No it’s not. You need to motivate people to actually get out and vote for your candidate, as 2016 showed quite clearly. Having people ‘not opposed to voting for your candidate’ simply doesn’t win elections. Also, I don’t expect Biden to be calm and boring when the pressure is actually on, he’s already shown difficulty handling really mild stress like respectful questions about the Hunter Biden ‘scandal’. Once the Right Wing Machine is in full force, I fully expect to see him looking scared and ineffectually mad. Trump is not going to try to rise above the fray, trump is going to try to drag whoever wins the primary into the mud with him since his base will love it and other people will probably be turned off by it.
And there are people who are not willing to vote for Biden who also will not vote for Trump under any circumstance. People who care a lot about people who supported Iraq war, or the '94 Crime bill, or DOMA, people who care a lot about the 1% funneling more wealth to themselves, and a host of others are not going to vote for Biden at all, if they even do vote.
And the idea that people who aren’t voting are the ‘middle’ who could get behind someone like Biden instead of an ‘edge’ who would only get behind a candidate who’s not a darling of the establishment is wildly unproven. People talk like it’s a given that there is some moderate middle, but the evidence for it is lacking.
Obama wasn’t perceived as a radical. He ticked off the usual Dem talking points, e.g. make the rich pay their fair share, expand the health care system to cover uninsured (note, not UHC), pro-choice, etc. Nothing radical there. Moderate in the sense that he is not revolutionary.
There are different kinds of losing. If you lose Mondale style, then it is time for a complete rebuild. If you win the popular vote, but lose the EC by a handful of votes, then it is time for re-tweaking.
If you lose the World Series in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 on an error, that is not the same losing as going 40-122 and finishing the worst in history. The two call for different strategies next time.
For some, the nail biting loss that Hillary suffered in 2016 somehow proves that the Dems need to go with a full on socialist! That would be like the owner of the Game 7 losing team firing all of his players, his manager, and his GM, and relocating the franchise to another city, burning down the stadium in his wake and salting the earth so that no baseball could ever be played there again.
It’s kinda inherent in the concept. If the candidate is ‘safe’, that means they are the one that is most likely to win. The opposite is the risky candidate, which means there’s a greater risk they will lose.
Now, if you want to ask why “safe” means “middle of the road,” the answer is just that this is where the presumed swing voters are. Swing voters are those in the swing states, since the rest largely don’t matter. It’s presumed that, if they can’t make up their mind which way to vote, then it must be because they are in the middle and see positives on both sides. Better to be the one who goes towards the middle.
People try to pull out Trump as proof this is wrong, but they seem to forget that he actually pulled in some liberal ideas. He talked about a federal work program, rebuilding our infrastructure. He was not against certain forms of welfare, like social security and medicaid. He ran as if he wasn’t anti-LGBT. That may not seem like a lot, but Clinton was seen as not at all trying to win anyone in the middle, not campaigning for the white working class at all. Trump used immigration to try and appeal to those people.
Of couirse, Sanders doesn’t completely avoid the middle. He’s got that appeal against “identity politics,” for example. He is trying for the white working class. But it still seems that more moderates support Biden. Sanders always ran saying that he needed to get more people voting to make up for his lack of moderate support. But, from South Carolina and Super Tuesday on, it seems that Biden is the one liked by more moderates.
I mean, Sanders’s actual numbers were lower than 2016, suggesting that the problem was more how the moderate Dems were divided than increased support. And he and Warren didn’t make nice in the same way, which I consider as much a strategic blunder as defending Castro again, when his goal should have been to distance his “socialism” from communism.
The guy with lower numbers both in the primaries and among people in the general is “risky,” while the one with higher numbers in both is “safe.”
One of my pet peeves about recent political discussion is people pointing to the 2016 loss and trying to claim it has any big overarching take-home lesson for the dems. The lesson of 2016 (to the extent that there is one) is that if you have a ton of things all go against you at once (admittedly, many of them self-inflicted) and make some absolutely terrible campaigning decisions (such as basically ignoring all the states that turn out to be crucial) and also run a candidate who has spent 20 years being the subject of the most virulent hate campaign in American history plus most of the populace assumes you’re going to win and it’s a foregone conclusion and why bother voting; then you can barely barely barely lose.
So, come back again, don’t do any of those stupid things, and you should win easily.
I don’t know your posting history, so I don’t know if your theory of this thread is that you’re in the tank for Bernie and will grasp at any argument to criticize Dems who have lost elections, but it sure seems like your definition of “safe” is so malleable that it is meaningless.
You think the definition of “safe” is having the supporters of a candidate believe that the candidate will win? Well, that’s every Democratic candidate in history.
Or is it that you think the definition of “safe” has to do with the Democratic electorate choosing a candidate with a minimum of baggage? If that’s the case – and I think that’s a common interpretation of “safe” in this context – then nominating the first woman to be a party nominee while she is under criminal investigation by the FBI is NOT FUCKING SAFE by any measure of those terms.
Yep, people may delude themselves into thinking that such issues don’t matter, but come on – Hillary Clinton is even more divisive than Bernie Sanders, as proven by polls. Cite,cite.
Seriously, I’d like you to form a coherent explanation of why nominating the less popular politician is more “safe” than nominating a comparatively more popular politician.
I’m not sure you realize what Hillary’s baggage was. This is someone who a good portion of the country believes kills people when they are about to get exposed. I mean someone literally thought she started a pedophile ring in the bottom of a pizza place and brought a gun to said pizza place.
It’s all based on bullshit, of course, but this sort of Hillary kills people who get in her way thing has been part of her baggage since Whitewater. And then leads a good deal of other folks to think well her killing folks is wrong, but she obviously must have been doing something shady in all these Whitewater/Bengazi/email scandals (even though nothing is found in any of them).
Honestly, as much as the lies hurt her, I think what hurt her the most was her husband’s philandering - for whatever reason, people would rather vote for a cheater than a cuckold.
Sorry, but that’s absurd. Bernie has a mild heart attack. He was out of hospital and back on the campaign trail in two days. It doesn’t seemed to have slowed him down one bit.
Biden’s performances in recent months have been worrying. This isn’t a rumour. It’s not a rumour that [ul]
[li] He challenged an 80 year old marine to a press-up contest.[/li][li] He called a young woman a “Lying dog-faced pony soldier” (can you even imagine if “toxic” Bernie Sanders had said that to a woman? Fuck me…) for daring to ask him a tough question at a town hall.[/li][li] He told a crowd he was running for the Senate.[/li][li] He told a crowd in Iowa to vote for somebody else (85% of them did).[/li][li] He forgot Obama’s name.[/li][li] He tried quoting the Declaration of Independence - specifically the ”We holds these truths to be self-evident” line which every seven year old in the country knows - and forgot how it went.[/li][li] He said the re-election of Donald Trump was inevitable.[/ul][/li]
And that’s just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head. My parents are Joe Biden’s age. They’re infinitely more cogent than he is. You know who else is infinitely more cogent than he is? Joe Biden himself, circa 2012. I dare you to go watch his debate with Paul Ryan in 2012 and then tell me with a straight face that Joe’s the same man he was then.
The guy has real problems, and you don’t need to be a neurologist to see them. I’m much more worried about Biden’s mental state than I am about Bernie’s minor heart scare.
Your snark is weak and off-point. The Primary race has a long way left to run. Biden’s still pretty damn far from getting a lock on the nomination so it’s a little early to be getting cocky.
Besides, many of the people currently supporting Biden only do so because they think he’s more “electable” than Sanders. As the campaign progresses, and as the evidence of Biden’s cognitive decline grows from strong to undeniable, how well do you think that argument will hold up?
I can’t rule out that any of these three geezers won’t make it to November, so I’m not in the business of making any predictions about any one of their health.
And yet, the mood of the Democratic electorate is “anyone but Bernie” at this moment. If Biden collapses, Bernie isn’t going to pick up any support.
Sanders never speaks without intent and content. Joe does that all the time. He’s a wind up doll to do this, because that is the way he understands the democratic process of running for potus, deriving form the 1950s basically. If it was 1992 and he was in his 40s or 50s it might be believable.
Pointing out that Hillary LOST the election is not ‘grasping at any argument’, it’s stating basic fact. She was in fact hailed as the safer candidate than Sanders at the time. You want to claim now that she’s ‘more divisive’, but that wasn’t the claim back when she and Sanders were competing in the primaries. My definition of ‘safe’ is that people refer to him as the ‘safe’ candidate. I’m not the one claiming that Biden is the safe choice, I said before that I expect him to get eviscerated once the Republicans get their hate machine into gear.
What exactly do you mean by ‘less popular’? Sanders had more delegates than Biden until super Tuesday, and plenty of polls showed (and still show) him getting more votes running against Trump than Biden. Like I pointed out last time I posted, if your argument for ‘more popular’ is who wins the primary, then you can’t use ‘the more popular candidate’ as an argument for who to support in the primary because the more popular candidate hasn’t happened yet.
Is there any evidence that the people who believed she started a pedophile ring are people who would actually vote for Biden? I don’t think that it really counts as ‘baggage’ that people who would not vote for any establishment Democrat think worse of her than they do other Democrats, it’s an irrelevant statistic. And conversely, if I accept that this particular baggage is really so absurdly severe, why was she considered the safe alternative to Bernie back in 2016? People looking for safety should have dropped her like a hot potato.
If you don’t expect the Republicans to come up with a plethora of scandals for whoever the Democratic nominee is, boy are you in for a surprise once primaries are over. Biden is not going to be able to mention Trump’s corruption without Fox News broadcasting a plethora of corruption ‘scandals’ from his years being a politician.
No, this is not true at all. It is the case that someone saying that a candidate is ‘safe’ believes the candidate is the one more likely to win, but it’s not a matter of objective fact. And I have seen people repeatedly claim that Biden is the ‘safe’ candidate when polls showed that other candidates were more likely to win in the general election than he was, so it’s clear that the belief isn’t based on facts and evidence, but on something else and note…
People claimed that Biden was the safe choice when his numbers in the primaries and among people in the general were lower, so what you’re saying here is clearly incorrect. These arguments all appear to be completely circular.
So it is all just pure presumption without actual data supporting it? I’ve never seen actual support for this idea that there are moderates sitting around contemplating whether to vote for D or R, and it certainly doesn’t match what I’ve seen in the real world. What I have seen (especially now that Trump is the face of Republicans) is a lot of people who absolutely won’t vote for one candidate but might vote for the other, that the ‘swing’ is not between D and R but between ‘one of D and R’ and ‘None of the above’, with people either voting 3rd party or sitting out the election. The fact that more people did not vote than voted for either major party candidate seems to get overlooked a lot.
I didn’t say “radical” or “revolutionary”, I said progressive. The only candidates that I can think of really qualify as ‘revolutionary’ are the various Republicans that talk about ‘second amendment solutions’ to losing an election. Obama was definitely not considered a ‘moderate’ during his initial run, and during his second term (where he was considered moderate) he managed a lower electoral and popular vote total.
There are plenty of folks who hearing the barrage of things surmised something must have been wrong. An analysis of the polling indicated that after the Comey announcement the week before the election the polls dramatically dropped for Clinton and late deciders went Trump by a far higher percentage than those who decided before the Comey letter.
And I think I mentioned earlier, I think the whole “safe” candidate thing is completely nonsense and mostly determined in hindsight.
Nobody except the far uninformed right wing believes that Hillary killed people or was running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop. That’s a strawman. Those rumors didn’t cost her any votes.
One of her biggest pieces of baggage that didn’t get a whole lot of airtime was the nepotism angle. If she hadn’t married Bill, she would be Hillary Rodham, retired lawyer from Arkansas. Does that qualify her to be President?
Plus the nepotism angle. If she had been elected that would mean that we only had one president in 32 or 36 years not named Bush or Clinton. Surely the talent pool of qualified people to be president has expanded beyond those two families.
And the Whitewater/Bengazi/email situations, while nothing criminal has been proven about any of them WRT Hillary, they call into question her judgment as a leader.
But even with all of his, her baggage was nothing like Bernie’s who wants socialism. Bernie would have lost big.
She was a “safe” candidate who almost won. Take away any of that baggage and she wins. So why do some Dems think the answer for 2020 is to go a complete 180 away from someone like Hillary?
The country is a center to center-right country. You cannot win by being far left or far right. As far as Bernie supporters being unhappy with Biden, he is farther left on almost every position than Obama was. Why the hate?