Of course they do. That is how progress is made - by envisioning what you want the outcome to be and planning steps to get there. There’s a word for that: strategy.
Yes, I do. Do you? After the email hearings and Benghazi and “deplorables” and not campaigning in swing states, she was up 20 points over T**** until the Friday before election day.
Come back from what, exactly? The polls didn’t move after the debate. The polls didn’t move after the shooting. The polls moved slightly when Democrats started calling for Biden to step down.
Because historically, incumbents overseeing a strong economy always win. And polls showed no one was better suited to beating T**** than Biden. You can find a post about that exact finding here on BoingBoing.
It wasn’t the party, though. The party apparatus was behind Biden. It was wealthy donors. We watched it happen in real time. People are tripping over themselves to deny it but that’s what happened. And that can’t be allowed to happen again.
May I respectfully suggest that the early reaction to Harris suggest that this is an utterly irrelevant question that can be parsed and dissected a thousand different ways that will all lead to the same conclusion: so what?
Whether you think that Biden was “popular,” whether or not you think he was treated unfairly by those who advised him to drop out, whether you think he would have beaten Trump or not, it’s moot now. Biden isn’t going to be the nominee, Harris is.
Clearly Dean Phillips ran against Biden in the primaries.
Also, Dean Phillips lost to Biden in the primaries. Including in NH where Biden wasn’t even on the ballot but was a write in. There were 22 candidates on the NH ballot. Nothing stopped them from being there. They all lost to Biden who wasn’t on the ballot and had to be written in.
Dean Philips was also advocating for Biden to drop out and then for a new selection process.
This was the real problem. Internal infighting within the party in public. Even a small amount of Democrats actively campaigning against the Democratic candidate was a huge problem. One that the longer it continued would create a larger and larger problem.
Democrats campaigning that the Democratic candidate cannot win is a self fulfilling activity. Even if it isn’t a majority.
Fortunately, the party seems to have resolved that. With a little grass roots help to nudge it back on the path.
There are plenty of topics to discuss those things in, though. This topic is a place to discuss what happened to cause Biden to drop out and the brilliant execution of the transition to Harris in order to prevent an open convention for four more days.
It’s rude to try to force people to talk about what you want to talk about when there are other threads available to do so.
Nice cherry-picking. T**** spent most of his term in the low 30’s. Shrub, as I noted above, cratered at 24%. You can’t divorce actual current events from the approval rating by picking a random date but ignore the overall trend, nor the fact that every president since Clinton spent the bulk of their presidency well below 50% approval.
It isn’t a random date, though: it is to compare apples to apples. 3 months before re-election!
Also BOTH Obama and Bush2’s presidential approval average was about 48-49%, certainly not well below 50%. You were right for 2 presidents out of 4 after Clinton being well below 50%
A random date would be helpful if we didn’t have a totality of data for every day of each modern president’s term. We do. And it tells a consistent story.
When you include the first 100 days data in the average, it skews the set. When you include 911 and the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the average for Shrub, it skews the set. Look at the trend line. It’s abysmal!
I would have used a later date for the Biden vs other presidents comparison but that breaks causality. It’s not a random date, it’s a now date!
You do make a good and valid point that US politics is changing, and changing fast, and using historical data to draw inferences is less valuable than it used to be.
I deleted my comment earlier, because this really isn’t the important part of it. But I read real-time graphs for a living, and often have to make decisions when the trend isn’t 100% known. I saw no shenanigans in the math. The math isn’t the important part.
Usually on a trend line like this, there’s some sort of weighted moving average being applied. Sometimes it’s a simple “average of the previous 20 points”, sometimes more recent points are weighted more heavily, such as an exponentially-weighted moving average, or EWMA. To my eyes, this trend looks like an EWMA.
I find it easier to see from other angles sometimes:
Two red dots on the upper-left leverage the red line off to the left. Most of that jump is hanging on them.
By contrast, the blue dots don’t jump as far to the left. Biden also had an uptick, but not nearly as far.
There is also a greater proportion of blue dots to the right side of the blue trend than there are red dots on the right side of the red trend.
The math looks clean to me. But the math doesn’t mean much.
There is a lot you can argue about here that’s way more productive than this. For example: polls always depend on getting a representative sample. That’s been hard since smartphones came out; in other words, the problem is over a decade old and there’s no solution in sight. Poll results are skewed heavily towards people they can reach; people who answer calls from people they don’t know, which pretty much excludes Gen Y and younger.
I didn’t read all the replies in this thread; I only came here to say this:
Kamala Harris is going to be the Democratic nominee for President. It is incumbent upon us to make sure she is President.
Full stop.
Biden has served decades in the interests of the United States and he has acknowledged that his time has passed. He has gracefully elevated Kamala Harris as the next Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States.
This thread, mid-July polls, and discussion of same, are not helpful in that endeavor.
That’s been my stance all along. Whether you were worried about Biden’s age or not, if you or anyone had confidence in Harris, well, there you go. It was a package deal.
Polls have been historically wrong all too many times to not have confidence in them. Just look at Harry Truman. Press, pundits, and polls got that completely wrong. So all that hype over poll number was just reifying the negativity to ruining sentiment. I’m just glad Biden flipped the naysayers the bird by endorsing Harris.
I am concerned about Harris’ prosecution record from her time in California. That was an encumbrance when she ran against Biden. However, it’s possible that may not be enough to dislodge her for those who don’t live in California and the Bay Area.
I’ve held long enough that the real reason the naysaying campaign against Biden was more about Harris. So screw those toe rags.
