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.
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.
Yes, we burned a week on this (a week with some *really* bad stories for Trump).
There aren’t that many more weeks before the election. Democrats need to either get together and have the conversation with Biden, or say, we’re all in very soon
I have a lot more respect for people who are fighting through all the pros and cons and (frequently) changing their opinions here, often in light of brand new information as it keeps arriving, than the people who've stuck with a single viewpoint and are impervious to reality no matter what.
I think where I’m coming down is: it’s ok to talk about party strategy within the constraints of the existing system and primary ticket we voted on, but the people actively undermining Harris as VP, or Biden’s mental capacity, on social media are actively supporting the fascists _on their ground._
By now if someone is doing stuff that’s indistinguishable from the fascist campaign or a Russian opp, it’s on purpose and they are accountable for it.
There are levers people can pull, even ordinary people, that do not publicly undermine the legitimate pro-democracy party.
Right. I saw Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) called on Biden to step down today, but she also called for an open convention instead of throwing her support behind Harris. That’s not helping.
yeah, that it's 8 days and counting since the faceplant and everyone is just walking around like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is not a good thing with 120ish days until the election. 4 months is a blink.
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).
