I don’t think it helps to have anyone publicly saying that Biden should step aside. It helps nobody to have a primary. If Biden is determined to stay in the race, I hope the calls for him to drop out stop after the distraction of the Republican Convention is over. Personally, I think that him dropping out at the convention would be a smart move. The delegates vote for him and the people who voted for him in the primary have their voices heard. Then he gets up to accept the nomination and citing a doctor’s excuse asks all the delegates to throw their votes behind Harris. (Discussed with them in advance). Harris is overwhelmingly nominated. The news floods the headlines. The Democratic Party appears unified and functional. Maybe they even win.
“The delegates have their voices heard and are then promptly ignored” sounds like one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard for how to win an election.
A.private discussion? With 3000+ people?
But if you think he should drop out at all, what’s the advantage of waiting until the convention?
American Tradition.
How quaint.
The modern politician will do what is necessary to stay in power while increasing that power, and will respect traditiion when said tradition favors said politician.
The advantage of waiting until the convention is that people turned out to vote for him in the primary even when he had no opposition. You don’t want those people to think they are being ignored. Also publicity. The convention is a media event covered in real time by all of the media. Also having less time before the general leads to less divisiveness about whether there should have been a primary or another candidate would have been better. The delegates will not be upset as long as they are notified ahead of time. They are the most loyal Democrats. They just shouldn’t be blindsided.
Then again, nobody should listen to me. My political education consists of PolySci 101 and 102 in college and Schoolhouse Rock. I majored in Chemistry for goodness sake.
I don’t think that’s actually just a characteristic of “modern” politicians!
But I do think that Americans are used to the rule that when the President can’t serve anymore, the Vice President steps up. In this case, we’re dealing with the unwritten version of said rules, but I think people still take them seriously enough that passing over Harris in favor of someone else would be deeply offensive to huge numbers of Black and women voters, and would greatly damage the party’s chances.
Yeah, this is just the way it works in our (dumb) system. The act of challenging an incumbent president in a primary in the first place is a sign of disloyalty and you just can’t win from there. All that could have happened is someone with more name recognition than Dean Phillips could have tanked their own political career to a run a “Biden is too old” campaign in the hopes that he would have seen reason and dropped out back then rather that a similar desperate attempt now with a lot less time.
There’s technically nothing stopping the party from reining in an unwilling incumbent president but it is just not how Things Are Done.
This is what Republicans said about Trump.
At some point of “ignoring the problem”, people can come to forget that there was a problem.
People who think someone should privately pressure Biden to step aside still want Biden to beat Trump. That’s the whole point.
And the (reluctant) GOP wagon-circling behind Trump in public did work. He did win the election. Anyone who would rather have him as president than Clinton would be happy they did that.
I think the “people voted for him in the primary and we have to respect their choice” argument is overrated. I think I voted for him in the primary…maybe I wrote in “Save Gaza” or something. I don’t really remember, because it was a completely inconsequential decision. This “primary” can’t be compared to an actual competitive primary in which voters have a meaningful choice between candidates.
But (depending on which polls you read), a large number and possibly a majority of Democrats now want him to drop out, and presumably they all voted for him in the primary, too. I don’t think “We’re respecting your wishes by ignoring what you’re saying now, in favor of what you said four months ago” is a very good position.
I’m going to go on record saying I think he still has a better chance of beating Trump than Dean Phillips would.
You mean the same divisiveness that’s existed for a year and which the anti-Biden crowd is actively creating?
Again, how do you privately notify 3000+ people ahead of time without it leaking? And how do you think those super-loyal delegates who came to Chicago eager to cast their vote for Biden are just going to be A-OK with being told their vote is going to be ignored?
I have some bad news for you about how representative democracy works.
Saying that “the 2024 Democratic primary was the will of the voters” is about the same as saying the latest election that El Presidente won with 98% of the vote was totally a free and fair election.
Does it work in such a way that parties which wave away voter concerns with “TOO BAD WE ALREADY WON NO TAKEBACKS I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA?” usually win elections? Because I tend to think it does not.
Sure, but you should also recognize that there’s a race to the bottom aspect of simply saying that we all have to ignore everything and simply guard against the other guy, no matter how horrible our guy is, because the other guy is even more horribler.
At some point, there’s value in saying that neither of the candidates are worthwhile, and letting the 2% of the population who are so nuts as to actually trust to these options be the only ones who actually vote for them.
While it may be, in that case, that Trump comes out on top, the fact that there’s 98% of the vote out there, waiting to be captured, will signal to Congress and potential candidates that there’s an audience for something better and that the person who is willing to step up and just be a normal and reasonable human being, on that day he shows up, is going to be the one to win everything.
Under Communism, there was no incentive to work since you would get rewarded the same for being a lazy a-hole and that’s just easier to do. And in modern politics, there’s no incentive to be a better candidate because you’ll get rewarded the most for generating headlines and drama, not for doing things that will actually help the common man.
A Thought Experiment:
Imagine there had been a real primary, that either Phillips caught on or someone with actual credibility jumped into the race and gave Biden enough of a challenge that he had to agree to a debate before the voting started. And imagine that Biden performed in that debate the way he performed last month. Would you think he should still be the candidate?
If these people exist there are 15 Billion of them, they are the result of a CIA cloning experiment from the 60s and they won’t have a significant impact on the election because there are no electoral college votes for the mineshaft where they are being held.
But that’s the point. Obviously not all of those 3000 Biden-pledged delegates are still eager to vote for him. Perhaps by the convention a majority will not be.
Then they should resign and allow an alternate to take their place if they can’t handle the job they agreed to do.
Because nobody else was allowed to run and voters were threatened with jail or worse if they didn’t vote Biden?
Maybe. What I can tell you is that if Biden/Harris is not the Democratic ticket in November, it will not have my vote.