“And if he looks like that now, what’s he gonna look like in a couple more years?”
You don’t have to be a MAGAt to think like that. You just have to be a normal person who’s watched a loved one age. And just based on the evidence of your own eyes, you could reasonably conclude that Biden can’t do it anymore.
Q.F.T.
And if they haven’t seen that yet, then over the next four months everything they look at–on any topic, on TikTok, YouTube, and everywhere else–will be flooded with clips of Biden looking frail and weak and saying “we finally beat Medicare.”
That’s all they’ll know about Joe Biden.
My (non) representative is claiming, on the record, that Obama’s actually running the presidency because Biden’s incompetent. Not Harris, Obama. I kid you not.
She just won her primary – against a candidate even further off the wall than she is. I still kid you not.
These people are not responding to anything factual about whether Biden is or is not competent, or how old he is, or how old he looks. They will, however, be quite willing to play clips of Democrats saying Biden ought to withdraw.
That’s been a pretty common theme for the last 4 years.
Those people don’t matter either. Nothing is going to get them to vote for any democrat.
Now, yes, Biden is old, and people have a right to be concerned about his health. But he is fine, his doctor said so.
Some are saying they might not vote for Biden- which more or less works out to the same thing.
Sorry, I was using “alzheimers” as shorthand for “severe mental impairment”, the kind being suggested that he has.
Consistent with normal aging, possibly. Now is that something to disqualify him from the job? Maybe would be fair to ask voters.
Frail and weak as fuck is not the predecessor to this thread, which was about the debate and possible cognitive impairment.
But I agree, the voters who are most significant aren’t the MAGAS, because they would vote for Trump in a coma, and not democrat faithfuls, who would vote for Biden in a coma.
The target audience includes mostly swing state voters, because the other states are pretty solid on the outcome no matter what.
Out of those swing staters, the voters we need are
All progressive and liberal votes, despite grievances over any particular issue or overall feeling Biden is too centrist/not progressive enough. This means young/ first time voters who think they can teach the party a lesson by protest voting. Or ethinicities that Dems typically win who might just stay home because they aren’t excited.
Moderates/independents who might not like all the liberal policies, but don’t like Trump and MAGA crazies either. This means stressing the unprecedented nature of the threat to democracy the republic by the Republican Party and Trump in particular.
Low information voters who don’t follow politics but measure everything by how their personal lives feel, soundbites, and memes. We need them to either disregard the “Biden is too old” meme or be discouraged from voting at all. Because while inflation has slowed, the effects of inflation are higher prices and those aren’t going down. This includes fighting memes with memes, convincing them that Trump is “just as bad”, since low information voters are unlikely to grasp the severity of his much worse Trump would be. Hopefully they don’t show for either, since getting them to show for Dems seems a challenge.
Now, if the Dems did convince Biden to step down for the good of the country (how? ), then the strategy could shift to looking to energize the dissatisfied voters and turn the age argument against Trump.
But again, we are still largely only playing in the swing states. Texas will go Red despite how many of my friends and nephew’s friends can get excited by whatever Dem candidate. Same with solid blue states going blue.
Purple is where the game is played, and the trick is that some purple may have wider swings than before. We need to keep what we had last time, if not grow more blue.
Claudia Tenney?
I find Nate Silver’s explanation more plausible:
They’ll also learn about Biden through memes. There is a clip of Biden at a Juneteenth event where music is playing and people are moving to the music, but he looks stiff like a mannequin:
The text in the meme is: “when the schrooms hit and I realize the beauty of the world all around me”.
For the disengaged voter, clips like these will influence the impression they have of Biden. He really needs to be able to stop having behaviors like this. The more he acts like this, the more these viral clips will get spread around and will cement the view of Biden in the minds of the voters.
This is a really good point. Biden’s being meme’d a lot lately, especially post-debate, and it risks turning him into something of a joke amongst… the very people he’s gonna need to cast a vote for him come November.
Do you have some idea it would be different for any other candidate, or even for Biden, irrespective of how he performed in the debate?
If he had been more or less perfect, he’d still be memed. So would Harris, Whitmer or anyone else running. If MAGAs and foreign actors didn’t have something to hand, they’d make it up.
True, but I still think reality matters.
Accusing Trump of being against democracy weakens him more because he actually has talked about deserving a third term, and presidency for life, many times.
Harris stands accused of giggling. Biden is accused of cognitive decline. Both are true. And I think median voters know which is more important.
Your “reality” seems quite fanciful to me. I can’t believe the many horrible things you’ve asserted about Biden’s state of health based on nothing but what you saw at a “debate” and a few carefully curated cherry picked bits of video. But you do you.
You seem incapable of accepting that Biden is not going to step away from the nomination. He has made that crystal clear.
It’s the only data point that matters now.
Everyone knows real presidents dance like this;
That’s the one.
Wait a minute, don’t your feet have to move a little if you’re dancing?
I imitate this sometimes. Gets a knowing laugh.
Presumably, they wouldn’t have had their mouths agape and looked like they were stroking out.
I don’t imagine these are necessarily magats doing these memes. Just meme makers making fun of how completely out of it he looked.
ETA: And all this park-clutching over the NYT and CNN having it out for Biden will have a lot less impact on low-info voters than turning Old Man Biden into a punchline for his oldness and feebleness.
I like to refer to it as the Double Invisible Handjob.
I think you can catch any one of us on a bad day and be made to look like a loon.
This.
We are paying attention to the NYT and CNN. Those low information voters? Nah. They are spending their time on other more enjoyable things.
And the news cycle will soon move on. If it takes some time to do so and distracts from the GOP convention, that’s okay.
So again, how he performs going forward will be critical. Another confused performance and it flames back up. (My fear of what will happen.) If not then those memes hurt but damage done and move along. A harder battle than it could have been but oh well.