i believe these so-called “centrists” want two republicans to choose from on the ballot. they need to be kicked to the curb.
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As a left-leaning Brit, the vibe I get from Kamala Harris is something of a rerun of the excitement around Obama. A lot of Americans are really eager for her. They’ve donated $100M from small donors in a few days. She’s getting the lying knocks about birtherism and so on, of course. That shows the Republicans are scared of her. I genuinely feel Harris will energise POC and young voters and a lot of people who worried that Biden was too old. Plus of course Trump is now too old.
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I’ve got some friends that will never vote for a democrat, they’re pretending to be upset that there wasn’t a primary with other democrats that they would never vote for.
They’re upset the will of the people, blah blah blah.
They never post a single trump policy or not once explain how he will fix the economy or bring peace to the world.
It’s just Kamala bad, trump savior.
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Just to be clear: I think increasing turnout and making voting easier are extremely important. I think they’d favor democrats in all races nationwide, but even if they didn’t, I’d still think they were extremely important. This should have been a central principle of democratic politics for a very long time, but if we start now, we can make a big difference starting in another election cycle or two. I’m all in favor.
I also don’t understand how swing voters can exist, or what that thought process feels like, but please don’t pretend they don’t exist. It’s gone down over time, but they’re still 5-10% of the electorate as measured by the past several elections, while key races (not just for the presidency in specific states) have margins much smaller than that.
If we do succeed in greatly increasing voter turnout, especially among POC, yes that will favor the democrats, but in terms of views, this is is a population whose viewpoints are on average less liberal than the average white democrat (because conservative white people vote republican). So if you want to motivate POC to overcome current barriers to voting and turn out in this election cycle, “become more left-leaning” is not obviously a winning move to do that. Youth, yes, sure. POC, not so much. My guess is that after a few blue waves, the net result of greatly increasing POC turnout ends up looking like “Republicans become less racist (which is a great outcome!), then democrats moderate their views to avoid losing their more conservative voters.”
Welcome!
I agree with most of your claims, but this part makes me a bit itchy:
As for AOC, I believe two things: 1) she was afraid of someone other than Kamala being put on the ticket, ie another white dude with a white VP instead of a minority woman at least as VP
Are you talking about her much quoted X talk? Where she was defending Biden’s decision to stay in?
If so, I watched it, and I thought she genuinely believed that since Biden was determined to stay the course, he deserved support. I also think she wasn’t afraid of Harris not becoming the nominee; I think she was sincere in stating that powerful donors could well prevent that. (I actually wonder how she squares that now with how quickly Harris appears to have secured the nomination.)
- as someone on the far left of the party, it was especially important for her standing to not be seen as someone stabbing the leadership in the back because she is probably in danger of losing party support for being too progressive anyway.
I think she didn’t want to be seen stabbing Biden in the back because she saw it as important to support him at that point in his determination to stay in the race. I don’t think she thought anyone else should have been stabbing him either.
As for her losing support for being too progressive, well, certainly from some centrist Dems, but she was seen at the White House just before she recorded that midnight talk. I think she has a lot of support from leadership, both from a surprisingly progressive Biden and now likely from Harris (which is probably why she was called in for a sit-down).
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I think I will listen to actual PoC’s on this issue. And that would suggest this is, perhaps not totally, entirely, accurate. Are there Black conservatives? Sure. Are there conservative Latinos? Oh, hell yes. Lots. But to make it out that these populations are more conservative than white Dems is a stretch. Any population is going to be a spectrum, as I say quite often. But the PoC population has been the backbone of the left(ish) wing as long as they have had the right and ability to vote. As far as Republicans becoming less racist (and misogynist, and xenophobic, and homophobic and all the rest) that would be great, but it will not happen until the current iteration of the GQP is utterly destroyed. MAGA delenda est!! Only then can a “conservative” party reconstitute itself as something other than a christofascist cult of personality. I hope that can happen. But we cannot structure our current existential struggle around that possible future event. We have to sweep them form power utterly.
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There definitely seems to be a meeting of the minds between those upset that the GOP got caught entirely flat-footed by Harris, and those who are primarily upset that their absolute certainty about what would happen over the last month was not entirely justified.
Either brand of foot-stomping seems to be pretty irrelevant at this point and looks to be shouting at a train that has left the station at full speed.
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As metrics go, this one is super misleading.
There’s a large group where the president is unpopular just because he’s from the other party. Doesn’t matter which way.
There’s a group that dislike some specific policies that also drives the number down. However, that doesn’t mean they like the other candidate better. Often, this dislike is because the policy is largely the same as the other candidate or the other candidate has a position that they dislike even more for the same policy.
Just looking at the approval number combines both those groups. Even though the second group is likely to still vote for the incumbent. It’ll depend on other factors, like how much they are likely to be swayed and change and how the specific issues mixes with all the others. Along with if the dislike has deterred them from voting at all.
Lots and lots of extra context and nuance needed when looking at an approval number.
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IMO Democrats should not worry about what MAGAs think. They should concentrate on 1. getting their own vote out in big numbers, and 2. pick up as many voters as possible from people who can’t stomach different parts of MAGA policy, e.g. abortion, book-banning, policitising the judiciary. There must be lots more things too.
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She presented it much better than me (no surprise there), but I was thinking the same thoughts. All the drop out talk was Democrats campaigning against Democrats. Generally hurting the campaign. Dropping out and selecting a new candidate had two options.
Option 1 - Contested selection with many candidates. All fighting with each other. This would have destroyed the party with infighting. It would have been great for media clicks.
Option 2 - Instant support for a single candidate. All the “blitz primary” and many different suggestions for candidates made this option sound like magic and extremely unlikely.
I thought her video explained these risks well and concern that option 2 was unlikely. That this option was not what people were discussing.
Then, magic happened and we got a unicorn. We got option 2, avoided all the internal fighting that would have weakened any eventual candidate.
While it might be nice to hear the story of how the magic happened after the election in November, I think it’s more likely we’ll hear about it in a book 4 or 5 years from now.
Until then, I would like to believe how this Thread describes it is what happened.
Even if that’s just fiction, it still sounds great. Plus, we got the magic unicorn option.
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I fully agree that presidential approval is FAR from the only metric that goes into re-election chances. However, the only point I’m making about this is that Biden is very unpopular. Historically unpopular! At this point in his term, according to basically every major pollster, he’s the least popular president this century. For example, Gallup presidential popularity from mid-July of a President’s first term in office:
Biden 38% approval
Trump 41% approval
Obama 47% approval
Bush 2 49% approval
Clinton 57% approval
Bush 1 31% approval
Reagan 55% approval
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I also choose to believe that Biden worked this all out to screw over the fascists and those who put power over country. I think that it might have worked, which is why the Repubs are having such a shitfit over it, claiming that the Dems have a legal requirement to nominate the candidate of the Repub’s choosing, even if he says he will not run. I choose this because it makes Biden even more of a hero than I already thought he was. But it is a choice, and I recognize that. In time, I think the true story will come out. But at the moment, it really doesn’t matter. We have who we need at the moment, and we need to run with that and smash the absolute hell out of the fascists. Let’s get this done.
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At this point,
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Why didn’t you circle and use the blue dots (Polls with Biden ahead) at the same time point as the red ones(polls with T**** ahead)?
Frankly, if you look at all the data points and the history of the trend, that sharp uptick looks Sharpied in…
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Welcome to BoingBoing. Typically, we don’t throw insults like that around. It’s rude.
It was the story because the media ignored his administration’s accomplishments (see dozens of articles and discussions here) because competence is boring and made it the story. I know general presidential elections are far apart, so people forget how they work, but we’re 5 months out from Election Day. Biden had barely begun to campaign at this point. The bulk of the campaign fund get spent in the last 45 days before Election Day. The media drives the narrative leading into that period, but campaigns start driving the narrative as Election Day approaches.
The claim “you can’t come back from this” is ludicrous.
There are, though - past elections. We can gauge the accuracy of polls by comparing them to election results in other areas (US special elections, past elections, the UK, France). Those comparisons show a significant rightward lean in poll results.
Undemocratic! Undemocratic! Undemocratic! Undemocratic!
Anyone could have run against Biden in the primaries. You know what they all knew? That he is 81. That wasn’t a surprise. If age was a concern, all the folks who have been put forward as possible replacements could have stepped up then. You know that several of them were dipping their toes in the water, right? Newsom for sure was getting poll numbers vs T**** to gauge a run. Those numbers didn’t look good or he would have run. None of this happens in a vacuum. Your take on this is ahistorical and naive.
That’s the only part of this we agree upon.
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Biden is very unpopular with old Republicans who watch far too much Newsmax and still answer their landline that doesn’t have caller ID because that costs more.
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I think it is exceptionally important to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President again, and a key part of that is for Democrats to be honest with themselves. It works against Democrats electorally to act like Biden is a popular President. That’s just false.
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one thing not considered is that aoc’s video and its reception might itself have helped to sway things in this direction.
her perspective in her meeting, and her publicizing that opinion - loudly - might have woken up some of those wanting a more open race… because, really, aoc was right. and, unlike the gop, the dems can feel still feel some shame
plus, honestly, the people themselves. harris raised 100 million from small donors in just a few days?
no one predicted that level of grassroots support ( and definitely no polls ) - nobody could step in front of that train and not get absolutely crushed.
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It wasn’t meant as an insult, it’s just that left-wing discussions often circle around the way we wish the world was. Man, if only the press would report on Trump the way they hound Biden for his age. Sure, but the press won’t do that! You can loathe the way the NY Times reports on this, but you won’t change it, unfortunately, and to claim that Biden could have come back from that is, to me, being blind to how these things work. Remember Hillary’s emails?
Similarly, Gavin Newsome would guarantee memes about Don Jr. having taken his girlfriend, and now Don Sr. taking his country. Silly, and sexist, and with no bearing on the actual job, but still worth a few percent of votes unfortunately. The same way some white dudes will now wring their hands and look for any reason to not vote for the black woman.
And I think it’s naive to think that the primaries were an open forum for anyone to try oneself against Biden. I don’t begrudge party politics - it’s important to have some kind of leadership and united messaging. But it was very clear early on that Biden wanted to run again and if the incumbent wants to run, you anoint him.
Sure, on paper anyone could have run against him. But it was equally unlikely that anyone would. And either way, no challenge was presented in the primaries. What I spoke against was the idea that the voters in the primaries made their preferences clear and it would be undemocratic for those votes to not be counted. Fact is, Biden did not win the primaries against anyone (unless you want to count fringe candidates), it was party politics. If party politics now foce him to withdraw, then both are equally democratic or undemocratic.
Let me just add to a question above: I was referring to live stream by AOC where she seemed to say that people clamoring for Biden to be replaced shouldn’t be so quick to do so on the assumption that Kamala Harris would be next in line. I understood that the way I said above.
