Who do you suppose that 45% are going to vote for in November when (NOT if) Biden and Trump are the two names on the ballot?
But they wouldn’t vote for someone who replaced Biden, of course. Because they are loyal democrats that will vote for the democratic candidate no matter what, unless it’s not Joe Biden, in which case they would never vote for the democratic candidate.
What in the Sam Hill does that have to do with the question I asked?
Agreed, but not quite as you mean it.
The great majority will vote for Biden. But now that this cognitive issue to too big to be forgotten, more of them will vote for Cornel West or Jill Stein or even RFK Jr. If a close election, that will be the difference.
Let’s imagine for a moment that Joe Biden was in an actual coma. He had a stroke and now he’s in a coma. And they wheeled him out for the debate. And when he it was his turn to talk, he just laid there in his hospital bed.
Would I be falling for republican propaganda if I said this was a problem? After all, they’ve been saying he’s practically been in a coma for years. I guess I’m just finally getting around to believing their propaganda!
Biden’s cognitive decline as he ages is a legitimate concern. Just because republican propaganda has exaggerated/lied about the possibility thus far does not somehow make him immune from actually declining, nor does it mean that anyone who notices the decline or is concerned about it is falling for republican propaganda.
What do you think you’re getting out of lying, here? What do you think you’re getting out of personally attacking anyone who is concerned about Biden? Do you think you’re going to shame them into voting for Biden? Do you think you’re going to convinced them to be in denial, like you are? Do you think you’re somehow going to annoy them into being a Biden cheerleader? Why are you trying so hard to make me not want to be on the same side as you? What benefit do you think that has?
You’re saying that even if Biden is cognitively compromised, because he’s running against Trump, all democrats and all reasonable people will vote for Biden anyway, because opposing Trump is more important than any other factor.
You’re also saying that we cannot replace Biden with another candidate, because then we’re guaranteed to lose, because it’s Joe Biden specifically that needs to run, and people want to vote for Joe Biden specifically, and not just against Donald Trump.
You cannot hold both of these positions at once. The former is closer to reality than the latter - which is why you can switch to Harris or another candidate and still retain every bit of that anti-Trump vote.
Let’s establish a baseline please. I think we’re all on the same side. I am deliberately looking for the agreed baseline, and avoiding drawing conclusions or poisoning the well.
Can we agree on the following (or propose what critical points are missing):
- The ONLY thing that matters is preventing DJT from a second term. Anything else is secondary, agreed?
- The core never trumper base will vote for anyone who’s name is not DJT, agreed?
- This and all elections are decided primarily by who turns out the vote, agreed?
- in 2024, the swing voter turnout is based on getting younger voters, protecting the right to choose, double haters, and undecideds out to the polls, agreed?
(This assumes that these demographics will vote in higher % for the dem candidate than DJT) - Who ever leads the ticket has to be able to access the national DNC and Biden/Harris fundraising so as to be in compliance with election spending rules (and avoid starting fund raising from zero), agreed?
Does the above net out the baseline (or is something critical missing)? Please grit your teeth and get the baseline hashed out before we try find common ground on the conclusion. Thanks for playing!
Thank you for this. There seems to be a lot of not addressing core differences and just repeating arguments louder. Anything that might get people out of the rut is welcome to me.
If the new normal is that age-related concern is cause for a candidate to drop out, Trump is easily as susceptible to this as Biden because Trump goes in front of crowds and demonstrates his diminishing mental capacity not only on a regular basis but also with increasing frequency and intensity. Remember a week ago when Trump seriously proposed having the UFC create a fighting league for immigrants? And the week before that when Trump was talking about having to choose between electrocution or being eaten by a shark?
Maybe the good thing about all of this is that by normalizing talk of having to sideline a candidate because of obvious diminished capacity maybe just maybe Republicans will allow themselves to think the same thing about their candidate.
West and Stein are polling close to zero. There is little reason to think this will change.
RFK Jr. is drawing more from the DJT camp. He’s a Bannon stooge. It will not take as much from Biden as the MAGAts hope.
We all know Trump operates under different rules because the republican party is a cult. No one abandons their candidate for any reason whatsoever. This is back to the “should” issue we talked about earlier. Yes, if voters reject Biden for being old, they should reject Trump for being old. But they won’t.
Should doesn’t matter. The reality is that Trump’s cultists will never abandon him for any reason, but democratic voters will abandon candidates for flaws like being unable to actually execute the job. That asymmetry is illogical and unfair, but we have to deal with the reality of the situation which is that it doesn’t matter what’s wrong with the republican candidate and it does matter what’s wrong with the democratic one, at least as far as their own voters are concerned. You can’t bank on appeals to consistency.
I honestly think you’re spending a lot of time and energy on a side issue. I don’t think the “should” thing is as big a factor in the other side’s belief that Biden still has the best chance of defeating Trump as you seem to think.
But what do I know, maybe I’m wrong.
Okay, I will make a deal- if and only if trump drops out, so should Biden.
However, the same survey found that neither Harris, nor any of the other Democrats being floated as contenders to replace Biden—including Whitmer and California Governor Gavin Newsom—would fare better than Biden in a two-way matchup against Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Newsweek has contacted Whitmer’s representatives via email for comment.
In a Biden-Trump matchup, the poll found 45 percent of voters would back Biden, while 48 percent would choose Trump. Harris would perform the same in a head-to-head matchup against the Republican, according to the poll.
Other, lesser-known candidates would perform worse, although more voters would indicate they are “not sure” when it came to those matchups.
Remember of the 60% that say Biden should drop out- most of them are GOP voters- so in other words- yep the GOP really really wants Biden to drop out
I should have also mentioned Chase Oliver, the Libertarian Party nominee, a gay man positioned to the left within his party.
This is from a single poll, but it a panel with the same voters queried before and after the debate. So qualifications about margin of error do not fully apply.
Will those third party candidates fade towards election day? Probably, yes, but not as dramatically as they will if the Democrats nominate a younger candidate.
Thought it would be worth spinning up a separate “is there a baseline we can agree on to beat DJT?”
For starters, Biden in a coma would STILL be a better president that Trump.
But he wasn’t in a coma, was he? He wasn’t “wheeled out”. That’s the kind of hyperbole you’d hear on Newsmax. There is zero evidence that he’s “in cognitive decline”. Yes, he had a bad night. His voice was hoarse, he had a cough, he was struggling with his stutter more than usual, and he was lacking in energy and having trouble keeping up with Trump’s Gish Gallop. You know what can cause all of those symptoms? A COMMON COLD. He hasn’t sounded like that any other time recently, he didn’t sound like that the next day (though he still had the cough), and since then he’s been having meetings with donors and family members who would notice if he wasn’t all there. Not one person who has spoken to him since the debate, in public or in private, has said that his mind is gone and he needs to drop out - only the circlular firing squad that overreacts and screams doom and gloom every time a Democrat has a public flub. Remember when the pundit class declared Howard Dean insane because he let out a loud yelp during a campaign speech? Exact same phenomenon. And beyond that - Biden’s delivery was poor, but he was honest, he clearly had a solid grasp on the facts, he called out Trump repeatedly on his lies, and he expressed a message of optimism in stark contrast to Trump’s thesis of “America sucks, everything is the worst it’s ever been, and you’re all gonna die unless you vote for me”.
Nothing, because I’m not lying.
I’m not insulting you. I thought that perhaps pointing out that you’ve fallen for Trump propaganda might make you think twice about the doom and gloom you’re spouting.
You say you don’t want Trump to win. If that’s true, then stop propagating his lies, pay attention to the OP, and focus on how we help Biden win this election.
Joe Biden doesn’t need to run. Joe Biden IS running. It’s far too late to change that. Reopening the primary now would likely be the end of the Democratic Party as we know it. Imagine the most acrimonious presidential primary you’ve ever seen in your life, then compress it into six weeks, take away all barriers to entry since no other candidate has won a single state, and see what happens when the convention is on its twelfth ballot, there are a dozen candidates tied at 5%, and the Newsom faction are being called Communists by the Whitmer faction, who are being called DINOs by the Fetterman faction, while Harris demands that the delegates owe her their votes and the Bernie bros are setting fires in the trash cans. You want to assume that if only Biden were to drop out that some Great Liberal Hope will emerge, the party will rally around them, and the Republicans will be forced to abandon the tactics that have worked for them for 30 years and have an honest discussion about policy. That’s not realistic. Whoever emerges from this war is going to be mortally wounded before they’re even out of the gate. If you thought Sanders fans refusing to vote for Hillary cost us in 2016 you ain’t seen nothing yet.
…there are plenty of formerly Democrat voters who have indicated that they will not vote for Biden, under any circumstances, primarily because of his policy in the Middle East, that I won’t elaborate on here.
People sitting the next election out is already a big problem that has just been ignored by Democrat leadership. The debate just highlights how big of a problem that is. Whether you agree with them or not, many sitting on the fence will see the debate performance as enough justification to sit the next election out.
This is the Kobayashi Maru scenario. I’m not sure there is a winning strategy here. Not with the woeful state of the dem leadership. I think if Biden stays he loses. I think if they swap Biden out they still lose. And then everyone insists they were right in the first place, and we get lost in the discourse while democracy dies in darkness.
I think the calculus is a simple one. Keep Biden. Focus on the swing states. Bring the focus onto the house and the senate. Everybody steps up. Don’t make the campaign about “Biden vs Trump.”
Or roll Biden now. Pick someone who can go toe-to-toe with Trump. And if you do that, then you’d switch things up by putting all of the focus on them.
Just pick a lane. And then go all in.
And if by some miracle Biden or Candidate X wins and you hold the senate and win the house, the Democrats needs a reckoning. Because the leadership is abysmal.
You knew I was presenting a hypothetical that was hyperbolic because using real-world examples was not getting through to you. But you’re addressing me as if I’m saying that was actually what happened. This is an example of the dishonesty I later mention.
My point is: the republican party has attacked Joe Biden in a hundred different ways. Then Joe Biden displayed a concerning behavior that happened to match one of the hundred ways they attacked him. Then you say “oh you’re just falling for their propaganda” for having a concern about something we actually saw and have reason to be concerned about. No. If the republican party never existed or never said anything bad about Biden and there was no propaganda, I can still be concerned when an 81 year old man has a continuous senior moment on one of the biggest nights of his life. The fact that you think that this CANNOT POSSIBLY BE A LEGITIMATE CONERN shows that you are not attached to reality.
The funny thing about my hyperbolic coma hypothetical is that if that indeed actually happened, you’d be on here saying the same stuff, still in denial, blindly defending Biden, and calling anyone who was concerned about the coma to be falling for republican propaganda.
Yes, there was. We just saw it. It’s not conclusive evidence, but we’ve never seen Biden so frail and slow-witted and lost before. Again, you’re focused on the physical symptoms because you’d like to pretend that he gave some great performance through his words but simply that his presentation was lacking. No, his words were quite poor too. His strategy, his ability to think on his feet, his decision on what points to address and what not to, his line of attack - everything about the performance was poor. Imagine Obama or Hillary Clinton up there and tell me they wouldn’t do 100 times better in every way than Biden did.
This is why I really need to stop responding to you. There is nothing that will stop you from repeating your denial talking points.
You know that no democratic insider is going to say Biden is unfit publicly, and yet you keep crowing that the absence of that is evidence that he’s fine. Even if someone were completely convinced Biden is unfit, they wouldn’t state it publicly, they’d tried to handle it quietly internally. If someone would not say something under any circumstances, then the lack of them saying that is absolutely not evidence of anything.
Telling me that I’m incapable of interpreting what I see with my own eyes because I only fall for republican propaganda is absolutely an insult and it’s extremely alienating. You have no interest in actually swaying your target audience to your favor, you’re only interested in loudly proclaiming your denial over and over to make yourself feel better.
The rest of your post is just again describing your contradictory position:
You believe that if we stick with Joe Biden, everyone will fall in line and vote for him because nothing is more important than beating Trump. All the voters will understand this and vote for Biden.
And yet the democratic party themselves is so fractured that they can’t even make beating Trump a priority. They’re going to all fall upon each other like a bunch of jackals and destroy each other. No one is going to vote for the Biden replacement candidate because, suddenly, beating Trump is no longer a priority.
So if Biden is the candidate, everyone will be in perfect unison and all vote for Biden because the only thing that matters is beating Trump.
But if Biden isn’t the candidate, then no one will remember that beating Trump is all that matters and no one will vote for the non-Trump candidate.
You hold these positions even though they are blatantly contradictory, because they both uphold your narrative. But you cannot reasonably believe both.
There’s no need for a war. No need for another primary season (this isn’t even possible). Biden drops out voluntarily due to health concerns, Harris on the same ticket steps up, the campaign continues, everyone rallies around Harris, done. It’s possible this loses votes for reasons like misogyny and racism, but not because everyone loves Joe Biden so much or forgets that beating Trump is the number 1 priority. If we lose fewer votes to misogyny, racism, and other Harris-related factors than we’d lose to Biden scaring everyone off, that’s a net win. And she may even pick up some votes for factors specific to her, too.
This re-primary democratic civil war nonsense is something you made up to make the barrier to changing out Biden so high that you don’t have to consider it as a possibility so you can keep your world simple. Not only does it not have to be like that, everyone involved, knowing that beating Trump is the only priority, would not make it like that.
In any case, I knew 30 or 40 posts ago that trying to talk to you about this is like beating your head on a brick wall. There’s nothing anyone can say that will make you reconsider your position. I’ve made my points sufficiently clear for anyone else reading this thread and I really need to stop pounding that wall.
45% of our own party not having confidence in our top-of-the-ticket candidate four months out from the election is a problem. But you go on and keep telling yourself otherwise.
People who don’t believe in their own party’s candidate aren’t motivated to go vote. Period. You might think they should, but that’s not how it works. Waving pom-poms for Biden on a message board isn’t gonna change the fact that 45% of Democrats think their candidate isn’t up for the job. That’s some fucked up shit that I am not sure we can overcome. It scares the shit out of me. I hope I’m wrong.
But to be honest, we gain nothing from continuously arguing back and forth over this. Best of luck in your endeavor to argue that Biden’s not sitting in a steaming cup of hot shit water right now.
On the one side we’ve got a fascist cult leader, on the other we’ve got a candidate who has cratering support from voters in his own party. Four years ago, that cult leader lost the electoral vote because of a very small percentage of votes in a small handful of states to a candidate who was much, much more popular then than he is now. God help us all.
The fact that there’s a thread on this very topic that is incapable of reaching a consensus on who should take Biden’s place shows how unrealistic this is.
“Everyone here knows that beating Trump is the only priority, and that’s why I’m asking for your support.” -30 different Democratic politicians once the convention is open
And we haven’t seen him that way SINCE either, which shows that it was a one-off. You choose to ignore his physical symptoms and pretend that a single bad night is proof of a serious kental condition that up until now has escaped the notice of his doctors, his family, the hundreds of people he interacts with on a daily basis, and even the former Republican Speaker of the House who was talking up how sharp Biden is earlier this week. None of these people have noticed a problem, but you, a guy who watched him on TV the other night, are somehow uniquely qualified to diagnose him?
Correct, because Biden has had four years to unify the party behind his vision and his agenda. You can’t just replace him and expect everyone to fall in line.
If Biden isn’t the candidate, then everyone will be sure the replacement THEY supported could have beat Trump, but the out-of-touch eggheads in the party picked a terrible candidate who won’t do any better, so why bother voting for someone whose views they don’t support?
I’m with you, bud.