Here’s why Biden is toast: in this situation, any candidate in Biden’s shoes would do a series of events (interviews, press conferences, town halls, etc) to prove they are up to the task.
But, Biden isn’t doing that because he can’t. He’s not capable—and that’s not going to change.
I think when half your campaign and party leaders are leaking to the press that they're shitting bricks, and you're not putting it to bed with some urgency, there's a problem that's a lot bigger than a few folks on social media thinking the sky is falling
One blue dog said Trump would win but still backs him, one crazy House D called on him to resign, and Pelosi said something ambiguous. What other actual concrete statements have been made?
“Joe had a bad night, but he’s still our guy, now let’s talk about Trump’s fascism” should have been the unified message, repeated constantly, and that kind of coordination needed to come from the campaign within hours. Instead, we were left with scattered statements, some ambiguous.
If you can’t reassure Nancy Pelosi enough to get her to say something non-ambiguous (the president still hasn’t called her!), then it becomes a campaign issue, not just a media issue. Playing the media is part of comms.
Right. If folks want to say it's overblown, go for it. But the concerns here are plainly real, and plainly coming from a lot of folks who are concerned /because they are terrified of Trump winning/, not just trying to kneecap Biden or quietly pro-Trump folks, or a bit of a social media freakout
Part of the job is being party leader, and that's gone and it's not coming back. The party is practically in open revolt against him and, perhaps even more justified, his abysmal team. Right or wrong, that's what's happening. It has snowballed incredibly quickly and will only continue to ratchet up.
Yes. And ... not just in the wider party. Staff! Senior staff! *Current* staff! Like, sure, they're not putting their names on it in the newspapers because doing that is resigning, but I think folks are missing that this is very much not just a little social media storm. It's actually pretty serious
Over the space of about 72 hours we've gone from "that was bad but no way he drops out" to "eh, maybe a small chance, this isn't looking good" to "oh wow this might really be happening" to "it's very likely happening, should he also resign? And also it's Harris, stop fooling around about that."
The time between now and the DNC is roughly the same amount of time the UK had for its *entire* election season. It sucks, and I absolutely do not minimize the difficulty in climbing this mountain, to drop your candidate, but there *is* time if they do it now, but not time to delay it much further
