No, it doesn’t . . . now tell us who this candidate is.
Absolutely, the concerns about his age are largely a result of the media astroturfing concerns about his age, starting with far-right outlets inventing it whole cloth until enough Americans believed it to influence polling by more reputable ones.
My bold.
Yeah, it is outlandish to suggest that.
This. Go ahead. Speak up.
I can’t put pen to paper and make a logical case … but nevertheless, yes, it does seem outlandish that another Democratic candidate would have a better chance to beat Trump.
Here’s something: Say the Democratic Party switched Biden for another contender. They rid themselves of the “too old” issue … but what other issues do they then take on with the new candidate? There’s no conceivable unassailable Democratic candidate who brings progressives, independents, and conservative never-Trumpers into the fold with a snap of the finger. Especially in a compressed time frame.
Well, there’s the rub. Obviously other candidates haven’t been extensively polled against Trump, so we don’t have a lot of data.
I feel like realistically, we’d have to go with Harris. Because the unwritten rule is that the Veep is next in line, and trying to change the unwritten rules right when the Veep happens to be a Black woman would be way too divisive.
And I get that she’s not a perfect candidate, either. But picking anyone else sends the message “We’re not really concerned about Biden’s capacity, we’re just panicking and dumping an incumbent President because the polls look bad in February”.
Every time around, it’s always something. There’s always some reason why the candidate the Democrats have put forward is the wrong one. “If only they’d chosen someone else, they’d win more handily”, we are eternally told.
It doesn’t matter who the Democrats nominate. We will always be told that that person is the worst possible choice, by deeply concerned people.
Yes, picking anyone else, at this point, does send the message “We’re panicking and dumping an incumbent President because the polls look bad in February”.
replied to wrong post
Yes, remember those silly “progressives” who tried to tell us Hillary was a bad candidate in 2016, just because the polls said so? Boy, did they end up looking foolish!
And yet she would have won if it were not for Comey sandbagging her right before the election.
We don’t have an “unassailable” candidate now. Biden’s approval rating is under forty. He is trailing Trump in the polls. If we can’t do better than that, we might be fucked, but I find it very hard to believe that we really can’t.
Scroll down to the polls conducted in February and March 2016. Double-check what those polls were saying at that time.
Well, no. Concerns about his age are reasonable, and are very foolish to ignore.
Projecting reasonable concerns about the future onto an assessment of the present is what the right wing are doing. It would be ineffective, except that concerns about the future are quite reasonable.
Regarding the bolded: Generally within margin of error and with major confounders in the polling (IMHO, admittedly).
One big confounder to date, however, that I think is hard to deny has been the reluctance for some poll respondents to come to grips with Biden’s 2024 candidacy. There’s been kind of an “As I wish things were, rather than how things actually are” effect that’s led some Democratic respondents to mark “Undecided” or “Other” instead of “Biden”. That particular effect should fade from the polls before too long.
Reminds me of the saying: “The Republican Party is held hostage by its base, while the Democratic Party holds its base hostage.”
By this point I’m convinced Biden would still be the DNC nominee even if he were 90 and had a stroke.
Yes, they showed Hillary winning. As you may recall, she was in fact leading in the polls right up until Election Day, and still almost won despite underperfoming her polling.
But all you’ve shown are polls of Clinton vs Trump, ignoring the relevant point that polls consistently showed Bernie Sanders beating Trump by a wider margin.
Yes, because no one else is seeking the nomination.
Most Democrats like Biden. That’s just a fact, and the state primaries have reinforced this fact again and again. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a Democratic president who most Democrats think has been very good and accomplished a lot of good things is renominated to run again, even if he’s (gasp!) got at least one flaw and isn’t an absolutely perfect candidate.
Moderating:
Let us please stop flogging 2016 in this thread. It is a hijack. Discuss 2024 here, please.
Fair warning: I will not issue another mod note. If 2016 is mentioned again in this thread, there will be a warning for it.
Yeah, it’s certainly not a hopeless situation. With those polling numbers, Biden would be an underdog if the election were held today, but not much worse off than Trump was in 2016.
But the numbers are worse for him than they were at this point in 2020, or for Hillary in 2016, or for Obama in either of his elections. So it concerns me that the DNC doesn’t seem to feel it needs a response to that beyond “Well, the polls are probably wrong”.