That’s more or less where I am right now. All of the Democrat contenders are good enough. While Biden is not in my top three, I acknowledge that he’s probably going to win and I’m totally at peace with that. I’ll happily vote for him this fall.
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The timing is pretty weird… He’s clearly ahead of Warren and Klobuchar, yet they didn’t drop out (perhaps they’re waiting for their home states to vote?). If he dropped to swing votes to Biden, it might be too late, since many super Tuesday states have early voting or vote-by-mail, so I bet he’s already taken a decent portion of the votes (and I bet some non-zero amount will still vote for him, not realizing he’s dropped). I do think it’s a party move though - they need to reduce the number of centrists to make sure at least one of them can break the 15% threshold in each state if only to take some delegates away from Bernie.
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Several of those analyses have been based on state polling or tied to the electoral college.
Trump’s win was also a serious squeaker, even those states that put him over the top didn’t show anything like definitive or dominating support. And his campaign didn’t even know they’d done it, and don’t seemed to have planned for it.
Every indication is that almost anyone starts in the lead. Where it goes from there you can’t predict, but all this “so and so can’t beat Trump” is foolish. It’s more important to pick a good so and so, and have a good plan on how to beat Trump.
He’s out of money and all his best polling states are behind him. He’s basically out of runway. Warren and Klobuchar have a pretty minimal chance of making an impact on Super Tuesday. But it’s there are they still have the money to keep going for a bit.
Practically the only thing that’s seen candidates dropping thus far is funding. I mean the story line on South Carolina is that Biden “dominated”, with 50% support. The story before that was Sander’s wins which maxed out around 50% support. Front runner status in national polls is down to who cuts closest to 1/3.
There’s a hell of a lot of room here for sudden upsets, and if there isn’t a serious delegate lead for anyone after tomorrow the potential for a brokered convention is pretty big.
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Oh no, not Pete! What will all the well-meaning but ultimately poorly-informed parents of Bernie supporters do?
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Funny how most of his supporters are flocking to /r/sanders for president and the warren subreddit. I thought expanding Medicare was a radical communist idea?
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Agreed that it’s wrong to believe Biden, Warren, or Bloomberg can’t beat Trump, and I’d much rather have the polling we’re seeing now than the other direction.
But I do think that a very healthy skepticism of X vs. Trump polling is warranted. If for no other reason than they are telling us what we want to believe is true–that the country is going to snap back to its senses and some version of normality rather than being irrevocably changed. (to be clear, this isn’t directed at you personally, just in general terms)
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Pete was always a terrible candidate. His main perceived strengths within the party were that he’s young, he’s in a progressive demographic (not to be confused with progressive policies), he’s more or less main-line dem, and he’s not Trump. For some reason, main-line dems are under the illusion that an establishment (read unprincipled) candidate is a sure win against Trump because he’s so unpopular. This is a guaranteed losing strategy this election year. Putting a lot of weight behind a not-Trump candidate (i.e., Biden or Bloomberg) even more dangerous considering how much more likely Bernie Sanders is of getting a majority in the primary.
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I just get frustrated with the tendency to discuss Trump as some behemoth with deep support, and a campaign not run by idiots.
Seems self defeating, and I worry it will undermine turnout and enthusiasm. More over it glosses over the fact that Trump isn’t necessarily the most important thing. His enablers (including McConnell) will be fighting challenges up and down the ballot, and they basically made Trump. Getting him out of office stalls out an immediate problem. But if you think those assholes are gonna let anyone legitimately fix anything or correct the damage they’ve cause you gotta be high.
This is all eminently doable, but it’s not happing because exactly the right charismatic leader walks through the door.
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Vote for Biden?
I would also be wary of “polls show [candidate] beating Trump in the general election.” Whomever the candidate is still has several months of highly tuned conservative attack machine to weather before election day. By the time November rolls around at least 40% of the country will think they are the Devil incarnate.
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Are you including Bloomberg as a “BLUE”?
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Yes, anyone currently running for the Democratic nomination would be far superior to Trump—but you could say the same of almost everyone who was running for the Republican nomination in 2016.
I’ll vote for whoever wins the Democratic nomination but that doesn’t mean I don’t care who it is.
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Nah, he didn’t need any money to coast through super Tuesday. Why not throw in the towel on Wednesday? He didn’t need to drop two days before unless he’s trying to throw support elsewhere or perhaps is looking to not be embarrassed by a poor performance.
I agree that he is out of money - I recall seeing pictures of his SC office closed last week right in the lead up to the primary, which is crazy. Warren and Klob do poll well in their own states and I think are staying in as strategic stop-gaps to deny Bernie delegates that might put him over the top, but that’s some tin-foil hat stuff right there.
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This is so dumb I don’t know where to start. This is the sort of sentiment that got you in your current predicament, so you’re doubling down?
This guy [bloomberg] is a fucking clown. Who actually likes this billionaire racist? Haven’t you had enough of that kool-aid?
Can’t say the same. I’d sooner not vote than vote for bloomberg. I’d sooner not vote than vote for biden actually. I hope whomsoever wins has the wherewithal to get rid of the damnable republican bullshit we call an electoral college and move more towards a democratic election process.
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I think that someone needs to be really, spectacularly, fantastically bad before it makes any sense to not vote for them against Trump. I think you’d have to think someone was a one-in-a-million worst person to be president. To me, that means definitely supporting Biden*… but I get where you are coming from on Bloomberg.
* By “support” mean in theory. I don’t get a vote.
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As of Feb. 29, the Maryland primary (ETA: which isn’t until the end of April) still has every candidate except John Delaney, whose name says “withdrawn.” I don’t know if that means they have to explicitly ask to be removed, or what, but the list is updated every business day (and Delaney withdrew on Feb. 3). I don’t know what the ballot looks like in other states, but here – in addition to the candidate – the voter also chooses up to four delegates, with the name of the pledged candidate in parentheses. (E.g. presumably one may vote for Bernie as candidate, and also select two delegates for Marianne Williamson, one for Andrew Yang, and one for Steyer).
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This reminds me… Over the weekend I read a short interview with Nate Silver, who pointed out that 538 had Trump with a thirty percent chance of winning: “Trump’s going to win the election about as often as a good baseball player gets a base hit… We were quite emphatic that the election was competitive, and that Trump had a chance.”
(I don’t actually remember what they emphasized or didn’t, but I’d agree that 30 percent is much different than non-zero)
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It doesn’t quite work that way. There are campaign workers and offices that remain open and that needs to be paid for. Shutter those and letting those people go, while remaining on the ballot gets noticed. And your basically out of it anyway, but the shit performance that comes out of it still reflects badly on you.
And if you can’t afford to continue after, even if you get something out of it. All your really doing is complicating shit and making the delegate situation messy. Burning what money you have left instead of sending it to the general campaign fund.
I agree it’s a little weird given that it’s tomorrow, dude’s still gonna be on the ballot. And he doesn’t even have time to campaign for some one else. He has to have known he was boned in South Carolina. But it doesn’t look good to drop before then, given the splash he made.
I really think he was out of it before voting even started. His donors apparently maxed out on direct contributions last year, and his “I’m young Biden” pitch started around then. Seemingly a play for Biden’s big donors who’d already maxed out and began to look for places to throw their money.
But especially once Bloomberg got involved they never lined up behind Pete. I don’t think he had the runway without that, his funding base was just very narrow but very moneyed. The impression that he had a shot came almost exclusively from how much money he was raising.
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I like this guy OK.
I liked him better before he started running to Biden’s right.
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The most hilarious thing is that tomorrow, California will have 10x the delegates that Biden has already won, and he will not win California. Nor will Bloomberg. It’ll be Bernie, and he’ll be the front-runner. But Bloomberg will keep pissing away a few drops of his fortune to cloud, distort, muddle and divide so that when a bunch of squishy fools can’t come around to Bernie, Bloomberg will still have the money to seem like an option. And we’ll lose, because the DNC can’t say to someone Uh, we don’t want you in the race or the debates.
I think Buttigeg is a ratfuck centrist republican with a good line of bullshit and some okay personal presentation skills. I’d still vote for him over Bloomberg.
Btw, “Vote Blue, No Matter Who!” is fine, but if I have to vote Bloomberg, I simply won’t fucking vote. Because he’s as bad as Trump, if not worse, and he’ll only get the nomination because a bunch of anti-vaxxer wine-parents in rich zip codes can’t be bothered to look up “democratic socialism.”
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If it makes it easier just tell yourself that you’re not voting for president, you’re voting for the Supreme Court justices that are going to need to be appointed over the next four to 8 years. Because as the republicans have known for years but some of the rest of us seem to have only learned recently, that REALLY MATTERS. And those guys tend to stick around longer than presidents.
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