Boring, reassuring, normal – these are Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be careful. They could also be his great weaknesses.
That’s because any return to “normal” would be disastrous for America.
Normal led to Trump. Normal led to the coronavirus.
Normal is four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top.
Normal is 40 years of shredded safety nets, and the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world.
Normal is also growing corruption of politics by big money – an economic system rigged by and for the wealthy.
Normal is worsening police brutality.
Normal is climate change now verging on catastrophe.
Normal is a GOP that for years has been actively suppressing minority votes and embracing white supremacists.
Normal is a Democratic party that for years has been abandoning the working class.
Given the road we were on, Trump and Covid were not aberrations. They were inevitabilities. … If the underlying trends don’t change, after Biden we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see.
Which is the scary part, because the GOP doesn’t seem to get demoralized enough to stay home while the democrats do.
In 2010 the GOP had a red wave election. Obama called it a ‘shellacking’. But it was maybe a 6 million vote margin (at least in the house). In the house, 39 million democrats came out to vote while 45 million republicans came out to vote. Basically democrats were demoralized due to the ineptitude of their party in 2009 and 2010 to bother to vote in 2010. People didn’t flip to become republicans, its just that democrats didn’t bother to vote that year.
By comparison, no matter how inept the GOP is, people still come out and vote. 2018 could’ve been a gigantic wave election, 2020 also, but the GOP still came out to vote no matter how terrible their party was. Normally about ~35-40 million people of each party show up to vote in a midterm federal election. In 2018 however 60 million democrats came out to vote, but so did 51 million republicans. If GOP turnout was only ~40 million, democrats would’ve won way way more.
A ‘wave election’ isn’t so much about high turnout for your party as much as it is low turnout for the other party nowadays. That ~45 million votes the GOP got in 2010 would’ve been a joke if the democrats had gotten ~60 million votes like they did in 2018. And I don’t see the GOP having low turnout (unless Trump’s efforts to convince his base that voting is futile since its all rigged comes to pass, and I doubt it will).
In other words: if the Democrats had had high turnout in 2010.
It’s only partly about what the other party does. Record high turnout for Biden/Harris got them elected despite there also having been record high turnout for Trump.
Check out this article, in particular the quotes by Nichole Remmert, a Democratic campaign manager. She points out that many Biden voters were voting against Trump, not for Biden. That’s why Biden’s victory didn’t translate into Democratic victories down-ballot; many voters wanted Trump repudiated but weren’t liberal/Democrats and voted Republican in the other races.
In other words, Biden was hardly a draw for voters, as if his magnetic charisma and Obama-like appeal somehow turned people out to vote for him. People were voting against Trump, and any Democrat would have done it.
Biden isn’t particularly charismatic, but enough Republican voters found him acceptable to vote for him. There’s no guarantee they would have voted for another candidate. They might have abstained if they thought they were too liberal.
Exactly. That’s why I supported Biden (even though I didn’t vote for him), it was harm reduction. My priority was with the Propositions on the ballot that I’ve been campaigning and organizing for. I’ve seen my rights continually taken away from me during these past four years and I can’t let it continue any longer. Those of us on the left didn’t vote for Biden even if we did actually vote for him, it was just a way to prevent fascism from spreading further.
I’ve had this discussion with many leftists who feel completely unrepresented and therefore see electoral politics as a waste of time. I point out that Trump is a unique danger that can’t continue and therefore we have to support Biden as a necessity. I wouldn’t be saying that if he was running against someone like Mitt Romney or another somewhat sane Republican. I wouldn’t have supported Biden at all in that scenario.
Yes, this. Those who think Bernie would have done as well against Trump are ignoring the reality that someone who’d find Biden acceptable (and thus vote for him against Trump) would NOT find Bernie acceptable. Such people would have either held their nose and voted for Trump, or abstained from voting (which would have advantaged Trump).
Voting isn’t about being in love with the candidate; it’s about who you can tolerate. Millions of voters could tolerate Biden, who would not have been willing to tolerate Bernie.
And, frankly, when a person claims to believe that Bernie would have won against Trump, I’m less inclined to grant them credibility on other topics. There seems to be a lack of engagement with reality at work, there, that is off-putting.
So Democrats would rather let Trump win and ruin this country further than vote for someone running on actual issues that can drastically help the country just because they are so afraid of the evil socialist!!!
Tells me a lot about what they really care about. Self-interest over humanity isn’t a solely Republican trait.
I’m not sure who you’re replying to, but if if was to me, I wasn’t talking about Democratic voters disliking Bernie. I was talking about voters who had voted for Trump in the past but were disenchanted (in other words, independents or Republicans). There were millions such who voted GOP all down-ballot, but also voted for Biden over Trump.
Those voters would not have been able to tolerate Bernie. They could talk themselves into Biden, however, since he’s more centrist.
No, you’re right that they wouldn’t be able to tolerate Biden, but we shouldn’t be targeting Republicans in the first place. The Lincoln Project has shown to be a failure (and a scam, imo) and the number of Republicans who did defect was nowhere near what was expected.
The Democrats need to stop treating the enemy as allies just because they get desperate. They would have been able to make up for what few Repubs we’ve pulled off with the support they would have gained from the left. But the Dems always run right. Always.
I live in California, Biden was guaranteed to win so I didn’t bother voting for him. If I still lived in Nevada I would have gave in and voted for him.
Not the first time, I also voted for Jill Stein in 2012 for the same reason. There was little substantial difference between Obama and Romney. It was a different situation this time.
It’s funny you say that because back in his younger days one of Biden’s perceived strengths was charisma. His career is uniquely odd because once upon a time he was the whizzkid in American politics who people in the beltway wanted to interview and speculated about a presidential run as soon as he turned old enough.
The Biden who served in the senate in the 70s and 80s was described as being a good orator but too much into style than substance but the Biden of the 90s and especially the 2000s was a foreign policy bore.
If people don’t realize that Republicans are beyond hope at this point, I don’t know what I can do to convince them.
They have been brainwashed through years of right-wing media to believe in this fantasy they have created where they are the heroes fighting against anybody trying to change their society for the worse. And now Trump has fulfilled the end goal of all this brainwashing - he is the logical outcome of all the dangerous insanity they have drilled into the minds of these hapless drones. And there will be more of his kind, this is the new normal for the GOP. The only way to deal to deal with them is to deprogram them somehow, or fight them as hard as we can.
The Trumpers may be hopeless, but Biden wouldn’t have beaten Trump without getting the votes of Republicans and conservatives who thought Trump was terrible. Like it or not (and I don’t like it), we needed those voters to beat Trump.