Yes generic Republican and generic Democrat almost always poll better than any actual Republican or actual Democrat. This is for two reasons. First when given a blank slate people tend to fill it in with their favorite candidate, but its a different candidate for each one. There is no guarantee that there is a single individual candidate that people would prefer. Vanilla is the most popular flavor of ice cream despite that only 11% have it as their first choice.
Second there is the fact that as the obvious candidate Biden is obviously under more scrutiny by the media and more attacks by the right. So all his flaws are pointed out. That is not the case for any candidate who would replace Biden. Would instantly receive the same scrutiny and attacks knocking him back down into the mud. This is why those yammering that polling showed that Sanders would have been a better candidate against Trump then Clinton were fooling themselves.
To continue the fly analogy, its a choice between the Biden fly swatter, which ain’t perfect, but we know can work, vs. the “Ronco Fly Beater 2000” which claims many advantages over the ordinary flyswatter but which is still in the design stage and won’t have a prototype ready for at least two months.
A Democratic consultant who worked for the Dean Philips (remember him?) campaign (as well as Ye’s) in the past allegedly created the Biden fake robocall that was used in New Hampshire. There’s no evidence that the Philips camp knew about it. There’s even a magician involved!
I could be wrong, but I don’t think this is true. I think they SEEM that way, because the margins are so thin and consequential in swing states (by definition).
When a candidate over- or under-performs (an average of polls by reputable outfits) by one million votes – or (say) 6% – in California, hardly anyone notices. But if they over- or under-perform by just forty thousand votes – or, say, 3% – in Wisconsin, that’s a big deal.
All because of our cockamamie electoral college crap.
Yeah, people keep saying it, but on a completely cold, political, pragmatic level, I’m not sure it’s the surefire vote-getter that they think it is. Yes, obviously, alienating part of your base is a bad move in isolation, but I’m just not sure about the balance of their votes against the balance of those who’ll vote against Biden for taking the opposing stance.
Then why not do what’s right? (If you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t?) And saying they are acting irrationally means nothing when we’re giving them the means of which help them fight.
Well, that’s the question no one knows the answer to, is it: how many votes you net with each course of action (again, purely on a cold and pragmatic political level). Maybe supporting Israel gives, like, a two percent reduction in chances of re-election while demanding a ceasefire causes a fifteen percent reduction. I dunno, I’m just glad such things aren’t even close to relevant for me in my decisions (although I have seen at least one Doper argue it should be).
Hell, it might be even worse if we did know, if we had to choose directly and knowably between saving Palestinian lives and the end of democracy in the United States with a side order of concentration camps for all the queer people.
Right, and I’m saying that anyone insisting that being on the right side of their pet issue, no matter how important or clear it it seems, is a surefire election winner (or opposing being a surefire election loser), immediately makes me skeptical. If it were, the candidate would already be doing it. It’s similar to what I’ve thought with Bernie Sanders in 2016.
This why I’m glad I’m not in politics. I can just live my life and try to make the right moral decisions without having to worry about potentially costing myself an election in which some despot wannabe might do even more damage.
I can come up with quotes where he is saying Israel is “over the top”, which seems to be an weasley-worded endorsement of the Hamas interpretation of Israel’s war aim. But, from my Israel-sympathetic standpoint, I think Joe has likely gotten enough into the weeds on Israeli vs. American military targeting practices to not really believe that. I wonder if “over the top” was a mostly meaningless nod towards his base.
When Biden clearly goes against public opinion, as when he opposed the popular reverse racial discrimination Supreme Court decision, I give him credit for both truth telling and a profiles in courage moment. But his Gaza policy is not like that. It may be that his actual views, and his policy, and where median voter public opinion stands, are pretty close on Gaza/Israel.
Biden’s polling numbers do seem to have gone down a bit due to Gaza. It’s a mistake to attribute this to being pro-Israel, or to being insufficient Israel skeptical. Instead, it’s that when something bad happens, it hurts the incumbent.
Gaza and Michigan are a worry. But Netanyahu is not Putin. A cease fire will come around.
Biden will be the candidate for Dems.
Summary
Trump may lose the game and then an equally Trumpian character will be chosen at party convention. Possibly a family member of Trump. There are no brilliant minds there and none are the sociopath that Trump is.
Yeah, but none of them have his special whatever either, built on years of being Trump. They won’t carry the same adoration without Trump to prop them up.
Plus, there’s more than one of them in the lime-light. I suspect most people wouldn’t be able to name any of Trump Sr.'s siblings, so he pretty much stands alone as the “Trump Brand” for his whole adult life. But with his kids, there’s three who have some degree of name recognition from hanging around the Shit Show, and all three would pick up some different portion of the MAGA crowd. None of them would have enough of the MAGAts to be able to replicate Sr’s success.