Aren’t most RFK supporters Trump-leaning? It’s doubtful many of them would vote for Robert F Kennedy on Election Day, so if they defect to Trump when it’s actually time to mark their ballots, that might mean Trump actually has a larger lead over Biden than that graph shows.
It’s possible that the majority of RFK’s 8 percent would go to Trump, padding Trump by an extra one or two percent on Election Night.
Probably? AIUI, part of the concern over his candidacy is that low-information moderates or liberals may vote for him based on (a) name recognition, or (b) dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party.
I think they are fairly evenly split.
Biden and his team are the ones who fucked up and put an emergency on his party’s plate.
Biden has been arrogant and vain. He was asked in an interview how he would feel if he stayed in and lost to Trump. He said that he’d be okay with it because he’d done his best. That’s about the worst, most clueless answer possible.
Building on what other posters have already said, I’d say that things are moving so quickly that, yeah, the Dems have already been through this process, and Biden has stayed in the race thus far because he’s been a vain, clue-free dick about it. That’s been very obvious from his offended, belligerent tone about the whole thing–as though he’s unwilling to recognize the problem in the first place.
I think the Democrats have been handling this about as well as anyone could have.
Good article on this topic:
It’s clear that spite acts as emotional rocket fuel for Biden. It’s a character trait that has served him well on many occasions, allowing him to pick himself up after being knocked down by life, and giving him the stamina for a long career.
But at this moment, this bunkered-down and spite-infested personality is a liability. It’s the character trait that stands in the way of Biden’s making a rational decision to put his party and country above his personal desire for vindication.
I’ve read multiple articles on different Liberal sites saying more or less the same thing. Biden is being a dick.
There’s one thing I haven’t seen in the polls, and that’s voter passion. In a country where voter turnout in Presidential elections generally hangs around 50%-55%, 2020’s 63% was an outlier, and a repudiation of Trump.
But how many of those Biden voters in 2020 are now saying, he’s too old, he’s the same old thing, I’m not really better off than I was four years ago, or whatever tired excuse voters users use for not voting?
Say what you will about Trump, when voters say they’re going to vote for him, they turn out.
My question is not whether Biden is more or less popular than he was, but is he as capable of turning that support into actual votes. Will voters turn out for Biden? Can Harris generate more enthusiasm and drive turnout higher? Would an open convention unify Dems behind a new candidate, or tear the party apart?
I suspect the Democratic Party has some data on this that the public polls either aren’t gathering or aren’t giving out to the public. But I’ll be damned if I can guess what it says.
Used to be, we would call that kind of maturity “presidential”.
What would you rather hear him say? “I’d instruct Kamala not to certify the election results that show that Trump won, and I’d send a mob to the capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power”?
I hope Joe hangs tough.
After all, he’s got a democracy to save.
And what, pray tell, is the “correct” answer?
I think the problem is more that Biden was implying that there was no consequence to a Democratic defeat except merely a personal defeat for him (Biden,) as if this were nothing but a round of golf and nothing at stake except bragging rights.
Whereas there are many millions of people - in America and out of it - whose lives could turn much worse if Trump wins - and Biden’s refusal to drop out could be the reason that Trump wins. The consequences of this election are immense.
Uh, probably acknowledging the stakes, and contrition that he didn’t rise to the occasion. Remorse that dropping out might have avoided electing a man that previously attempted to end democracy in the US?
I would guess also that whichever party is out of power at the moment tends to have more motivation to vote and retake what they lost, than the party that is in power has to vote and keep what they have. But I haven’t seen any studies on the topic.
The reason that answer was shit because he was making it about himself. The Nation article cited it above, and other sites have said this, but Joe Biden’s myth in his head about being the scrappy kid from Scranton who never gives up and beats the odds and the naysayers has been Biden’s primary “input” in making this decision–and not the good of his party and his country.
His ego and offense at being challenged has been on full display since the debate. It’s unseemly and revealing of a big character flaw.
Ever since the disastrous debate, Trump has been consistently ahead, in a situation where the Democratic candidate needs to be at least 5 to 7 points ahead. The only prediction that had Biden ahead by a very slim margin was the one that basically ignored all the polls and went almost entirely with a simulation based on fundamentals, an unproven and probably very unreliable approach. Biden’s intransigence here is really pissing me off.
Yeah, I can tell that some people are really stretching to read it that way. I don’t understand why, though. Again, what kind of answer do you want him to give? “I’ll be up all night worrying about our democracy”? Sorry, but Joe Biden, the politician from the 80s, is just not your guy if you’re looking for that kind of rhetoric; try someone born after the end of WW2 if that’s what you’re looking for.
Me too. And guys, it would be one thing, and a reassuring thing, if Biden had been cool about the challenges to his candidacy. If he had been genial, understanding of perspectives not his own, and just nice.
He hasn’t been! He’s been entitled, belligerent, angry, and obstinate. This attitude is as bad a sign as his constant gaffes and mistakes.
It’s actually even worse than that. The 538 prediction depended on the fundamentals being underestimated due to state-to-state correlations. If you just crank the knob so that fundamentals count for 100% and polls count for 0%, it’s still not enough. You have to assume the fundamentals have been undercounted as well. Easy to see in their Wisconsin forecast:
The “full forecast” is better than either the polls or the fundamentals-only!
“I would very much regret having miscalculated, since the result of that miscalculation would be dire indeed. But I do feel, right now, that the decision I’m making is the best for the country. And that’s what’s most important–not my personal ambitions.”
Multiple possible options. The kind of answer would include disappointment that the country chose a vision for our future that is beneath us; and disappointment that we as a team were unable to make those starkly different visions clear enough.
I did my best and that’s all that matters? That’s the right answer for a grade school baseball player; not for the future of our country and world.
…for real? You expect the person running for office to say “well, maybe I’m not the best man for the job, I guess you’ll have to roll the dice and find out”? You DO realize he is running for office, right?
Biden’s contention - the contention of anyone running for candidacy as president - is, and should be, that he is the best person for the job of beating his opponent. In any question he answers, that is going to be assumed - it would be monumentally stupid for him to answer any question in any other way - and if he was the best candidate, and he lost anyways, the correct answer is to respect the democratic process.
Bullshit. I’ve seen a ton of people and outlets make this claim (I was driving with my wife yesterday and we listened to Vox’s Today Explained make that point, and I paused the podcast to rant about what bullshit nonsense that was) and it is incredibly weak. If people weren’t desperate to build this “Joe Biden of all fucking people is a megalomaniac” narrative that they grasped at any possible straw, we would never be having this kind of converstion about that nothingburger turn of phrase. Give me a break.
Interesting how in 2017 it was incredibly unethical to speculate about the president’s mental state, but now we are all freely writing endless narratives about Joe Biden’s supposed delusions.
Or, he knew that he was the best candidate to take on Trump, and moving on from a stumble with as much decorum as possible is the only possible way for him to have recovered.