I have seen no pattern. Every appearance by Biden since the debate has been better than the one before. By pattern do you really mean he’s never allowed to mess up again in the slightest?
I previously thought that the DNC wouldn’t have time in the election cycle to consider changing candidates. This stemmed from the fact that I’ve voted when ballots are mailed but then realized other voters instead let the ballot lay there for a month. So I figured out I was wrong, that they could potentially have time to choose Harris over Biden.
Allowed by whom?
Since I think most swing and uncertain voters have already made up their minds pretty firmly, it is hard to answer your question.
But if we are just talking about winning back the two points or so that Biden lost due to the debate, the answer is yes. In order to keep a loss from morphing into a rout that brings down congressional candidates, Biden should make easy Rose Garden statements and not risk tiring himself with travel.
I found this opinion article really informative this morning. It discusses not whether Biden should step aside, but why there is argument (he contends that it has very little to do with Biden’s age or mental status and very much to do with his chances of beating trump) and what options exist.
Gift link.
Put all that together and you have four camps of Democrats: 1. those who want Biden to remain on the ticket, 2. those who want him replaced by Harris, 3. those who want some kind of open process to pick a new candidate, and 4. those who aren’t confident in Biden or Harris but also don’t want a convention fight over the nominee.
My conversations with Democratic staffers suggest that on Capitol Hill, No. 4 is the biggest group.
What’s going on? The main explanation is that whether Biden or Harris can win Michigan, whether it makes sense to choose a candidate at the convention, and other such questions are not about policy. So they are not splitting people along ideological lines.
I don’t think this has been just a pundit rebellion against Biden. It was more pundits plus Democratic Party officials who didn’t have a lot of other avenues to challenge Biden using the pundits to raise doubts about his campaign.
His performance at the rally differs from the debate by the fact he had teleprompters. Reading what to say is far far different than answering questions which in this case were easily anticipated. There were no “gotchas” in the questions asked.
That brings us back to the lack of debates. If Biden would have wiped the floor with his opponents then the party would have benefited from it to strengthen his position. They chose not to. They did this for a reason. I would suggest that reason is that they knew he was in a declining mental state.
The number of people calling for him to step down is growing rapidly and it’s not because he’s doing well without teleprompters. He was far from mopping the floor in the last debate and the fear is that he will again do poorly in the next debate.
We have seen Biden speaking without a teleprompter, such as during the question session of his NATO press conference. His performances have been good enough for him to keep running. They weren’t perfect, but they weren’t so bad that it’s worth going into the uncharted and unpredictable territory of having him drop out. If he continued to be like he was during the debate, then it would be worth considering that option. But I feel he’s pulled himself up enough that it’s not worth the risk of having someone else take over.
No he should not. He obviously needs to “risk tiring himself”, especially in reaching out to swing states. One of the biggest mistakes Hillary made was not doing that.
This. IMHO the biggest mistake Biden is making is that he seems to be sticking to a conservative, as opposed to aggressive, campaign.* Democrats are like that football team who uses a strategy of run up the middle, run up the middle, short pass, then repeat or punt. After that debate I was expecting either Biden dropping out or some sort of “come to Jesus” moment where an all out aggressive campaign was announced, including acknowledging the various points that have been mentioned in this thread about Biden having had a decline but that he still represents a much better choice than Trump. Instead we seem to be getting more of the same.
- FWIW I think a failure to take chances with aggressive campaigns has been a flaw with Democratic strategy going back to the 1994 midterms, with the only exception being Obama’s 2008 campaign.
There is no likely next debate. It’s just an opportunity for Trump to lie for 90 minutes.
But how do you sell that?
Trump will, presumably, say loudly and often that he’s up for another debate — explaining, hey, why wouldn’t he? It’s another chance for him to show the world just how fucked up Biden’s brain is, to the point where Democrats in Congress did and would call on Biden to drop out! That’s why Trump is up for it every month or every week, and Biden ain’t!
And the response is — what? That it wouldn’t go down like that again? Reassuring, if true; but ya gotta prove it. That, no, there’s no point, because it’s just another opportunity for Trump to lie for 90 minutes? Look, if Biden didn’t know that the first time, then he really is incompetent. So — what?
Yes, we all saw him introduce President Putin to the microphone.
Your confidence in him is not shared by his own party. Either they know something you don’t or have a candidate that polls better including the chaos it would generate.
But in 2016 and 2020, there was no unexpected Democratic bump on Election Night with the undecided voters suddenly thronging to the (D) candidate when they realized how awful Trump was. In fact, the opposite: Trump beat Hillary, and four years later, Biden’s 9% lead in the polls turned out to only be a 4% margin on Election Night as Trump overperformed.
The collapse-of-the-wave-form-in-physics phenomenon you speak of seems to be voters breaking for Trump, not against him.
If your theory were correct, we should be seeing the opposite: We should see the (D) candidate surge on Election Nights and overperform polls because of all these “I was on the fence about who to vote for but now I’m coming home to the Democrats because of how awful Trump is” voters.
Merely reminding voters of how awful Trump is doesn’t work. If that strategy worked, Trump would have lost every election in an 80% blowout defeat.
Yeah, I’d like an answer to that as well. I’m pretty confident that there is absolutely no evidence that Biden has had plastic surgery. Nor can I think of any valid reason for making such an assertion. I’ll stop there rather than get myself into trouble.
His face looks like he’s had Botox treatments. Maybe that’s why people think he’s had plastic surgery.
The problem is that Biden having plastic surgery was asserted as a fact, not an opinion. And all I can find is dubious right-wing sources for that rumor.
I’ve seen the result of his latest appearances described as Democratic “purgatory”.
Biden hasn’t been so obviously bad lately as to create the necessary surge to get him off the ticket, but still off-kilter enough to unsettle queasy voters (who are the ones that need to be convinced that an off-Biden is still a better bet than a mentally and truth-challenged Trump).
We have seen that in recent special elections, plus we’ve seen consistent Haley over performance in the Republican primary contests. So it’s indeed possible that something has changed with regards to polling.
It’s obvious from looking at photos over time that he has had hair transplants. It’s nowhere near the mess that is Trump’s hair but is an undeniable fact neverless.
This is exactly right. As I mentioned earlier, a recent headline described the result of one of Biden’s key “do or die” moments as having done neither. Which, in the metaphor of a footrace, I see as the Democratic candidate being (barely) able to remain upright while limping to almost certain defeat.
Which is enormously frustrating because Trump would be so vulnerable to criticism by a candidate with forceful, quick-witted sharp intellect, as indeed he has been in much of the television media, but very few of the voters who matter are seeing it.
Trump gave Biden maybe 20 opportunities for easy layups in the debate and Biden passed up on all those chances.