If Team Biden can't allay the fears he is too old, voters will be implicitly pricing in Harris taking his office during the next term anyway. So you either comprehensively demonstrate the "Biden old" stuff is bogus, or if you can't (because true) or can't (because incompetent), get out of the way.
Or to put it another way: every day that Team Biden isn't actually ending the "Biden old" conversation, they are running Harris as the principal at the top-of-the-ticket anyway, but only taking the costs and not taking advantage of the opportunities that come with that
There’s also no way Trump campaign doesn’t start running hard on; “Biden is going to resign and put in Harris”.
At the absolute least you have to start campaigning her as strong, competent and capable.
Because I don’t do cable news; and this site has a distorted filter of real world news that breaks through, I sometimes miss what’s going on.
But it feels to me like I’ve heard very little from Trump campaign in last week; I presumed they are letting Dems stew in their own disarray.
They definitely said you are getting Harris in 2020. But that was much more easy to dismiss.
If they are already saying it now. Then I’m not surprised. But it will become exceedingly clear part of the campaign by the end.
Yeah he delayed his VP announcement for that reason, and is actively running ads about Harris being the replacement (leaning into the racism of why that'd be bad being very much the theme)
It’s worth remembering that Trump and co. is on a nonstop gish-gallop online, so it is more about sussing out the current MAGA vibe since they never shut up.
i expect that action would have much the same result as comey looking into clintons emails - legitimize trumps bullshit to the low information voter and strengthen his position
Opportunities like picking a very electable VP, although I worry she'll bungle it and pick someone who doesn't help (like Newsom).
But she could try for Whitmer or Beshear, for example.
It seems to me there are way more people who would show up to vote for Harris but not Biden than Biden but not Harris. It's getting harder for me to see the downside in elevating her.
I’ve already priced her into my vote. And I also think they’ve hidden her light under a bushel these past years. But the other guy hasn’t even picked his running mate, he doesn’t really want one. He’s just as likely to kick it than Biden and we get stuck with Uday or Qusay.
Yeah, This is a classic "doesn't she look tired" hit.
The damage is done and effectively irreparable.
Anything Biden team does now can just be written off as cover-up, or falsehoods to conceal the truth. Or a good day.
Ignoring of course that a literal boiled potato is a better choice than Trump.
The more the conversation is about “Should Biden dropout” the less opportunity there is to talk about the real and present threat. That is what needs to be factored into the decision making matrix by the people that have control of whether he drops out.
Harris is the Vice President of THIS term, not necessarily the de facto replacement for the NEXT term.
IMHO, if Dems are going to be audacious, they shouldn't temper that because of pretend rules or hurt feelings.
Reliable Dems settled with Hillary in 2016 and then Joe in 2020. In both runups, fervent support for other candidates gave way.
A do over isn't practical. But the platform's the same, the ground game, appointees, and operatives. Not to put it lightly, but the biggest change would be the lawn signs.
“Pressure mounts on Biden” from the relentless coverage in the NYT in particular.
Nowhere in these articles are they mentioning the fact that Trump is 78. But Biden is too old.
And this has been the case for four years now. It's really basic stuff. It was understood that if we got to where we were looking at a second term that the VP choice was going to matter a lot! The electorate collectively dealt with this question in 2020. This is all a waste of time.
Trump wins! Thanks for playing "Surrendering to Trump." So glad, Dems don't disappoint every election by giving into Republicon Fascists fear-mongering to win. Hope you enjoy your poor, poor state of living. You will, if you don't notice now, just how good a job Joe really did this ... 1
And they wouldn't be wrong to price that in. It's impossible to even credibly argue at this point that it's more likely than not he would be able to finish the term.
So - if people would vote for Harris for President (plausible but 100% hypothetical), why wouldn’t they vote Biden on the understanding that she has him backstopped?
What’s the difference?
Feels like an implicit argument that huge swathes of the electorate are too stupid to know what a VP does.
I'd put it firmly north of 50%. It was already a real chance before, now it's very plain. The man will be 86 in January 2029. If this is what he's like now, at 81... I mean, I really hate how morbid this whole thing is. But that's where we are. We all saw it and it really was that bad.
I continue to think that he's old, and holding that job (and the schedule, and the stress, and the physical demands) is just a lot. It's clearly a problem for running. I'm not convinced at all that he has a problem doing the job itself. Maybe so and we just don't know, but that's hardly certain.
The office will run surprisingly far just on auto-pilot if you have other people around you, tho it will feel a bit directionless. But campaigns can't really run on auto-pilot in the same way, and folks will be concerned about the country if he's not visibly up to it, even if they shouldn't be
Related: the VAST majority of what a POTUS does is select competent, experienced people to give them good advice.
Which is why Trump is wholly unqualified, whereas Biden will have a reasonable to excellent response to any problem that doesn’t require an instant response (like a debate).
I agree with all of this. I just think it is far overblown to suggest that he is seriously ill or on death's door. I think the most likely explanation is that he is just old but that, other than the actuarial tables, there is no concrete reason to think that he can't make it through another term.
TBH if I were convinced that Biden is already too old, that he's as out of it as he appeared at the debate all (or most of) the time, I would not be pricing in Harris. In that scenario Biden is either muddling through with diminished capacity or being "guided" by aides, and would continue as such.
Exactly. 126 days is all we need to put up with Biden if he is indeed too old & we can do that because he has an excellent team behind him, though I'd prefer he stepdown January 21st, not November 6th but the point remains.
That's a fair point. I'm not in a panic over his debate performance, but I do realize at his age that he might not survive another term, and there might be a President Harris.
So we move to Harris now and fight this issue right up front. Bonus: Dems get to spend 4 months campaigning on how old, infirm, and addled TRUMP is. If elected, at half-term he’ll be the same age Biden is today. “We fixed our old-man problem — but the Republicans have not.”
I hate it because I don't want biden as president because he's an awful awful human being and an even worse legislator. But now it's all about him being too old or whatever
term, with more to come his 2nd. There will not be another Democrat in office to cleanup the economic messes Repubs always make, because that's someone else's problem. ... 2
