Kamala was not what Biden's betrayers wanted. Too bad

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With a great deal of genuine respect for you, no.

There is a meaningful policy point to be made here, and it relates to the actual topic of the OP. I believe it is imperative to remember what happened here and, once the election is over and (hopefully) Harris takes office, take steps to prevent it from happening again. We can’t just let this get smoothed over and go back to business as usual. What happened to push Biden out is nearly on the same level as Jan6th when it comes to the stability and legitimacy of our democracy. It can’t get lost in the shuffle.

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Sure if you think that alchemy is science and that numerology is maths… ALL the polls have been within the margin of error. All of them. :woman_shrugging:

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Seriously? However you may feel about the pressure campaign those two things are simply not comparable. At all.

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They really only have one playbook, and all the play are the same. And they are stupid. Can’t forget that part.

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Cutting taxes on the working class. Tax credits for renters. Major expansions of Medicare. These would dramatically change taxes and increase spending.
They’re the right things to do. But I would argue that are centrist wouldn’t do them!

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Undermining the will of the voters from votes already cast and counted? Sounds pretty similar to me.

Different methods, same intent. But this one actually worked.

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Any day now, Vance and the MAGAts will start chanting, “Lock her up,” in reference to Harris.

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Would you mind laying out briefly (if possible) your evidence that pushing Biden out was, as MAGAts also claim, a coup within the Dem establishment?

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Third-Way politicians wouldn’t do them, but I’d argue that the movement was less centrist than a pant-pissing reaction to the success of Reaganism/Thatcherism.

All of those policies were bog-standard Dem establishment/centrist positions from the late 1930s to the early 1990s. That’s the centrist position Biden spent most of his career defending and promoting. Harris seems on-board with it as well.

Put another way, let’s stop joining the corporate media in equating “centrism” with “Third Way” (or Manchin/Sinema DINOism for that matter).

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I’ll be as succinct as I can and provide clarification as needed.

Timeline:
-T**** vs Biden debate: Biden shows poorly, despite bringing lots of facts and accomplishments, but low energy. T**** lies his ass off, also performs poorly; both lose points in subsequent polls.
-Large donors start calling Dem politicians to demand that they push Biden to drop out. Some of these politicians anonymously call that pressure “blackmail”, as it tied pledged $ support to Biden dropping out. If Biden didn’t drop out, no money.
-Polls continue to show a tie, even after the debate
-Large donors also publicly call for Biden to drop out, in parallel to some opportunistic Dem politicians and the previously mentioned “pressured” Dems.
-T**** assassination attempt
-Despite conventional wisdom that T**** would experience a surge from surviving the attempt, being (slightly) injured, and the fist-pumping optics, polls don’t show any improvement in his numbers
-Calls for Biden to drop out accelerate, even though every possible replacement publicly states support for Biden continuing
-RNC Convention: despite conventional wisdom (and historical data) that show both parties get a bump from their convention and from announcing VP picks, no such bump manifests for T****. Polls remain a dead heat.
-Biden steps down due to pressure from within the party. Note that his own description of this was that he felt “betrayed by people he thought were friends and allies.”

Again, I’m not calling out any individual voters on this. It was the pressure from large donors and the breathless coverage by the media (who are willing to risk democracy for clicks, or actively want T**** to win so that their corporate overlords can have low taxes) that caused this. And there are policy solutions to mitigate or prevent both in the future.

ETA: some citations

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Problem is we need better than the usual margin of error toss-up in order to beat GOP electoral college redistricting and Supreme Court shenanigans. We need at least a 5 point lead, and Biden wasn’t going in that direction. Harris will be in a much better position to accomplish that.

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That neglects the built-in errors of modern polling, which show a 10-20% right-wing bias compared to actual voting results.

I do agree that Harris is showing better energetics from younger voters, but I’m not sure that can be separated from the context of Biden being forced out by wealthy interests.

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How does that differ from what I said? I literally said this:

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With wealthy owners, who might be putting an editorial thumb on the scales.

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That’s a separate matter, mostly having to do with smart campaigning rather than shifts in policy positions. The Biden campaign learned from the disaster of 2016, didn’t neglect swing states like Wisconsin or neglect blue-collar/union concerns, and won in 2020. Harris has the same core staff.

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Only in the timing. You asked us to stop discussing it now, but I think it is important to discuss now our it will get lost by the time January comes around and (hopefully) Dems have a chance to start enacting policy.

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Thanks for laying out your conception of a coup. A big thing missing, I think, is that as I understand it, the decision to pull out was nonetheless Biden’s: he wasn’t “forced out.” And waddya know, that decision and its timing are looking pretty smart right now.

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November 6 is not January. All I’m saying is we need to be united right now. To be clear, I am not happy about the way in which Biden was, in my opinion, pushed out. But it happened, and it’s done, and there’s no going back. You said we need to investigate what happened after the election and take steps to prevent it from happening again. I agree. After the election. Right now, preventing a fascist takeover of our government is more important.

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