Nevermind then! 
I find this troubling. I want the candidate who will do the best job. There is no guarantee that these two traits are coincident. If the person with an 80% chance to win is a piece of shit (or even just not very competent), and the more appealing candidate (to me) has a 65% chance, you will not convince me to get behind a piece of shit just because that person is more likely to win. I will vote for the person I like.
And really, 538 came up a bit short two years ago – why should I trust that dirtbag can in fact pull it off? We damn well better be seeing signs that the Ds are ready to pull out all the chocks this time around.
This leads to more Trump.
Look, I didn’t love Hillary. Oh, she was Ok, and it would be nice to see a female President, but there were better.
However, she was miles above trump.
Waiting for perfect gets you utter crap, instead of “pretty goo”.
I’m mystified by the appeal of Joe Biden. He has run for President before, and got his clock cleaned. He has a number of liabilities in his past, such as plagiarism and a history of touching women inappropriately. His female secret service staff have complained that he forces them to watch him swim in the nude. So he’s kind of like a creepy old uncle. And at 78 years old, he’s crazy old to be President. At the end of his second term he’d be 86 years old. Most men do not live that long, and especially they don’t live that long in the kind of health that a President requires. Don’t forget, Reagan was ten years younger when he was elected, and his age was a big deal.
If Biden runs, he’d likely have to make some kind of one-term commitment, and his running mate would have to be someone ready to step into the Presidency on a moment’s notice. If you have someone like that, you might be better off just running them.
If you want to know who Republicans are afraid of, it’s someone like Amy Klobuchar. Two-term Senator, she’s from Minnesota and could help rebuild the midwest ‘blue wall’ that Trump broke through. She’s also one of the most popular politicians in the country, in terms of what her constituents think of her.
The Democrats have to break out of the coastal elite pattern. A left-wing politician from California running for President will make Trump ecstatic. They also need some newer, younger voices who are not crazy socialists.
Do you have a cite for the “touching women inappropriately” and that he forces his female secret service staff to watch him swim in the nude? Or is it just right-wing infotainment website stuff – like the video of Joe hugging people cut with scary music and slow-motion close-ups?
The swimming in the nude thing is detailed in a book by Ronald Kessler. Kessler was a Washington Post reporter for a long time, and apparently the book quotes named and unnamed sources within the secret service.
Well, the being handsy thing actually isn’t from the right at all, because the right doesn’t give a damn. The swimming in the nude stuff, which apparently was in a book, needs to be cleared up before he runs. I can think of an innocuous explanation: he didn’t make female secret service agents watch him, he made the secret service watch him, and some agents were females.
Please stop repeating this ignorance. They were not wrong. They were right within the same exact parameters they have been before–the same ones they were in this election. There was a systemic polling problem.
The thing is, Biden has a lot of problems. Yes, it’s nice that he can pull in the white working class. But notice that a lot of what worked in this election was energizing people towards younger candidates that were firsts in some way. You want to keep that level of enthusiasm, and an older, pro-establishment candidate is not the best choice for that.
What we really need is someone who can appeal to both sides. Someone who can bring the excitement of the younger voters as well as lure in the white working class.
I’m also not entirely convinced that a large part of the problem with the white working class was that Clinton didn’t even try to appeal to them. I heard nothing about them, and her husband supposedly told her that she needed to appeal to them.
Appeal isn’t fixed, you know. Some of the appeal is just coming up with ideas that would help these people out. And, on that, Trump was the only one putting up ideas. Most were garbage, but they were ideas. And the infrastructure jobs one was not bad at all–it’s one that’s been used historically before–if he’d actually even tried to accomplish it.
I guess you could turn that around and say it about Biden. Sanders did get that appeal. Could Biden? I don’t know.
I also worry he’s a liability in the #metoo era, since people do really push that creepy Biden meme. And then he just had that thing for running off his mouth. And while it’s not fair, that matters more to liberals than conservatives. Saying something that comes off as racist or sexist or any other -ist could kill him since it would play right into him being older.
I for one hope we have someone better. I think Biden could win, but I think it would be close, and a hard needle to thread.
So, in my opinion this approach is the wrong one, and is likely to get you a candidate that loses to Trump.
To start, this sort of approach leads to an entirely circular discussion. “Biden’s great because people will like him! What’s the reason to like him? Because he’ll win!” It’s a way to end up with a fad candidate who wins the primary because lots of voters are convinced that everyone else is a fan, and then may very well crash and burn in the general election.
It’s compounded by the fact that, to be blunt, everyone is pretty terrible at predicting what will happen. I know all of us have seen some really smart people end up totally wrong about what was “electable”.
If you focus on “who will win” instead of “who’s the best”, you’ll end up with a bad candidate and no more guarantee of winning than you had otherwise.
For what it’s worth, I don’t have anything against Biden besides his age. He made a good VP and I think he’d make a good President too; I’m not surprised that at the stage of the race where nobody’s even announced their candidacy, the VP of the last Democratic president appears to be the default frontrunner.
Since you appear to have done your research, have any of the supposed “victims” of his handiness ever complained?
Swimming nude needs to be cleared up? Some people prefer to swim nude. I’m sure any Secret Service agent on the VP’s personal protective detail is both mature and professional enough to deal with it. Look, I wouldn’t want to see Biden nude, either. But if it was literally my job to watch over him constantly in his personal life, and the man liked to skinny dip, I think I could understand that and deal with it, vagina or no vagina.
Three days before the election Nate Silver showed Trump with a 35% chance of victory. It dropped to 29% by Election Eve but had been even higher earlier; on July 30, Trump was shown as (very slight) favorite!
When a statistician says something will only happen 29% of the time, that means he expects it WILL happen in 29 out of 100 trials. And indeed, Trump’s victory was a very close thing.
TL;DR: The frequent criticism of Nate Silver’s “calling the election” for Hillary seems very misplaced. What am I missing?
I am hearing “vote for the person who can beat CFSG”, but who can say who that is? What if the country is circling the drain (possible, given Republican foolishness), to the point that any D is just about guaranteed to take the election: will we still be arguing about who can beat the guy? I do not want to settle for someone who makes me hold my nose as I color in the oval (not, frankly, that my vote really matters much, as my state is quite solidly colored in).
Not that I know of, just pictures of him in public, and he’s not even touching anything but waists and shoulders. In a couple of cases, the women seem to be surprised or squirming, but I’m not even sure this rises to the level of misdimeanor.
Sure, if he’s just skinny dipping and the SS has to keep their eyes on him. But if he had a thing about doing it just with female agents that would be something else entirely.
Nominations are decided way too early to be sure that any Democrat will win. So the smart thing is to pick someone who is very likely to appeal to the Obama/Trump voters who decide elections.
It’s as important, if not more so, to nominate someone that excites minorities and young Democrats to come out and vote.
I’m gonna go contrarian on this and say the Democrats would do quite well to fire up Latinx, AA, and other minority voters. By all means, make an effort to earn the white working class as well, but I feel like a truly progressive and democratic party would stop trying to build its strategy around attracting old white voters with old white candidates.
Exactly. It is not a zero sum game.
Remember that Obama in '08 did better with white no college education voters than Kerry had in '04 and a lot better than Clinton did.
They wanted “change” so they voted Obama … and for that same reason they voted Trump. A candidate who is not white male needs to represent that change and respect that these voters matter too. Firing up non-white voters does not preclude earning the votes of the white working class as well.
That said the converse is true as well. I think a Biden (or a Brown for that matter) could also effectively fire up non-white voters.
Execution of the campaign would be the tale of the tape.
Historically, that means a young, black candidate. There is no evidence that anything else works. So Booker or Harris.
But you’re not seeing the whole forest here. If you want just the White House, this strategy is fine. But what happens during midterms and special elections when your beloved to voters who don’t normally vote President isn’t on the ballot? Probably the same thing that happened last time. It’s just not a stable coalition and it can’t create results outside of the Presidential election itself. It’s not a coalition that can be energized to get legislation passed and it does nothing for the Democratic Party.
Politicians like to talk about appealing to new voters, but the reality is that the power lies with the people who actually vote regularly. Those are the people you need to win.
Yes, of course we should listen to the GOP on who to pick for Dem. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: