Aren’t the same people freaking out about Biden the ones perfectly happy to weekend-at-Bernie’s Feinstein — or play along with that — as long as they could?
This is a genuine question; I don’t know.
Oh yes, definitely.
Eh. I’m not freaking out about Biden; I am freaking out about the press, the pundits, the donors, and especially the campaign.
This seems to me to be the You Have One Job of a campaign and that they can’t manage it scares me. It’s not a surprise!
Right. And folks can (and plainly do) have lots of opinions on what to do now, but the overriding concern here, and in the D party apparatus isn't "will Biden be ok in the Oval Office" but "is his campaign going to get him there" and if not, can we fix it, and can someone else fix it, in that order
I didn’t much like Biden and never liked the primary system. I thought he was too old in 2020! But the time to fix it was before the primaries. I don’t have the impression that he’s changed much, only the world, both in very predictable ways.
I think the thing for me is there's still 4 months left. That's not a giant amount of time, but it's also plenty if they really did light the fight in the campaign
The problem is this is just a really hard election to properly model; in some profound ways it's not like any election up to 2016, and has some very important differences to 2016 or 2020 too in lots of important directions. Which isn't great for anxiety. But it does mean it's still all to play for.
I think a lot of Democrats are freaking out because they seem to be stuck in an earlier era where the president's performance had coattails that either helped or hurt the party, but if you believe polling, Trump and Biden are almost totally detached from that.
Obama and his 2008 coattails aren't helping anyone out this time. Everyone's going to have to work for this themselves on every level. Personally, I know I'm volunteering for the Stein campaign here in North Carolina.
they're worried about downticket races, but I really wouldn't underestimate how much they genuinely, genuinely are terrified of what a Trump admin would be, and feel like Biden and his bubble of senior aides fundamentally don't get it and/or aren't capable of running a campaign up to defeating it
It is absolutely not free to swap out the ticket. It's also not the case that doing it is only downsides. A lot of this week's noise is just a lot of senior folks in the party changing their mind about where they think the balance of that lies.
I'm seeing people CLAIM that there's some sound reason for the hatred, abuse, and threats being directed at everyone perceived as having "turned on Biden," but this is the same cult of personality behavior as any other political cult of personality. People have a parasocial relationship with him.
I get that and have definitely disagreed with the campaign, as we've discussed. I think pushing for a campaign leadership shakeup might be the best thing at this point. I think pushing for Biden to drop out has backfired (and the rallying around Harris came too little, too late).
the abortion stuff is a huge wildcard. it has driven huge voter turnout in local races and it is on a ton a ballots. So it could easily skew the hell out of results.
And who knows if that would also have an impact in house/senate races.
Given it’s such a central issue, I’m not sure “skew” is the right word. It rightly and justly can affect the results a lot! I wish the Dems would run on it more!
With apologies to George Box: All models are wrong; some models are useful; and sometimes no model is useful, so spend your time touching grass instead of trying to model when it just won’t work.
Is it? Most international commentary I read have been assuming a Trump WH for months - not as something that will necessarily happen, but as a strong likelihood. Most polls have went only one way so far.
And I don’t mean the national polls either. I am talking about polls in key swing states. Dem just don’t have the swing states; and we can debate the rationale, but it’s not just Biden’s age. And while it’s true that the campaign hasn’t addressed it, it was there before that.
Aren't there still big money differences, campaign offices, staffing and staff quality differences favoring Biden - the mechanics aren't much changed are they?
Yes. Lots of advantages there. The number that worries me more than favorability tho (which is the big one that's usually quoted) is "enthusiasm to vote" numbers, where Ds consistently poll below Rs
The flipside to that as well is that the R groundgame is basically trash, which makes even those types of numbers a bit hard to interpret. Basically the whole cycle is a flock of black swans and everyone's trying to peer through frosted glass a bit to interpret what's going to happen
Well, that’s one reason I am back to volunteering for a local campaign.
That, and it’s a way to manage my anxiety by doing something that’s not online.
That's what the Biden campaign doesn't seem to get. They keep talking about this being no contest. Orange man bad, that sort of stuff, without acknowledging that the people turned off by Biden's age aren't going to flip their votes to Trump, they just won't vote, handing the election to Trump.
I’ll canvas from time to time. I’m trying not to feel this way, but I’ll be real. Why bust my butt when the campaign continues to humiliate itself? These people are paid to do this work and keep fucking up with no accountability. Why am I doing volunteer work for them? Why donate money to them?
Harris looks to be a significant plus pulling Blacks, Hispanics (why?), youngs off the couch. ACAB votes for Trump fill a thimble, lawnorder votes against Trump fill a bucket.
Nobody else mentions it (do they?) but the VP candidate card can win a few tricks at this stage of the game.
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Pwn if there are only so many Rs these days because they've been purging the infidels for ~8 years and what's left is a very small of true believers, won't those numbers inherently be skewed when the "other" side is a bunch of people who are "anything but that" which lends itself to dispassion
But many will vote out of desperation, or fear...No one who isn't corrupt, deluded, or very, very stupid will vote for Trump.
Unfortunately, there are far too many people out there who fit in one of the above slots, or more than one.
Deluded is all of us, unfortunately. I was just thinking yesterday about how deluded I've been these last 10 years, imagining the politics of average American following my life experiences just because my entire social circle did as well
I think inflecting this through the filter of which Ds and which Rs pick up the phone to answer a pollster also adds a layer of complexity. Not sure of the exact nature of it, but all the samples are unusual...
's one of the reasons I keep trumpeting D wins in Wisconsin. There's been close vote after close vote basically since 2019, and pretty steady results driving turnout into wins. Not all wins (Ron "that asshole" Johnson is still in office even after promising to retire), but it's WAY better.
Everyone in Europe (& I think a lot of the USG) is prepping for the worst case; they are already living the best case so there's no prepping to do for that.
bsky.app/profile/atru...
And the only modern precedent we have for the presumptive nominee pulling out before the convention is 1968. And that didn’t go well. And while the situations aren’t identical, boy they’re uncomfortably close.
I almost feel like it's all baked in, and we just don't know the answer until the timer goes off.
At this point... it's who is more excited/scared to vote on the actual day.
