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I'd be surprised if the Democrats were that dumb. Not extremely surprised, but surprised.
But in general I agree. It's 2026. Election's in 2028. We've got a war to get through, plus midterms. Lots of things can happen, it's way too soon to count Vance out.
I think Kamala will have a lot of power because she presents a fantasy. If a Kamala wins 2028, it’s a mulligan, Trump was just a fluke after all, we’re back to the original timeline. She won after all it just took a while. Anybody else is an explicit acknowledgement that Trump won and we’re living in his shadow.
Kamala was never that popular without a coronation there's no way she gets the nomination.
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She lost the popular vote to Trump. The stink of failure is too great this time. I predict an early flame out in the primary for her.
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The dem primaries for the midterms have, so far, pushed towards conventional wisdom white male candidates. Not the same thing as moderates, but not diversity hires or people who can't string a sentence together.
Speaking of, what the heck is going on with Jasmine Crockett? First she gets beat by the white guy which clearly has to be down to racist misogynoir, right? and now there's some possible scandal over a former security guy of hers turning out to be a criminal impostor who just got shot by the cops?
I see she's another one touched by the guiding hand of Kamala:
I can’t speak for the others, but Lina Hildalgo is also crashing and burning, although she blames ‘mental health problems’ rather than racism and sexism.
Talarico is not a moderate; but he is a conventional seeming white guy… until you hear him talk(which during the primary, he didn’t do very much of). He won the primary due to black-Hispanic tensions and mismanaged elections in Crockett’s strongest county. This doesn’t make him a particularly strong general election candidate although he seems like it superficially.
I don't have much exposure to him. Just some sound bites where he comes off as a decent and likeable Christian with down-to-earth, pragmatic ideas about politics. Though I see there's now a kerfuffle over a deep fake Talarico reading some of his old tweets and there's no hiding the fact he's debased himself at the altar of woke in the past. Is that what makes him immoderate? Or is there more to it?
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Who have they got otherwise though? Newsome probably gets cancelled eventually for resembling a white male with initiative
Newsom at the moment looks like the front-runner, but his problem (same as with Kamala) is that the skills that won things in California aren't going to scale up to the national stage. Nate Silver had a run-down of "these are possible Democratic candidates who are doing better than Newsom" but none of those jumped off the page for me.
It can't be Kamala a second time, because she imploded so badly first time round that if they put her in a free primary there's no way she'll win (see her run for 2020 which planted the seeds of a lot of things that tripped her up in 2024, e.g. the infamous trans surgeries bit) and if they try and force her as the nominee as they did for 2024 there are no reasons for it this time round as there were last time, and unless someone has even fewer functioning brain cells than Tim Walz no way they would agree to be her VP (see Shapiro's little hissy-fit over why she rejected him).
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Newsom is the obvious choice; it's possible the Democrats can keep their wokies under control long enough to elect him. There's also Shapiro, though with the anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic) turn in both parties, I find him unlikely. And AOC, who is probably more electable than Kamala (though not by much).
The wokies can't win a straight vote. They universally hated Biden but it didn't matter.
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Yeah, but I think his problem is the same as Kamala's (and indeed, Pete Buttigieg's problem): great, you did fantastic in your home state, now what?
He was governor of California, what does that mean for the rest of the country? Is he going to try and turn the entire USA into California? Some might love that idea, some might not. I can see why he's trying to rewrite his personal history ("I had to take a job as a paper delivery boy because my single mom had to work multiple jobs! I'm dyslexic!") in order to get away from the billionaire connections, but that's not really going to work. The French Laundry incident, the Getty wedding where he and a rake of other Californian pols were all too happy to bow and scrape for their very good close friends - it's not everybody can have City Hall closed down to preside over their single wedding. That's not helping with "I can relate to you, ordinary people, because I too had a hard life" presentation:
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