IMHO, there are 2 narratives that are guiding Democratic strategy this year:
First narrative: Incumbency is a massive advantage. I would question this assumption when presidential incumbents have lost nearly half of all reelection races in the past half-century (Ford, Carter, Bush Sr. and Trump all lost,) but that’s not the main thrust of this thread. Furthermore, we’ve never had an 81-year old incumbent, so the normal rules or assumptions about incumbency advantage may not apply.
Second narrative: 2020 was a resounding victory.Biden gave Trump the thumping he deserved, and convincingly demonstrated that he was and is the best man to beat Trump. As such, the 2020 formula works, and does not need tweaking, and any (D) candidate that would replace Biden could only perform worse than Biden.
My challenge to the second narrative would be that 2020 was actually extraordinarily close. I feel this gets glossed over. A mere 44,000 votes in three swing states - Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin - was all that separated Trump from reelection. That’s half an NFL football stadium’s worth of voters. That’s a razor-thin margin. Had Trump performed just one percent better overall, he probably would have won the election. Far from “Biden routed Trump and taught him his lesson,” it should be viewed as, “The Democrats came extremely close to disaster.”
Far from saying, “2020 showed that the formula worked, so we don’t need to tweak anything and we just need to repeat it in 2024 to get victory,” Democrats should have been conducting something akin to a post-mortem analysis - the same way the NTSB does investigations even of airplane incidents that were near-crashes but didn’t crash outright. They should have been thinking, “Given how bad a performance 2020 was, how can we ensure we don’t repeat its failings in 2024?” Instead, it seems to be the opposite message: “Given how successful we were in 2020, how do we repeat the formula in 2024?”
Can you possibly cite that these are the strategies of the DNC?
They appear to be working hard in the swings states to avoid losing them and possibly to flip 1 or 2 more. That doesn’t seem to line up to what you wrote.
The OP sounds like yet another way to debate the idea that the DNC should have nominated someone other than Biden, or that Biden should have stepped aside.
If that’s not your intent, I’d like to hear what you think the Dems are doing that makes you think they’re coasting on 2020 strategies, and/or what they should be doing differently that would reflect recognition of 2020 as a near-disaster.
Biden won by tight margins in those states, so the electoral college could have gone either way. But, he won by 7 million actual votes. I know that doesn’t count for who becomes president, but saying he won by a razor thin margin is pretty misleading.
Didn’t the Dems also do well in the House and Senate?
After the GA runoff (helpfully assisted by DJT loudly insisting the important thing was his election and not theirs) they were able to procedurally flip the Senate by making it 50/50 + the VP but they actually lost seats in the House going down from 235 in 2018 to 222 in 2020.
I think we would have been better off with Democratic candidates stepping up to challenge Biden, but 1) am far from convinced that any would be polling better against Trump*, and 2) that water is so far under the bridge that it’s long since been washed into the sea and is bathing squids.
Not sure what golden strategy the Dems could be coming up with to convince close to half the electorate that voting for either a mentally failing narcissicist felon or an unhinged conspiracy grifter is a bad idea.
*“Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would all lose to Trump by wider margins than Biden in a hypothetical generation election match-up, according to a Feb. 16 poll from Emerson College. The poll, conducted between Feb. 13 and 14, sampled 1,225 registered voters and has a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points. Of the three hypothetical Democrat alternatives, Harris came the closest to beating Trump, trailing him by three points with 43% versus his 46%, the poll found.”
Reddit, admittedly, isn’t a representative sampling of society, but I see the sentiment repeated frequently there, that 2020 was Trump getting spanked and taught his lesson.
I don’t want to nitpick, but Biden did in fact win by razor-thin margins since the EVs are what counts and only the slimmest of margins got him past the finish line in GA, WI and AZ. If he had gotten 45,000 fewer votes in those states, saying “He got 7 million more popular votes” would not have been any consolation whatsoever.
By this point, of course, the DNC isn’t going to nominate someone other than Biden. But their strategy appears to have been “Biden won in 2020, and incumbency advantage exists, so he’s the best man for 2024.” I have never encountered any DNC argument this year that didn’t rely on that assumption to some extent.
So if we ignore how you actually win and instead substitute in an alternate metric that you emotionally feel should be the one that matters, he won by a wide berth?
I wrote, “I know that doesn’t count…”, so please don’t say I ignored that. I mean, give me a break.
He won by a lot of popular votes.
And, yes, he won by a wide berth – 74 electoral votes by the actual metric.
So, which metric did he barely win by?
ETA: Don’t tell me what I emotionally feel. What kind of post was that?? I know how the electoral college works, and I know that’s how presidents are elected and I said so. Saying he won by a razor thin majority is just misleading.
The only time I feel like the DNC and/or its supporters were confident was in 2022 when the “red wave” that was supposed to come failed to materialize, and in particular the people that Trump endorsed and those who firmly identified with MAGA fared especially badly.
But Trump won in 2016, lost by a close margin in battlefield states in 2020, and polls are showing a close race this year (if you trust them). I don’t get the feeling that anyone is celebrating early or super confident, the DNC itself is especially not projecting complacency.
Mostly I see things like, “How is Trump not clearly out of the running by this point?”
The fairest way to view it would probably be to take the change in votes needed across the battleground states.
In Arizona, Trump needed a shift of about 0.15%
In Georgia, Trump needed a shift of about 0.115%
In Michigan, Trump needed a shift of about 1.39%
In Nevada, Trump needed a shift of about 1.195%
In North Carolina, Trump needed a shift of about 0.67%
In Pennsylvania, Trump needed a shift of about 0.585%
In Wisconsin, Trump needed a shift of about 0.315%.
Saying that he just needed to improve his position by 1%, in the states that can actually shift sides, is no understatement.
