP's only essential duties are to break ties in the Senate and to stand as a second for the President.
I also reject the self-serving notion that Bernie is what did in Hillary. She's always been unpopular and Bernie being relevant at all was the public desperately begging Democrats to take their money. Democrats didn't lose in 2008 because someone actually challenged at a primary instead of letting the party grandee be anointed. The party could also have leaned on Kamala to allow an open primary.
So if Biden wasn't Biden it'd be okay?
Like, this is part of what drove me crazy about the media spin on this. They made it seem as if Biden's mental decline was nothing more than a campaigning issue . So I suppose, in that light, it can look as a bad roll of the dice, bad tactics, a very good but rare counter that knocked Biden out. Some sort of July Surprise? Shit happens, move on.
No, Biden was unfit, physically and mentally. The reason the debate settled the matter is that it was undeniable proof of what people were told wasn't happening (and they had to keep being told because they didn't believe it). Biden hid the extent of this for months upon months not only from the public but from some of his colleagues and the media. This likely affected not just the campaign but his administration (given all of the reporting of stage-managing) Biden then couldn't hold it together under the stress of a full campaigning season, like Democrats like Dean Phillips warned ahead of time. By the time it finally came out, it was too late.
That is still Joseph Biden's fault. Why are we talking about this stuff like it just happened to him? Even if he could have white-knuckled it, he shouldn't have. Because the office of the President is too important to be left to a convalescent. And Biden, as the adult, should know that.
All of this happened against a backdrop of voters making it absolutely clear his age was an issue. Biden pushed through, thinking some combination of his policies (both the ones he claimed and the ones he tried to row back from), Trump's legal cases and general unfavourability would all win him the day - essentially holding the voters hostage, as Silver puts it. He gambled, and lost.
It was not at all practically impossible for an old President to step down and let the party battle it out. I understand that it felt that way psychologically for Biden. But Biden's political judgment doesn't seem to be so self-evidently sound that we can take it as Gospel.
We're hearing now from Democratic insiders like PSA that his polling showed a 400 Electoral College loss and even then he had to be dragged out. What about this implies some sort of judicious weighing of the options? It's just ego. He's way more like Trump than the media hagiography has implied. Worse: Trump actually does seem to be irreplaceable to his base.
The question is how many months. Remember, we're not talking about whether or not Biden should have dropped out earlier, but whether he should have run in the first place. He announced he was seeking a second term on April 25, at which point there were only two groups of people arguing that any kind of age or cognitive issues should keep him from running. The first was Republicans, but they had been arguing that Biden had dementia since at least 2019 and thus had no credibility on the issue. The second was people like Dean Phillips and James Carville, along with a bunch of rank and file Democrats, but their arguments were just that he was too old generally and not that he was experiencing any kind of specific decline. If he had instead announced that he wasn't seeking a second term then he would have been a lame duck immediately and all the problems I mentioned above would have come into play. Hell, his cognitive decline wouldn't have even been noticed, for precisely the same reason that no one is looking over his appearances from the past four months to find signs of further decline.
I don't know what the big deal is about this. It's not exactly a secret that running mates are chosen more due to political considerations than anything else. Hell, Trump's choice of Mike Pence over the more well-known Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie was pretty much a naked ploy to shore up his unsteady support among the Christian Right, yet I never hear criticism that he was chosen for religious reasons. By your criteria, he's an even worse choice than Harris, as his chances of winning a national election as second in line are roughly on par with Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee. Harris, for her part, chose a white guy after only considering white guys and after pretty much every commentator said she should pick a white guy, yet I never heard any criticism of her for choosing Tim Walz for racial reasons.
I agree with you there; Hillary was a bad candidate, and the Democrats should have seen that in 2008, but you go on to conclude
First, it wasn't Kamala's decision but that's not my main point. For all the talk I've heard about about having some kind of contested primary, I don't see any scenario in which it wouldn't have made the situation worse. Suppose Biden drops out immediately after that debate; what then? The convention is in less than two months and the election in just over four. The mechanics of scheduling new primaries in all 50 states less than a month after the last ones were completed is a tall order in and of itself, but even assuming the problem could be overcome it only distracts from the real issue. Who is going to jump of the couch to contend for a presidential nomination with that kind of lead time? Remember, nobody other than Biden has any fundraising apparatus or campaign staff at this point. You're asking candidates to start from scratch on short notice. And for the winner, what are the spoils, exactly? The opportunity to run an abbreviated campaign as part of a reclamation project.
Even if they were to dispense with actual elections and simply have a contested primary where candidates would lobby delegates, I doubt the party's best and brightest would be the ones signing up. Do you really think that an up and comer like Josh Sapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is going to waste political capital to take over the presidential bid of an unpopular incumbent? Why not wait a few more years to become more seasoned and make a normal bid where, if nominated, you have the time to run the campaign you want and you're going against a GOP running someone other than Trump for the first time in a dozen years? A contested primary or convention that only attracts b-listers and also-rans only makes the party look even more incompetent, in addition to exposing the internal divisions I spoke of above. Is Deval Patrick or Marianne Williamson a stronger general election candidate than Kamala Harris? Is Kamala a stronger candidate after beating one of those two? Easier to just endorse her and lobby for support rather than open up the clown car.
For having no credibility on the issue, the Republicans seemed to have gotten it right. Maybe you are wrong and they did have credibility but you didn’t listen.
Being eventually right isn't the same as being right. My grandmother had dementia in 2014. If I had continually said she had it beginning in 1995, I would've eventually been right, but only after nearly 20 years of being wrong. Additionally, the claims were always beyond anything that's been demonstrated thus far. While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia. His debate performance was bad, but the actual answers he gave weren't anything one wouldn't expect from a garden-variety bad debate performance. The criticism was more on his energy and demeanor than anything substantive. From my experience with the disease, this is not what one would expect from someone with that kind of cognitive decline.
Or, alternatively, Democrats lived in denial for years and dismissed every evidence, until the mountain of evidence got so large it was impossible to ignore anymore, and then they decided this is the moment from which credibility is counted. Very convenient for them, except some people still have memory and can notice that there was plenty of indications and plenty of evidence.
Bigger point is it doesn't matter at which point the medical diagnosis of "dementia" is supported. Maybe he will never be medically diagnosed with it. The point is he was mentally unfit for the rigors of President's job when he was elected, and he only got worse since. And that's exactly what Republicans were saying and Democrats were denying. Pretending like Republicans just got a bit of blind luck because perfectly fit Biden suddenly became unfit in some random freak accident is just bizarre cope by this point. It is absolutely clear Republicans were right from the start and Democrats were lying from the start (those - and there were many - who knew) or were deceived by the former category and willingly accepted the deception despite the evidence in front of their own eyes.
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Yes — in your hypo sure. But if you started mentioning grandma is slipping in 2010 you would’ve been correct. That hypo is closer to reality.
The republicans did talk about lack of energy (he did run a basement campaign after all) but pointed out he kept on making weird gaffes (eg confusing his wife with his sister, losing his train of thought). It got worse over his presidency but there was a pretty clear line.
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