Everything's complicated and my hesitation about replacing Biden up to now has been informed by polls showing other candidates not doing much better. But a lot of people seem remarkably certain that Harris specifically could not win a general election for reasons I think they should say out loud.
There's a very specific personal vulnerability there that I'm surprised hasn't come up much on the right, but my sense is that doubt here is more about, uh, demographic concerns that haven't really been fleshed out or justified explicitly. Could be wrong.
This is very valid and true, but if the choice is between her a guy who cannot reliably complete sentences without a teleprompter...I dunno, man.
bsky.app/profile/lewm...
To be fair, the last time she was in a national election, everyone thought she would be a formidable candidate but she did terribly, and was widely considered a surprisingly poor campaigner. So there is a data point.
But this is a false choice - the choice is between her and Biden and anyone else the Dem establishment may want. And presumably they’d want someone who was able to stretch her well-resourced campaign to the start of voting?
This seems like the actual choice to me because I think what establishment Dems want more than anything else is to avoid disruption, which is why they've carried Biden this far in the first place. I don't think an open contest is likely.
I don’t think they’d allow an open contest, I think they’d knife Kamala if they wanted someone else. I wonder if her terrible 2020 run isn’t doing more to keep him viable than anything else - in which case, well played Biden Team.
By picking Harris as his VP Biden made clear his view of who should be president if something happens to him. The very voters who picked Biden in 2020 also picked Harris as their alternate already. Party bosses picking anyone else would be an outrageous usurpation in addition to everything else.
i think that is a big part of why biden didn't step down -- or there wasn't more pressure for him to do so: no one wants to see another insurgent left campaign.
