I’m not paraphrasing the LA Times. People can read the article for themselves. I’m saying that I agree with both the New York Times and the LA Times (and dozens of other publications) that Trump is an extreme danger and must be defeated. I agree that beating up on Biden isn’t productive, but that’s not actually what anyone is trying to do. The objective is to get Biden to give way to a candidate with the actual ability to win the election. Biden should be an elder statesman advising the next generation, representing the institutional wisdom of the Democratic Party, not an old geezer struggling in vain to win another election.
So the one poll you just linked to showed Biden losing, or at-best tied, to Trump, and shows Harris beating him… yet she’s the “maybe?”
Biden’s losing to Trump, he’s ten-odd points down from this point four years ago, he’s cratering donors, has mostly back-handed support from Congressional Dems, and this is after he’s been campaigning as the presumptive nominee for months and is showing cognitive decline to anyone with eyeballs.
I’m afraid that polling “neck-and-neck” with a convicted felon rapist who headed up an attempt to overthrow the government less than four years ago, and who’s also responsible for overturning Roe, isn’t the blue ribbon for Biden you think it is.
I’m waiting for more comparisons to Lear. Or maybe Ran, since everything’s better with samurai.
Then what’s that say about the other possibilities who don’t poll much better, or even worse? Are we now taking for granted that not outpolling Trump by double digits shows that the Democratic candidate is weak?
The other possibilities haven’t been president for 3+ years and have had no promotion as presidential candidates. Make Harris the candidate and give her the spotlight and I’d wager she polls much higher than Trump.
Didn’t we have a similar discussion to this about Bernie Sanders in 2016?
Biden had to poll much higher than Trump in 2020 to get the results he actually did, which were much lower. If that sort of delta happens again, Trump is president again, having probably picked up Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Maybe add in New Hampshire, Michigan, and the lone Nebraska EV that Biden got.
Sure, but my point was more that I don’t think a Dem candidate is inherently weak because they don’t have a landslide lead over Trump. This has been discussed before, and I agree.
Maybe, but I wasn’t on the Dope yet!
Exactly my thought. If this is where Biden is after being the presumptive nominee for months, and Harris currently isn’t that far behind his numbers (or even ahead of them according to at least one poll), put her out in front and see what she can do.
I’ll keep saying it: If you’re running neck-and-neck against a convicted felon rapist who tried to overthrow the government less than four years ago, and is also responsible for overturning Roe, something is probably wrong with your candidacy. And I just don’t see Biden having the stamina or cognitive strength to change this 120 days out from the election.
An interesting discussion on Biden’s speech patterns by John McWhorter, comparing the simplification of Biden’s speech recently to a pidgin. What a Linguist Hears When Biden Speaks https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/opinion/biden-speaking-linguist.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
For all of the attention that the shaggy text flow he slips into at times gets, such as when he seemed to say that he was the first Black vice president, it’s not pidgin-like, and needn’t be alarming. Such a lack of elocution — which Donald Trump is also quite given to — is mainly a symptom of casualness, not pathology. We tend to underestimate the extent to which context, facial expression and intonation clarify the words we speak, including when we are addressing two or three topics at a time within the same stretch of speech.
Other aspects of his speech are more suggestive of unraveling. In his interview last week with George Stephanopoulos, Biden repeatedly used verbless chunks in the place of sentences, with utterances such as “No indication of any serious condition,” “Nobody’s fault, mine” and “Large crowds, overwhelming response, no slipping.” This is hardly unknown in casual speech, but Biden leaned on it a lot given the gravity of the interview. The linguist Ljiljana Progovac has described such inert word sequences as “living fossils” of earlier stages in the development of human language, before people combined those chunks into the flowing, complex sentences we are familiar with.
Biden’s control of suffixes also appears to be slipping. Most discussed has been his “I did the goodest job as I know I can do,” which suggested that he had forgotten that “good” does not take the superlative suffix but rather the modifier “best.” I’m pretty sure I hear him early in the interview saying “preparance” rather than “preparation.” That, too, made me think of pidgins, which have very few or even no suffixes.
To quote another poster, “should” and wishful thinking don’t count for much in politics. 
Personally, I don’t see it; at least, not clearly enough to take it out of the realm of a gamble based on vibes. The only thing really left to argue is whether the situation actually calls for a desperate roll of the dice whose result is based on hopes and dreams.
And, again, I disagree. I’m inclined to agree with those who’ve said that any Republican would be at least within the margin of error against Jesus Christ Himself as a Democratic candidate. I mean, overthrowing the government and Roe is a plus for one third of the country minimum.
Inherently weak? No. But I’d say worrisome as the man always manages to outperform the polls for races he’s actually in, even if the rest of 2018 and 2020 and 2022 were good or at least less bad than expected for downballot Democrats.
It’d be a lot easier to consider Harris as having a shot if she had better charisma and was able to connect with voters naturally. She may be able to work on it. If she gets a PR team to help her with a personality makeover, she could learn some tricks to come across better. Perhaps she could read books like Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Biden is able to connect with voters because he actually seems to care about them and making their lives better. I don’t get that same vibe from Harris. Maybe Biden could help her improve that aspect of herself.
Oh, I think Harris will lose for all the same reasons she couldn’t even make it to Iowa. If I got to pick a replacement and force that person to be the candidate, I’d probably go with a more purple or even red state governor like Whitmer, Shapiro, or Beshear.
A Pew Survey says that the largest consensus is that our candidates for President are embarrassing to the nation:
Pretty sure that could be a poll from last July. Large portions of the country have been saying that for a long time.
This has to be the death knell for a Biden campaign. Sorry, Joe, love ya and you were a better President than people give you credit for, but it’s over.
That’s cringeworthy to say the least. It sounds like tonight’s press conference is going to be a Gauntlet for Biden.
Again, I generally try to ignore most gaffes by most politicians most of the time. But Biden simply cannot be making mistakes like this.