This actually doesn't make much sense to me. If the party was sociopathic and they just had a Will To Power, you'd expect them to do the more effective thing and NOT the thing where they seem scared of hurting people's fee-fees. They wouldn't have nominated Clinton, that's for sure.
A sociopathic party would absolutely kick Harris to the side or at least make it an open competition as much as possible.
What does that mean? For a sitting VP, Harris actually seems to have a ridiculously low standing within the party, yet for fear of 'going out of turn' or whatever the fuck they're doing, they're going to nominate her.
Feckless? Yes. Cowardly? Yes. Sociopathic? I wish.
Sure, but a truly sociopathic party would not cow to that leverage for fear of what she would do. They would proceed in a way that gave them the best chance to win.
It doesn't necessarily, but when it's used as in they just have a 'will to power,' it obviously implies being rational or calculating without a care for anything else.
I think the Democrats legitimately believed Clinton was the best realistic option. It's easy to forget this, but she was quite popular in ~2013-14, and she ran a strong campaign against Obama in the 2008 primaries (a much better campaign than McCain ran in the general, that's for sure). She was a good candidate on paper.
Maybe so, but I also think they kind of had to convince themselves of that because it seemed like such a foregone conclusion that it was 'her turn.' She ran a stronger campaign against Obama, perhaps, but the fact she lost at all showed her limitations, and that's even conceding the fact that Obama was a generational political talent.
That a junior Senator named "Barack Hussein Obama" was able to unseat the 2008 coronation, a contest in which HRC went in with every possible institutional advantage, says volumes about HRC's campaigning skills, or the lack thereof.
they basically had no choice but to make her "practice President" at State 2009 since otherwise *far* more PUMAs would have voted McCain than just one-fourth; that's also why zero-delegate Harris was running mate instead of Chauvin's boss Klobuchar, since Biden wouldn't have withstood six solid months of Tara Reade puff pieces on The View etc.
Obama never liked Hillary, but the 2016 shenanigans aren't that surprising given his "brand protection" of Obamacare, from surrendering 2010 to the Teabaggers by not saying M4A would be the next step (which'd imply that the "signature legislation" wasn't pure capital-G Godlike perfection) to forming a Voltron of candidates around the 5th runner-up within hours the night of Feb. 28
I think they’re trying to recreate the magic of 2020 when everyone dropped out at the same time and consolidated around Biden just in time for him to go win SC. It might be a great strategy but would look a lot smarter if they’d picked a strategic and popular VP candidate instead of someone who only checked intersectional boxes
For sure. By “magic” I just meant that it worked. Will be super interesting to see if it works again. Dem party efficiency is probably their greatest advantage over GOP, even tho I agree it’s far from “democratic”
Right, but they won. This is where your position is weakest for me because you're making two arguments and picking evidence based on which one is convenient to argue. Hillary Clinton fits both your argument that (1) the Democratic party used elite opinion to influence the outcome of their primary and (2) it was a bad political move. The second just isn't true of 2020, when they won the general election. Elite control can be bad and it can be ineffective, but one doesn't prove the other. And it would be odd to expect the majority of Democrats to care about it being bad (or even consider it to be bad) if it yields good results, which it did in 2020.
they barely won. The margins were so slim that I can’t really blame trump for his insistence on recounts. Hell, I am glad we didn’t get four more years of Trump, but I am not actually convinced Biden won - not after the cheating the DNC engaged in to kneecap Sanders.
Ok, well if you don’t even believe in the vote counts then I don’t particularly care what your views on fair democratic processes are. We’re not going to come to any consensus because you’ll just claim you don’t believe something when it’s inconvenient to your position. Best of luck.
That’s not what I said. I said I don’t blame Trump for doubting the vote count considering the shitty, slimy behavior of the dnc.
Listen, as long as voting machines are used, the vote is not secure nor trustworthy. In every election since Bush v Gore, weird shit has been alleged, with exit polls being at variance with vote counts.
“I am not convinced Biden won” (that is saying you don’t trust the vote counts, btw). But cool, I am. There is no synthesis of those two positions. And if you don’t believe in the accuracy of the voting, there is no point in me engaging with your other points (although another commenter did). I’m not saying we couldn’t have productive conversations on other topics, but I think on any issue concerning voting you’re going to dismiss the information I present. There’s just no path forward with that.
Biden had 7 million votes more than his opponent. Because state elections are not statistically independent, to flip the 50,000 or so votes which 'counted most' in the closest states that got Biden over the 270 EC threshold, Trump would have needed to win between 2 and 3 million more votes nationally. That's not Biden barely winning.
Notably though, Trump won millions of votes more than in 2016. If he does so again, he will be President.
No, it was a decisive win by the standards of modern US presidential elections. The margins were slim in some of the electorally decisive states, but a) that's always the case and b) Biden did not need every state he ended up winning; he could have lost various combinations of 1-2 Rust Belt states/Georgia and still hit 270.
For Trump to have won he would have had to "run the table" in the same way he did in 2016. That would have been the genuinely unlikely outcome.
That’s the issue; they were slim in the electorally decisive states.
And - worse… in 2016 Hillary got CAUGHT cheating in regards to Sanders. In 2020, the DNC - while not technically ‘cheating’ sure fucking short-circuited democracy.
So, not trusting the DNC? Yeah. I get it.
Listen, he’s a jackass. A horror show.
And yet, through political malpractice, the Dems are going to lose to him again. After lying for four+ years that he was not suffering a cognitive issue - which those of us caring for PD patients up close and personal knew he was suffering - (and we were called conspiracy theorists.)
They did this after telling us that this is an existential election. After all, they’ll be fine with whatever speaking tour or quid-pro-quo mic jobs they end up with. We’re the ones who need to deal with 4 more years of that lunatic.
The margins were slim, but again, Biden won more of those decisive swing states than he needed to - he had (I believe the term would be) "insurance." If you need to win three of six close races and you ultimately win all six, that's not a nailbiter even if each of those individual races was close.
Biden pulling out of the race seems to me to be the least un-Democratic thing about this so far, given that quitting a race is something he's absolutely allowed to do. It's weird that now is the time everybody is freaking out about it. Or is it just that they're pushing Harris without a vote or anything?
They can't do the whole primary cycle. But they still have delegates who can make a decision.
If Fucking France can run an election in a month, the Democrats can figure out some way of picking a candidate in a way that lets the candidates prove themselves.
You keep talking about hypotheticals, or criticizing Kamala Harris, but you really haven't addressed just who is being denied the chance to compete against Harris for delegates.
I agree with Mr. Scizorhands. The stronger ticket for the D's is Whitmer/Shapiro because at this point the path to the WH seems to run through the Rust Belt.
It seems like they might feel hamstrung. I think the best way around that, to stand behind Kamala while still allowing others to come forward is something like “totally - although in terms of messaging, I think the best approach would be "We ahve an incredibly strong candidate in KH; as champions of democracy, we are going to let the people voice that support as only they can." Something like that. I think it would be a huge boost for her to win the convention with a wind at her back, rather than doing an email roll call.” That, I think, gives cover to those who might feel like coming forward could be destructive for “party unity”
It's a contested convention, if 2 or more candidates stand. The only question is, will anyone other than Harris stand for election?
I think complaints are stronger when they're directed not at (only) the party elites endorsing Harris, but other potential candidates refusing to stand. That's likely a sign of an undemocratic or schlerotic culture in the party.
Yes, I have heard that complaint, and I still don't understand the claim that there was no primary. When I Google "2024 Democratic primary" I find a Wikipedia page, a CNN run-down of results by state, a page by the New Hampshire Secretary of State...the list goes on. I also remember voting in the primary that Pennsylvania ran. If that wasn't a primary, what would be?
Florida canceled their primary. There was no serious attempt to make Biden debate or address the charges against him--which were that he was too old to run and he was unelectable come November.
They should have. And the likes of Whitmer and Pritzker and whoever else will have now let their moment pass without a fight and should have challenged Biden whether the party liked it or not. Credit to Dean Phillips for stepping up to the plate.
But from the post-debate landscape where the Dems gambit became unviable, better the honesty of a Kamala party coronation than a fake undemocratic delegate beauty contest before/during the convention, imho.
they were so rational that they are now in this deep FUBAR crisis. so much rational calculus (!) depended on cover-ups and gaslighting and lies and hubris. my god, to not see the terrible trash that is the Democratic Party
OK, fair: rational if one believed that his cognitive deficiencies weren’t going to be a major factor and could be brushed under the rug. Or if you were kept in the dark, as many people seem to have been.
Last year? Yeah, pretty much. And you can see how pissed he was about the idea that he should step down. He’s definitely slow, too slow to win an election or be an effective president, but he’s not a complete marionette.
We're getting to the same point, but I think the real sin is that the Democrats built a system that reinforces conformity and groupthink to a degree that incredibly ambitious governors and other leaders were terrified to show the slightest hint of deviation from the party line. I can only describe it as Stalinist, except that with Stalin you had the legit fear that if you expressed dissent you might get a bullet in your neck, for these folks it's what? Getting mocked on MSNBC? Lessening your ability to cash in on your "public service" after you're done being governor?
Meanwhile, Marianne Williamson, RFK Jr, and Dean Phillips were willing to stand up and say the emperor had no clothes, and they all have meaningful strengths to one degree or another, but were swept away like ants. To me, that's where the focus has to be - building a up a support system that allows leaders with guts to actually get traction against the establishment.
But isn’t that a sunk cost? The process was already undemocratic. However, given that, Biden and senior leadership shepherding Harris into place is not outrageous. She’s already been vetted for the role through two Primaries (OK, “Primaries”) and a general election. What’s more natural than the Vice President/ Running Mate stepping in when the President is unable? It’s literally her primary job. It’s what she’s there for.
I understand there are far fewer legal ramifications in her ascent to the top of the ticket—ie. transferring the campaign funds and resources; fighting nuisance suits in red states.
Harris was Biden’s running mate in the primary, and however flawed, it was the process they chose. Primary voters were ok with the incumbent Vice President in an election where the potential need to replace the President was not academic. The process, such as it was, already chose Biden’s successor. How is it undemocratic for her to succeed?
But it's this sort of action that the party is currently pursuing that got us Clinton and Biden in the first place. Freddie's point is that there's a throughline to the last three election cycles through the Democratic Party's "elites" (however you want to define it) of them assuming people will just go along with whoever they decide should be the nominee. How many times are we going to have "the most important election in our lifetime" in part due to the Dems running a turkey?
A lot of my liberal friends are freaking out because they didn't believe the polls.
At the end of the day this is pretty much indisputable proof that Trump is winning. You don't make history by throwing a sitting President out unless you're desperate.
...or unless you really think he's not fit to govern for four more years because you saw his horrible recent performances now that the media is actually covering them somewhat more appropriately? I'm not saying you're wrong; merely that there are pretty rational reasons to want him to drop out that do not involve "oh my god he can't win the election."
...depriving the people the chance to vote for or against the actual person who will be in charge. I hate how the fear has been ratcheted so far up that people think the other side winning the presidency is the end of the world, producing all kinds of credibility-destroying and democracy-destroying outcomes, because people seem to think that is preferable to the other party winning.
As a Democrat, I absolutely cop to desperation, and I'll admit I had no idea -- or didn't want to believe -- how infirm Biden had become until the very night of the debate, honest. He lost the election in the first 2 minutes, and then for good measure he lost it again when DJT survived an assassination attempt with a fist pump, covered in blood. There was zero hope at that point, none at all.
No comment on the nominee selection process, but Biden had to drop out. This is a Hail Mary pass, and I'm dusting off my rosary.
As a non-Democrat, I am reaching over to ask politely and genuinely: do you think Harris can win it? Do you think enough people who would not have voted for Biden - maybe stayed home or write-in or what have you - will vote for her?
I think it's possible. I think there was a lot of general disappointment with the Biden administration, around inflation, Afghanistan, Gaza, etc., but for many people it coalesced into just "he's lost his mind; we can have a senile old man making nuclear decisions." Harris is corrupt, ingratiating, and uncharismatic, but she now makes Trump once again look like the wildcard, and that at least removes many voters' #1 issue with Biden.
If nothing else, it disrupts a news cycle that was next going to escalate to Trump walking on water and healing lepers.
I'm not qualified to speculate on whether she can win, but I'm certain Biden could not. Hell, I'm about the most reliable Democratic voter you could ever meet, and even I was sick at the thought of voting for him after it was conclusively shown he wasn't up to the job for 4 more years, let alone campaigning for it. I wouldn't have stayed home but it would've been tempting, and now, try as I might to keep my expectations low, I'm actually excited about Harris. (It must go without saying here that I believe DJT would be a disaster for the nation and democracy; an entirely senile president would be preferable to an actively malevolent one.)
Biden dropping out was an absolutely insane risk that had to be taken. If your car explodes in flame while you're driving, it's a gamble to jump out, but there's no other choice. Here we are, and we'll see. Even if she loses, and she very well may, I don't think I'll regret Biden's decision.
In Canada, it would be a more straightforward process, with registered party members (i.e. regular people) directly voting for the party leader via preferential vote. This "people vote in state primaries for delegates who get sent to the convention" business seems way more complicated and difficult to accomplish in the time remaining. But even with the Canadian system, it seems nightmarishly hard to logistically pull off a national leadership campaign in a month with no prior notice, especially one with 10x our population.
they are still going to have to do that. if nobody serious throws their hat in the ring and the now-free-agent delegates choose to vote for her based on endorsements from Biden and other party elites, them's the breaks
Yeah, this seems pretty straightforward and easy to understand. For whatever reason, nobody seems to want to contest the nomination, so it's going to the only person who's asking for it. I agree that this situation is not ideal, but most Democrats seem okay with it so that's that.
I can't help but wonder if some of the dissatisfaction with this process is really just dissatisfaction with Democrats in general. It's certainly strange to see people get so worked up over a purely process-based objection. I mean, if the party somehow held a standard primary and Harris won that, would the discontents nod with satisfaction and pack it in? I'm thinking no, they wouldn't.
Thanks to you and Zack Straw for providing a voice of reason in this comment section. If the post and most other comments here were described to me by someone to my political right, I would think they were engaging in paranoid caricature. It's amazing how shifts in issue salience can rattle one's assessment of different thinkers.
Its not like they weren't warned. All the Democrats had to do is not go f***ing bats**t crazy. But their "obsessive fear of Trump" seemingly made that impossible.
So most democratic countries don't have the kind of primary system we typically have and wind up just fine on being democracies. Democracy exists mostly between the parties in most of the world and we don't see it falling apart in established democracies very often.
We also have a political system designed to ensure that the only feasible choices are one of two carefully curated corporate imperialist muppets. What flavor of idpol do you prefer?
That said, I don't consider most other countries to be model democracies either. The only question is how they are managed.
What state do you live in? Most counties in most states have moved to a split system where a computer marks the ballot but the voter can physically inspect it before it goes into a box that is the official count.
Yes, you can definitely trust Wikipedia. On average, it's probably the most trustworthy site on the internet. I think it's weird people still ask this question.
I'm not saying it's the best source as far as the most informative, but I am saying that scoffing at a Wikipedia link as thought someone just linked to Infowars is kind of misguided.
I don't like the Democrats claiming "our democracy is on the line" but there's major differences between a party realizing they fucked up before the nomination and replacing their candidate before the official nomination, and someone who denies the election so much that mob violence breaks out while he's waiting for the result to be thrown to the House of Representatives.
It aint over yet. Still three months before election. Although ballots have been mailed in some states already, I've been told. What do Democrats do with the wrong names? I'm voting for Dr. Jill Stein, again, so not my worry.
I don't really understand the contradiction you're trying to highlight.
Like the party decides and we choose between their two representatives. For some reason in the 60s we decided that it would be better if we let a tiny number of people who are barely even in the actual party in like a working sense, get to choose among unlimited candidates which has led to completely dysfunctional choice menus in both parties.
It seems like the smoke filled room is simply a better way to do this and then bring voters in for a choice between one parties choice and the others than letting randos pretend like they're the party despite having a kind of dubious connection to the party. qua the party. It's just a vehicle for a candidate. Like being a democrat should mean something over and above whoever the candidate is because your loyalty should be to the institution not the man.
When you say that the party elites didn't want a primary, I'm not sure what you mean. I seem to recall a primary. I voted in that primary, and so did lots of people I know. Candidates other than Biden even won delegates in that primary. I don't understand how there wasn't a 2024 Democratic primary.
If you mean there wasn't a competitive primary...well, very few viable candidates want to run against an incumbent president of their own party, and in 2024, none did.
If you were willing to do five minutes of research, you'd see the many, many ways the Democrats prevented an actual primary from occurring. Ask RFK Jr. Oh, but let me guess - he's crazy, so it was good that the party was undemocratic. Which is always how this goes. They always have an excuse.
It's true that I didn't do research on the topic; I just remembered the primary that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania conducted, and in which I voted. If that wasn't an actual primary, can you tell us what an actual primary is?
Isn't that goalpost-shifting? I don't recall that any candidate *must* debate any other to participate in a primary. So it seems to me that the existence of a debate is entirely separate from that of a primary.
The whole point is that the primary process was rigged to allow Biden to skate by. Why? I think the answer is obvious when you look at the debate footage with Trump.
Requiring Biden to debate and run would have shown a commitment to a fair and open process. The D's chose instead to game the system. How's that working out for them now?
It was clear that the DNC fixed the primaries so there was only 1 result. It was right out of the Soviet Union. RFK left because the fix was in. Stop pretending there were real primaries.
Letting your incumbent be primaried is what happened to Carter and Bush 41. It's anti-correlated with victory in November. (Yeah, I wanted Biden to debate, because I wanted him to get practice, but it was the least surprising thing ever that the party didn't help people nibble away at their incumbent.)
(And Biden won the 2020 primary. Bernie fans were mad because the plan was for the centrist vote to get split N ways and the leftist vote to all get concentrated in Bernie, i.e. the same way that Trump got a big share of votes to himself in 2016 while the establishment split the non-crazy vote. I'm not that impressed with people thinking it was unfair for a bunch of people trailing Biden to drop out to consolidate around him, when the plan was their own kind of hijinks.)
I'm happy for the Democrats to keep people who've never won any office ever from running for the highest office in the land on their ticket. Imagine if the GOP had that policy before 2016.
That's a reasonable argument _but_ I have to wonder if the real reason this time around was Biden's mental and physical decline. If that's the case then shutting down the primaries will, irony of ironies, significantly damage the party's chances this November.
I think Jill has been protected Joe (look up Operation Bubblewrap) from a lot of things and that not only shields people from his condition, but also can exacerbate his sunset.
Needing to stay out there can keep you sharp. A Biden that debated in primaries (however that might've happened) would likely not have had Jule 27th happen to him.
"Letting your incumbent be primaried is what happened to Carter and Bush 41. It's anti-correlated with victory in November."
To me this is very backwards reasoning. Did Carter and Bush lose because they were primaried, or because they were weak candidates and other people in the party recognized, correctly, that they were unlikely to win a general election? The big problem with the Democratic Party in general right now is they think they can get rid of any possible negative criticism by refusing to platform it. Far from strengthening their position, all they've done is provoke a historic realignment that's hemorrhaging the young, minority voters who are the party's actual future in exchange for older white voters who will be the first to jump ship the minute Trump's not on the ballot anymore.
Florida was cancelled. There were ballots with only one candidate listed. There were no debates or voter guides about who is running. No town halls. Can we no longer imagine competition, rigorous challenges, serious choices?
We had a competitive and rigorous Democratic primary in North Carolina, too. As I recall, the candidates were Joe Biden and someone named No Preference. There is even a Wikipedia page about it!
So I just read the Hollow parties and it’s kind of the latest in a series of books about how partisanship in America is kind of terrible and I’m inclined to agree that we need more gatekeepers and less intra-party democracy.
Like I’m not even a huge fan of Kamala or anything but like I feel like parties shouldn’t be so democratic at least at the think involvement layer of voting. They should be pretty powerful organizations that voters get to choose between.
"I’m inclined to agree that we need more gatekeepers and less intra-party democracy."
Yeah, no. Trump won because the gatekeepers had been banning all talk of immigration restriction or trade populism for decades and he was the first guy who didn't need their approval to show how popular these issues were and how completely unrelated the prevailing GOP dogma was to what GOP voters wanted. If they had been less restrictive, maybe it would have become a more acceptable viewpoint and real politicians with social skills would have pushed forward on this.
Right I think the problem was he didn’t need their approval. And so without strong support of his party he was able to capture it via revolt.
I think parties should be restructured to be more grass roots connections but not in a low commitment kind of way like voting it should be on the level of church joining. But they should be independent, powerful institutions which act not weak ones which are mostly acted upon.
Those views should have had to go with the long work of institution building not just some rando through money and/or charisma can bring the wrecking ball to a party and replace it with something else.
I agree with everything here except your final point. Trump needs to be elected if for no other reason than to break this death cycle of lunacy. The DNC power brokers won't change if it keeps on kind of working
It’s truly, genuinely insane that the sitting President dropped out of the race via tweet, with no concrete plans to address the nation. I understand he allegedly has COVID or whatever, but the way the media and his team covered up his very obvious infirmities makes me completely unwilling to trust anything they say going forward. The general aura of confusion and deception around his candidacy for the last year has erased whatever minimal shred of credibility the Democratic establishment was left clinging to.
I still recommend watching the video, which is widely available online. Maybe the real reason he stepped down is he realized he couldn't handle the travel.
If he died I don't think anyone would cover it up. Harris being the President instead of the Vice President would be to her advantage, both in the general election and at the convention. It would also mean less hard questions for the Democratic leadership. Biden being dead is something they could spin as an unfortunate freak occurrence that was out of their control. Him withdrawing while still alive raises a lot of questions as to how things were allowed to get this bad.
The problem is that Biden isn't done yet--he needs to fight off calls that he should also step down as President. Coughing and hacking into a microphone in a public address wouldn't have helped that cause.
I don't see what's so unreasonable about Biden's manner of announcing that he's dropping out. He was (is?) indisposed at the moment and not at the White House. He said in his tweet that he would address the nation properly at some point this week. Waiting until a time when he could make the announcement in a proper speech from the Oval Office would probably mean waiting a few more days, and we need all the days of notice that we can get.
Non-zero chance he got delirious with covid and various functionaries started saying stuff like "Joe we've got the pope on the phone... he says drop out"
She went after Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries. Even had the t-shirts made. Do you remember those t-shirts? Hey, what windbag ended up winning that primary anyway?
If you say that Republicans are under-estimating her, yes, they are. But "OH QUEEN KAMALA IS SO AWESOME! PROSECUTOR AGAINST DRUMPH, CONVICTED FELON DRUMPH, FELON FELONFELOEOFDLONTGOGR" isn't really a strategy.
What did she do in 4 years as VP? I genuinely would like to know where she’s been the past few years. I want nothing more than to rally behind our D candidate, but why are we left to reach back to her track record as senator/AG of Ca? What has she done as VP to prove her fitness as president?
I have this suspicion that voter preferences are entrenched to the point Harris might not do much worse, but I guess time will tell. The most entertaining outcome would be Trump proceeding to lose the election to Harris. Doubt it will happen, but to be really frank the Democrats' goose was cooked either way. This was still better than running the empty husk of Joe Biden and forcing everyone to pretend he wasn't sundowning.
Like, can you think of a single person you know who planned on voting for Biden that would switch to Trump now because Harris is the candidate? I sure don't. Most Democratic voters would vote for an empty can of Pabst with a D next to it.
I think Trump is leading Harris by double digits in Forbes latest poll. I don't know what the difference is but she's losing by a bigger margin than Biden.
That's fair, but I'd like to actually see polls once her campaign was underway. Either way at worst you're just trading one losing candidate for another. I don't think there was a viable path to victory for Biden regardless
The main one was avoiding a competitive primary. They wanted Biden in the race just long enough to get the primary process wrapped up. After that my guess is they wanted to replace him, that's why the debate was so early. I also guess he was way more stubborn than the party insiders assumed he would be.
They could still just pick someone other than Harris at the convention. I maintain that the Democratic party brass finds losing to Trump preferable to the social democratic wing of the party getting any kind of control. That's really the only lens through which their actions make sense. Beating the left was more of a priority than beating Trump.
One point for Biden would to be to go out as a one-term president by choice. He'd leave as a winner. Going into a reelection campaign might easily have him come out a loser. That might matter to him.
The point is that biden couldn’t plausibly be president for four more years and that the debate revealed that to everyone who isn’t online, thus the whole apparatus turned on him the next day. The whole thing was rather unbecoming.
I am absolutely baffled by the selection of Harris. Do the Democrats want to lose to Trump as some kind of 4 dimensional chess move that I’m just too stupid to see? Or do they genuinely think that Harris is the candidate that can win? If so, HOW?!?!?!? How could they possibly think that?
Yeah, this crossed my mind. I personally believe that electing Trump means a nonzero chance of a major illiberal slide, but _if_ the cynical explanation for Whitmer et al.’s behavior is true, it speaks ill of them.
On the other hand, they could well be thinking some blend: “At this point the odds would be stacked against me to get the nomination in a short time AND it would be hard to win, AND if it didn’t work it would hurt the eventual candidate’s chances, so my staying out is better both for me and for the country.”
That has the ring of truth to me. Not exactly noble, but not exactly evil either.
Somebody who hasn’t bombed out of a presidential primary previously.
Somebody who isn’t so vulnerable on immigration, an issue that Trump is going to flog incessantly.
Ideally somebody who has enough distance from Biden that they can say with a straight face that they didn’t lie to the voters about his capacity for months/years.
She probably is in a much better position to articulate more persuasively for reproductive rights, which is going to be a major motivating issue for many women.
I don't think she can articulate anything persuasively, but as many many women want a woman telling them what they want to hear on the topic, I agree with your larger point. A pretty, professional, childless woman telling pretty, professional, childless younger women "vote for me or Donald Trump will lock you into birthing chairs" will be very effective.
Abortion will never, ever, ever be resolved for the simple reason that women can reliably get all het up about it and Democrats will never ever give that up, period.
Like maybe the people threatening him with the 25th wrote the letter and made him sign it and then a pissed off aide tweeted off the endorsement. I don't think Biden's capable of much on his own.
The explanation I've seen (and I don't know if this is true, but it seems to make sense) is that since she was already on the ticket she has access to war chest – money, staff, etc. If they run some new guy, it would require starting from zero.
The Democrats (unlike the Republicans) have no imagination; that's a large part of the problem. They ran Joe Biden again in 2024 because in modern American history, incumbent presidents run for reelection at the end of their first term. President Biden didn't seriously consider switching up his VP because in modern American presidential politics you just don't do that. Then when this incumbent president dropped out, of course leading Democrats are falling back on what seems to be the default course of action: have the (both sitting, and candidate for) VP step up and take his place. This is a party that doesn't know how or when to think outside of the box.
Exactly. Not to mention, the Democrats are still playing by the old rules. They have no idea how to play the shady game like Republicans do. I'm not advocating for them being sleazy, but a bit of backbone would be good.
They were willing to pay attention to their constituents (too many of whom would blindly trot off a cliff after Trump) and bucked the norm of not running a candidate who lost a previous election, a norm which hadn't been challenged since Nixon's comeback in 1968.
I think parties exercising some more control is good. We had outsiders showing up to run for President -- *for President of the United States* -- in the parties despite never having done anything for the party in the past. And in one case it worked! Whoever called the parties "fully fueled jet airliners waiting to be hijacked" was right.
Parties in other countries don't risk control of their party to something as uncontrollable as the public.
It would be nice if the VP wasn’t a product of the California machine with seemingly little gift for politics, but I guess we are where we are.
This is pretty par for the course in Parliamentary countries, BTW. I think Theresa May and Rishi Sunak both became prime minister running unopposed for party leader.
What do you want the Democrats to do if Biden’s people didn’t realize he didn’t have enough of the ol’Bidemite to carry on this election until forced to realize it.
Sunak and May we're under quite different circumstances. Sunak makes a lot of sense because a PM was required, pronto, and he had just come 2nd in a leadership contest. It's a flawed contest for sure, but it's something.
The next step is for another Democrat to put their name in contention. At that point, the wrangling will begin. Once a credible non-Harris candidate is announced, the power of the DNC will be tested.
And, while I don't disagree with the criticism of the Democrat Power Brokers, including the terrible decision making paired with lack of any accountability, I don't feel like any result at this point would be very "democratic," since the delegates are not reflective of the population as a whole.
Trump was a terrible president, failing to even pursue his signature policies and instead simply giving a massive tax cut to further the ever growing wealth imbalance. I loathe the idea of him being reelected. So some form of open convention, while definitely imperfect, would be a way to have some form of voter input on the nominee while providing energy and attention to the campaign.
Why would a credible Democrat run against Harris, or even be her VP pick? If she wins, good for her, good for Dems. If she loses, the field is clear for 2028 rather than taking the L here?
I think it would be a freebie. If anyone but Harris were the candidate, they would have the obvious excuse that they needed a full campaign, and they would become the most recognizable candidate for 2028. Certainly risky.
People "waiting for the right moment to run" need to realize windows can close awfully fast. Maybe while your resume is baking in the oven a Barack Obama comes up and steals your rightful spot.
I've been waiting on Roy Cooper. Someone pointed out he's 67 years old already.
That is part of the problem. Had biden announced last year that he was not running Harris would have started a campaign as well as other candidates. At this point, though, anyone who challenges her pretty much has to win the nomination and the election. If you challenge her and lose nomination and she goes on to lose general election you will be blamed for her loss. If you defeat her and win nomination but lose general election, you will be blamed. Either way your political career is over. Of course if she wins, great, but that is not looking very likely. At this point it is going to be tough to beat Trump with Harris or any realistic candidate. I, personally, think Manchin could but that is not going to happen.
Maybe... considering nothing about our national politics makes much sense to me right now, I'm extremely hesitant to make any proclamations about the 2028 election.
In reference to FDB's earlier post, it is all just feelings at this point.
No, your best bet if you can’t have a full campaign at Trump, which is obviously not possible now, is for Harris tot take the loss and you take advantage of the blowback from Trump’s presidency.
The obvious issue there is if Trump's term sees significant economic improvement. At that point you're looking at the possibility of a third Trump term with JD Vance (or another Republican) as President.
Let me also make the preemptive point that nostalgia for Trump's first term is driving a lot of his success at the polls right now.
Curious what you see as the subjects of this nostalgia? I remember mostly chaotic churn without much in the way of results, other than a big tax cut for the wealthy and effectively shifting the federal courts.
Trump got rolled by the GOP establishment. He assumed they shared his goals and that if he gave them a tax cut (which he wanted, as well) that they'd go along with immigration, etc. Bad call. Won't happen this time.
And Trump did an excellent job of stalling illegal immigration and asylum even within that. He was a very impactful president. I hope he does more if he wins.
Full disclosure: I think Trump is a buffoon. I did not and do not want him anywhere near the presidency. BUT, I do think the US needs a secure border and a revamped immigration policy (my rationale is our current approach pushes hundreds of millions of dollars to the smuggling cartels which victimize tens of thousands of people a year and which pump all sorts of bad stuff into our country). I did not expect that Trump would lead on an improved policy but he campaigned every day on securing the border. And he had a Republican House and Senate for the first two years of his term. Despite these advantages, he got NOTHING done. I believe the estimates are that less than 80 miles of new border wall were built during his four years. And the immigration rates that he reduced were for legal immigrants being denied entry. Obama stopped and deported many, many more illegal immigrants each year than Trump (check out the graphs in the link below). In short, Trump failed to do the one thing he promised (not to mention that obviously Mexico didn't pay any of it, we did). He was a failure on this issue and I do not understand why any rational supporter would look past it.
Here's a summary from the CATO institute: "the population of illegal immigrants remained about the same as when [Trump] took office."
I wouldn't believe a single thing that CATO said about immigrants. But in order to *reduce* illegal immigrants he'd have to deport, and that was getting worked on but wasn't a priority. Seems to me that Biden's term reveals that population *just not growing* is a big deal.
Also, Trump reduced legal immigration which is an excellent thing as well.
Like I said, Trump got rolled. I don't think he'll make that mistake and contrary to what a lot of people believe about JD Vance and overconfidence, I think Vance was a turnout booster, a promise that he wouldn't get fooled again.
You can see the same numbers in the WSJ and the Economist, along with dozens of other news sources. Trump had the opportunity to secure the border and crack down on illegal immigration but he utterly failed to do either. Obama stopped/deported 60% more people than Trump, despite the overheated rhetoric.
Not sure why you think Trump would keep his word this time.
Seems like you're falling victim to prioritizing feelings over facts.
Trump absolutely did crack down on illegal immigration, and Obama had a shitty economy that led a lot of illegals to leave anyway.
The Dems want a lot of immigration. I don't. I'm glad Obama saw it as politically useful to deport, even though he stuck us with that ridiculous DACA nonsense and tried to do even worse. But Trump had good policies that kept asylum and new illegals to a minimum and until we have better courts I don't count on deportations working. I'd rather everify and yes, I want a wall.
When Trump promised over and over to build a wall across the entirety of the Southern border, and to make Mexico pay for it, did you think that meant 50-80 miles of new wall, with US taxpayers footing the bill for billions of dollars?
When Trump promised (and continues to promise) to deport 3 or 11 or 18 million illegal immigrants, did you think that meant he would stop/deport about 250,000 people a year for four years, well under Obama's numbers?
You clearly like Trump's vibe and his tough talk. And you make up excuses for him, while also confidently proclaiming his failures won't happen again. Look at the timeline. Trump was elected and put in place his tax cuts for the wealthy by the end of 2017. That was his top priority, but he still had another full year of Republican control of the House and Senate. Did he go to work on the immigration issue? Obviously he did not. Instead he floated an amnesty plan for 1.8 million DACA youth in 2018 that was DOA and then waited until May 2019 to share his immigration plan, which went nowhere. If you insist without any evidence that this time it will be different, you might need to take "realist" out of your screen name.
Democrats are cynical unto rank sociopathy. They have no principles other than the Will To Power.
So why does this surprise you?
This actually doesn't make much sense to me. If the party was sociopathic and they just had a Will To Power, you'd expect them to do the more effective thing and NOT the thing where they seem scared of hurting people's fee-fees. They wouldn't have nominated Clinton, that's for sure.
A sociopathic party would absolutely kick Harris to the side or at least make it an open competition as much as possible.
That simply shows the power that a Clinton or a Harris has within the the party, not that the party as a whole is all that rational.
"or a Harris."
What does that mean? For a sitting VP, Harris actually seems to have a ridiculously low standing within the party, yet for fear of 'going out of turn' or whatever the fuck they're doing, they're going to nominate her.
Feckless? Yes. Cowardly? Yes. Sociopathic? I wish.
She will never have more leverage than she has now, unless of course she wins.
Sure, but a truly sociopathic party would not cow to that leverage for fear of what she would do. They would proceed in a way that gave them the best chance to win.
If they can act as a unified front with total loyalty from constituents.
sociopathic doesn't mean smart or rational.
It doesn't necessarily, but when it's used as in they just have a 'will to power,' it obviously implies being rational or calculating without a care for anything else.
And the party is certainly not that.
I think the Democrats legitimately believed Clinton was the best realistic option. It's easy to forget this, but she was quite popular in ~2013-14, and she ran a strong campaign against Obama in the 2008 primaries (a much better campaign than McCain ran in the general, that's for sure). She was a good candidate on paper.
Maybe so, but I also think they kind of had to convince themselves of that because it seemed like such a foregone conclusion that it was 'her turn.' She ran a stronger campaign against Obama, perhaps, but the fact she lost at all showed her limitations, and that's even conceding the fact that Obama was a generational political talent.
That a junior Senator named "Barack Hussein Obama" was able to unseat the 2008 coronation, a contest in which HRC went in with every possible institutional advantage, says volumes about HRC's campaigning skills, or the lack thereof.
Obama is a once-in-a-generation political talent and notwithstanding his inexperience he ran one of the best primary campaigns in modern US history.
He also upended what was supposed to be a coronation,.in large part because HRC is so unlikeable.
they basically had no choice but to make her "practice President" at State 2009 since otherwise *far* more PUMAs would have voted McCain than just one-fourth; that's also why zero-delegate Harris was running mate instead of Chauvin's boss Klobuchar, since Biden wouldn't have withstood six solid months of Tara Reade puff pieces on The View etc.
Obama never liked Hillary, but the 2016 shenanigans aren't that surprising given his "brand protection" of Obamacare, from surrendering 2010 to the Teabaggers by not saying M4A would be the next step (which'd imply that the "signature legislation" wasn't pure capital-G Godlike perfection) to forming a Voltron of candidates around the 5th runner-up within hours the night of Feb. 28
I think they’re trying to recreate the magic of 2020 when everyone dropped out at the same time and consolidated around Biden just in time for him to go win SC. It might be a great strategy but would look a lot smarter if they’d picked a strategic and popular VP candidate instead of someone who only checked intersectional boxes
The "magic" was Barack Obama bending arms, so just another expression of elite control.
For sure. By “magic” I just meant that it worked. Will be super interesting to see if it works again. Dem party efficiency is probably their greatest advantage over GOP, even tho I agree it’s far from “democratic”
Right, but they won. This is where your position is weakest for me because you're making two arguments and picking evidence based on which one is convenient to argue. Hillary Clinton fits both your argument that (1) the Democratic party used elite opinion to influence the outcome of their primary and (2) it was a bad political move. The second just isn't true of 2020, when they won the general election. Elite control can be bad and it can be ineffective, but one doesn't prove the other. And it would be odd to expect the majority of Democrats to care about it being bad (or even consider it to be bad) if it yields good results, which it did in 2020.
they barely won. The margins were so slim that I can’t really blame trump for his insistence on recounts. Hell, I am glad we didn’t get four more years of Trump, but I am not actually convinced Biden won - not after the cheating the DNC engaged in to kneecap Sanders.
Ok, well if you don’t even believe in the vote counts then I don’t particularly care what your views on fair democratic processes are. We’re not going to come to any consensus because you’ll just claim you don’t believe something when it’s inconvenient to your position. Best of luck.
That’s not what I said. I said I don’t blame Trump for doubting the vote count considering the shitty, slimy behavior of the dnc.
Listen, as long as voting machines are used, the vote is not secure nor trustworthy. In every election since Bush v Gore, weird shit has been alleged, with exit polls being at variance with vote counts.
“I am not convinced Biden won” (that is saying you don’t trust the vote counts, btw). But cool, I am. There is no synthesis of those two positions. And if you don’t believe in the accuracy of the voting, there is no point in me engaging with your other points (although another commenter did). I’m not saying we couldn’t have productive conversations on other topics, but I think on any issue concerning voting you’re going to dismiss the information I present. There’s just no path forward with that.
Biden had 7 million votes more than his opponent. Because state elections are not statistically independent, to flip the 50,000 or so votes which 'counted most' in the closest states that got Biden over the 270 EC threshold, Trump would have needed to win between 2 and 3 million more votes nationally. That's not Biden barely winning.
Notably though, Trump won millions of votes more than in 2016. If he does so again, he will be President.
No, it was a decisive win by the standards of modern US presidential elections. The margins were slim in some of the electorally decisive states, but a) that's always the case and b) Biden did not need every state he ended up winning; he could have lost various combinations of 1-2 Rust Belt states/Georgia and still hit 270.
For Trump to have won he would have had to "run the table" in the same way he did in 2016. That would have been the genuinely unlikely outcome.
That’s the issue; they were slim in the electorally decisive states.
And - worse… in 2016 Hillary got CAUGHT cheating in regards to Sanders. In 2020, the DNC - while not technically ‘cheating’ sure fucking short-circuited democracy.
So, not trusting the DNC? Yeah. I get it.
Listen, he’s a jackass. A horror show.
And yet, through political malpractice, the Dems are going to lose to him again. After lying for four+ years that he was not suffering a cognitive issue - which those of us caring for PD patients up close and personal knew he was suffering - (and we were called conspiracy theorists.)
They did this after telling us that this is an existential election. After all, they’ll be fine with whatever speaking tour or quid-pro-quo mic jobs they end up with. We’re the ones who need to deal with 4 more years of that lunatic.
The margins were slim, but again, Biden won more of those decisive swing states than he needed to - he had (I believe the term would be) "insurance." If you need to win three of six close races and you ultimately win all six, that's not a nailbiter even if each of those individual races was close.
I dunno, Freddie, I think one could also say they were in it to win it vs how they were in 2016
Biden pulling out of the race seems to me to be the least un-Democratic thing about this so far, given that quitting a race is something he's absolutely allowed to do. It's weird that now is the time everybody is freaking out about it. Or is it just that they're pushing Harris without a vote or anything?
What am I not understanding here?
Right. And it's not like Democrats have the time to run an entirely new primary, so they have to make do.
If the complaint is that Biden should never have run...well, that ship has sailed. We are where we are.
They can't do the whole primary cycle. But they still have delegates who can make a decision.
If Fucking France can run an election in a month, the Democrats can figure out some way of picking a candidate in a way that lets the candidates prove themselves.
What candidates seem interested in doing so? So far, anyone who is anyone has endorsed Harris. So exactly who is trying to prove him/herself?
Even if all we're getting is Harris,
1. We get an actual campaign instead of an instant coronation by default
2. Harris gets a chance to actually campaign against others with some better ideas than advocating for bussing
3. People who are waiting to run in 2028 can get a chance to run some laps now, preparing the bench.
If, somehow, we had Democratic debates 12 months ago and saw the state of Biden, we wouldn't be in this problem right now.
You keep talking about hypotheticals, or criticizing Kamala Harris, but you really haven't addressed just who is being denied the chance to compete against Harris for delegates.
I agree with Mr. Scizorhands. The stronger ticket for the D's is Whitmer/Shapiro because at this point the path to the WH seems to run through the Rust Belt.
Certainly the charade has room for improvement.
It seems like they might feel hamstrung. I think the best way around that, to stand behind Kamala while still allowing others to come forward is something like “totally - although in terms of messaging, I think the best approach would be "We ahve an incredibly strong candidate in KH; as champions of democracy, we are going to let the people voice that support as only they can." Something like that. I think it would be a huge boost for her to win the convention with a wind at her back, rather than doing an email roll call.” That, I think, gives cover to those who might feel like coming forward could be destructive for “party unity”
Bad pasting sorry :(
The delegates will get to make a decision.
It's a contested convention, if 2 or more candidates stand. The only question is, will anyone other than Harris stand for election?
I think complaints are stronger when they're directed not at (only) the party elites endorsing Harris, but other potential candidates refusing to stand. That's likely a sign of an undemocratic or schlerotic culture in the party.
The complaint is that THE DEMOCRATS SHOULD HAVE RUN A FUCKING PRIMARY IN THE FIRST PLACE
Yes, I have heard that complaint, and I still don't understand the claim that there was no primary. When I Google "2024 Democratic primary" I find a Wikipedia page, a CNN run-down of results by state, a page by the New Hampshire Secretary of State...the list goes on. I also remember voting in the primary that Pennsylvania ran. If that wasn't a primary, what would be?
Florida canceled their primary. There was no serious attempt to make Biden debate or address the charges against him--which were that he was too old to run and he was unelectable come November.
There was a primary only the sense that Russia has elections.
The analogy with the Democrat Party is fitting.
They should have. And the likes of Whitmer and Pritzker and whoever else will have now let their moment pass without a fight and should have challenged Biden whether the party liked it or not. Credit to Dean Phillips for stepping up to the plate.
But from the post-debate landscape where the Dems gambit became unviable, better the honesty of a Kamala party coronation than a fake undemocratic delegate beauty contest before/during the convention, imho.
The complaint should be that Biden shouldn’t have run for a second fucking term.
Once he made that decision, every other decision has been a pretty rational calculus from the party.
they were so rational that they are now in this deep FUBAR crisis. so much rational calculus (!) depended on cover-ups and gaslighting and lies and hubris. my god, to not see the terrible trash that is the Democratic Party
OK, fair: rational if one believed that his cognitive deficiencies weren’t going to be a major factor and could be brushed under the rug. Or if you were kept in the dark, as many people seem to have been.
Lol...you think Biden just decided this on his own?
Last year? Yeah, pretty much. And you can see how pissed he was about the idea that he should step down. He’s definitely slow, too slow to win an election or be an effective president, but he’s not a complete marionette.
We're getting to the same point, but I think the real sin is that the Democrats built a system that reinforces conformity and groupthink to a degree that incredibly ambitious governors and other leaders were terrified to show the slightest hint of deviation from the party line. I can only describe it as Stalinist, except that with Stalin you had the legit fear that if you expressed dissent you might get a bullet in your neck, for these folks it's what? Getting mocked on MSNBC? Lessening your ability to cash in on your "public service" after you're done being governor?
Meanwhile, Marianne Williamson, RFK Jr, and Dean Phillips were willing to stand up and say the emperor had no clothes, and they all have meaningful strengths to one degree or another, but were swept away like ants. To me, that's where the focus has to be - building a up a support system that allows leaders with guts to actually get traction against the establishment.
They'd just have to rig it again like they did in 2016.
But isn’t that a sunk cost? The process was already undemocratic. However, given that, Biden and senior leadership shepherding Harris into place is not outrageous. She’s already been vetted for the role through two Primaries (OK, “Primaries”) and a general election. What’s more natural than the Vice President/ Running Mate stepping in when the President is unable? It’s literally her primary job. It’s what she’s there for.
I understand there are far fewer legal ramifications in her ascent to the top of the ticket—ie. transferring the campaign funds and resources; fighting nuisance suits in red states.
Harris was Biden’s running mate in the primary, and however flawed, it was the process they chose. Primary voters were ok with the incumbent Vice President in an election where the potential need to replace the President was not academic. The process, such as it was, already chose Biden’s successor. How is it undemocratic for her to succeed?
But it's this sort of action that the party is currently pursuing that got us Clinton and Biden in the first place. Freddie's point is that there's a throughline to the last three election cycles through the Democratic Party's "elites" (however you want to define it) of them assuming people will just go along with whoever they decide should be the nominee. How many times are we going to have "the most important election in our lifetime" in part due to the Dems running a turkey?
Why? Why do you believe they can’t run a snap election? France and the UK managed.
Their harvesters didn't sign on for the extra work, and they'd have to cut checks really fast.
A lot of my liberal friends are freaking out because they didn't believe the polls.
At the end of the day this is pretty much indisputable proof that Trump is winning. You don't make history by throwing a sitting President out unless you're desperate.
...or unless you really think he's not fit to govern for four more years because you saw his horrible recent performances now that the media is actually covering them somewhat more appropriately? I'm not saying you're wrong; merely that there are pretty rational reasons to want him to drop out that do not involve "oh my god he can't win the election."
If he can win he can retire and let his VP take over. If he loses the election outright that's no longer possible.
...depriving the people the chance to vote for or against the actual person who will be in charge. I hate how the fear has been ratcheted so far up that people think the other side winning the presidency is the end of the world, producing all kinds of credibility-destroying and democracy-destroying outcomes, because people seem to think that is preferable to the other party winning.
If the plan is to promote the VP immediately it's probably jut better to let the VP run in the first place.
But the entire point of the office of the VP is to step in if there's an emergency or unexpected circumstance.
As a Democrat, I absolutely cop to desperation, and I'll admit I had no idea -- or didn't want to believe -- how infirm Biden had become until the very night of the debate, honest. He lost the election in the first 2 minutes, and then for good measure he lost it again when DJT survived an assassination attempt with a fist pump, covered in blood. There was zero hope at that point, none at all.
No comment on the nominee selection process, but Biden had to drop out. This is a Hail Mary pass, and I'm dusting off my rosary.
As a non-Democrat, I am reaching over to ask politely and genuinely: do you think Harris can win it? Do you think enough people who would not have voted for Biden - maybe stayed home or write-in or what have you - will vote for her?
I think it's possible. I think there was a lot of general disappointment with the Biden administration, around inflation, Afghanistan, Gaza, etc., but for many people it coalesced into just "he's lost his mind; we can have a senile old man making nuclear decisions." Harris is corrupt, ingratiating, and uncharismatic, but she now makes Trump once again look like the wildcard, and that at least removes many voters' #1 issue with Biden.
If nothing else, it disrupts a news cycle that was next going to escalate to Trump walking on water and healing lepers.
I'm not qualified to speculate on whether she can win, but I'm certain Biden could not. Hell, I'm about the most reliable Democratic voter you could ever meet, and even I was sick at the thought of voting for him after it was conclusively shown he wasn't up to the job for 4 more years, let alone campaigning for it. I wouldn't have stayed home but it would've been tempting, and now, try as I might to keep my expectations low, I'm actually excited about Harris. (It must go without saying here that I believe DJT would be a disaster for the nation and democracy; an entirely senile president would be preferable to an actively malevolent one.)
Biden dropping out was an absolutely insane risk that had to be taken. If your car explodes in flame while you're driving, it's a gamble to jump out, but there's no other choice. Here we are, and we'll see. Even if she loses, and she very well may, I don't think I'll regret Biden's decision.
They have every opportunity to hold a convention in which votes are taken, and they're doing everything possible to not do that.
I'm not sure I understand the mechanics, but am I right that
1. It would just be voting by the delegates.
2. They've all been pre-selected by the Biden-Harris campaign.
?
It's something, and probably worth doing for many reasons, but is there a path to another candidate?
In Canada, it would be a more straightforward process, with registered party members (i.e. regular people) directly voting for the party leader via preferential vote. This "people vote in state primaries for delegates who get sent to the convention" business seems way more complicated and difficult to accomplish in the time remaining. But even with the Canadian system, it seems nightmarishly hard to logistically pull off a national leadership campaign in a month with no prior notice, especially one with 10x our population.
have you listened to Kamala Harris?
that-sounds-like-a-republican-talking-point
maybe you're doing partisan finger wagging.
they are still going to have to do that. if nobody serious throws their hat in the ring and the now-free-agent delegates choose to vote for her based on endorsements from Biden and other party elites, them's the breaks
EDIT: seems like Democratic voters overwhelmingly approve of the switcheroo https://x.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1815496331613389084
Yeah, this seems pretty straightforward and easy to understand. For whatever reason, nobody seems to want to contest the nomination, so it's going to the only person who's asking for it. I agree that this situation is not ideal, but most Democrats seem okay with it so that's that.
I can't help but wonder if some of the dissatisfaction with this process is really just dissatisfaction with Democrats in general. It's certainly strange to see people get so worked up over a purely process-based objection. I mean, if the party somehow held a standard primary and Harris won that, would the discontents nod with satisfaction and pack it in? I'm thinking no, they wouldn't.
Thanks to you and Zack Straw for providing a voice of reason in this comment section. If the post and most other comments here were described to me by someone to my political right, I would think they were engaging in paranoid caricature. It's amazing how shifts in issue salience can rattle one's assessment of different thinkers.
That's attributing way more malicious intent, and frankly, planning ability, to the democratic party than they are capable.
I'm squarely blaming rank stupidity of whole groups of people. Possibly engendered by obsessive fear of Trump.
Couldn't agree more. This whole fuck-up stinks of the now-common elite denial of reality when reality is inconvenient and the dysfunction of inertia.
Its not like they weren't warned. All the Democrats had to do is not go f***ing bats**t crazy. But their "obsessive fear of Trump" seemingly made that impossible.
Kamala has already been “anointed” to continue the neolib dynasty.
So this is the party that is supposedly battling the ‘threat to democracy’?
Don't you know, democracy(R) is something far to important to be left to the voters.
So most democratic countries don't have the kind of primary system we typically have and wind up just fine on being democracies. Democracy exists mostly between the parties in most of the world and we don't see it falling apart in established democracies very often.
We also have a political system designed to ensure that the only feasible choices are one of two carefully curated corporate imperialist muppets. What flavor of idpol do you prefer?
That said, I don't consider most other countries to be model democracies either. The only question is how they are managed.
Yes, they are battling the guy who pressured states into changing their electoral college results: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump–Raffensperger_phone_call.
Internal party fuckery is less bad than constitutional fuckery. I realise that is not much of a silver lining 😓
Well, the question is can we trust Wikipedia?
Also, where would ‘hanging chads’ fit in to the discussion?
States cleaned up their elections a lot since 2000. It's very hard to do any fraud at scale any more.
Sure hope so, since my state had some issue.
With ballots being cast by computer, fraud is easier than ever.
You really don't know what you're talking about.
What state do you live in? Most counties in most states have moved to a split system where a computer marks the ballot but the voter can physically inspect it before it goes into a box that is the official count.
Yes, you can definitely trust Wikipedia. On average, it's probably the most trustworthy site on the internet. I think it's weird people still ask this question.
Sometimes the best isn't actually any good.
I trust Wikipedia to get The Simpsons right. Anything else I just use Google.
I'm not saying it's the best source as far as the most informative, but I am saying that scoffing at a Wikipedia link as thought someone just linked to Infowars is kind of misguided.
I don't see the reason for Wikipedia as long as you have search engines.
Always
One led directly to the other.
You've already lost the debate, even if you won the argument.
I don't like the Democrats claiming "our democracy is on the line" but there's major differences between a party realizing they fucked up before the nomination and replacing their candidate before the official nomination, and someone who denies the election so much that mob violence breaks out while he's waiting for the result to be thrown to the House of Representatives.
Don't disagree, and sadly enough it seems as if that behavior has had a long ramp up.
It will be interesting to see how things move forward. Predicted that Trump and Biden wouldn't make it to the election. Got 50% right.
It aint over yet. Still three months before election. Although ballots have been mailed in some states already, I've been told. What do Democrats do with the wrong names? I'm voting for Dr. Jill Stein, again, so not my worry.
I don't really understand the contradiction you're trying to highlight.
Like the party decides and we choose between their two representatives. For some reason in the 60s we decided that it would be better if we let a tiny number of people who are barely even in the actual party in like a working sense, get to choose among unlimited candidates which has led to completely dysfunctional choice menus in both parties.
It seems like the smoke filled room is simply a better way to do this and then bring voters in for a choice between one parties choice and the others than letting randos pretend like they're the party despite having a kind of dubious connection to the party. qua the party. It's just a vehicle for a candidate. Like being a democrat should mean something over and above whoever the candidate is because your loyalty should be to the institution not the man.
When you say that the party elites didn't want a primary, I'm not sure what you mean. I seem to recall a primary. I voted in that primary, and so did lots of people I know. Candidates other than Biden even won delegates in that primary. I don't understand how there wasn't a 2024 Democratic primary.
If you mean there wasn't a competitive primary...well, very few viable candidates want to run against an incumbent president of their own party, and in 2024, none did.
If the facts about Biden had been revealed 12 months ago, there would've been a competitive primary that vets the candidates.
Instead we get . . . whatever this is.
And if they'd revealed the truth about Hunter's laptop we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Florida canceled their primary.
If you were willing to do five minutes of research, you'd see the many, many ways the Democrats prevented an actual primary from occurring. Ask RFK Jr. Oh, but let me guess - he's crazy, so it was good that the party was undemocratic. Which is always how this goes. They always have an excuse.
It's true that I didn't do research on the topic; I just remembered the primary that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania conducted, and in which I voted. If that wasn't an actual primary, can you tell us what an actual primary is?
One with debates.
If Biden had been forced to debate RFK Jr. and Dean Phillips the D's wouldn't be in the mess they're in now.
Isn't that goalpost-shifting? I don't recall that any candidate *must* debate any other to participate in a primary. So it seems to me that the existence of a debate is entirely separate from that of a primary.
The whole point is that the primary process was rigged to allow Biden to skate by. Why? I think the answer is obvious when you look at the debate footage with Trump.
Requiring Biden to debate and run would have shown a commitment to a fair and open process. The D's chose instead to game the system. How's that working out for them now?
It was clear that the DNC fixed the primaries so there was only 1 result. It was right out of the Soviet Union. RFK left because the fix was in. Stop pretending there were real primaries.
In any of the last 3 as a matter of fact.
Letting your incumbent be primaried is what happened to Carter and Bush 41. It's anti-correlated with victory in November. (Yeah, I wanted Biden to debate, because I wanted him to get practice, but it was the least surprising thing ever that the party didn't help people nibble away at their incumbent.)
(And Biden won the 2020 primary. Bernie fans were mad because the plan was for the centrist vote to get split N ways and the leftist vote to all get concentrated in Bernie, i.e. the same way that Trump got a big share of votes to himself in 2016 while the establishment split the non-crazy vote. I'm not that impressed with people thinking it was unfair for a bunch of people trailing Biden to drop out to consolidate around him, when the plan was their own kind of hijinks.)
I'm happy for the Democrats to keep people who've never won any office ever from running for the highest office in the land on their ticket. Imagine if the GOP had that policy before 2016.
That's a reasonable argument _but_ I have to wonder if the real reason this time around was Biden's mental and physical decline. If that's the case then shutting down the primaries will, irony of ironies, significantly damage the party's chances this November.
I think Jill has been protected Joe (look up Operation Bubblewrap) from a lot of things and that not only shields people from his condition, but also can exacerbate his sunset.
Needing to stay out there can keep you sharp. A Biden that debated in primaries (however that might've happened) would likely not have had Jule 27th happen to him.
Hell, I think it's likely they shut down the campaign in 2020 in part because Biden was already shaky.
Trump is the product of demographic change, so I believe that he was inevitable. Better for the R's to be invaded sooner rather than later.
"Letting your incumbent be primaried is what happened to Carter and Bush 41. It's anti-correlated with victory in November."
To me this is very backwards reasoning. Did Carter and Bush lose because they were primaried, or because they were weak candidates and other people in the party recognized, correctly, that they were unlikely to win a general election? The big problem with the Democratic Party in general right now is they think they can get rid of any possible negative criticism by refusing to platform it. Far from strengthening their position, all they've done is provoke a historic realignment that's hemorrhaging the young, minority voters who are the party's actual future in exchange for older white voters who will be the first to jump ship the minute Trump's not on the ballot anymore.
Florida was cancelled. There were ballots with only one candidate listed. There were no debates or voter guides about who is running. No town halls. Can we no longer imagine competition, rigorous challenges, serious choices?
Not to mention what they did to No Labels, but that was external party fuckery
We had a competitive and rigorous Democratic primary in North Carolina, too. As I recall, the candidates were Joe Biden and someone named No Preference. There is even a Wikipedia page about it!
We had that here in Minnesota, too! Alas, this clusterf*ck of a party has blown it.
So I just read the Hollow parties and it’s kind of the latest in a series of books about how partisanship in America is kind of terrible and I’m inclined to agree that we need more gatekeepers and less intra-party democracy.
Like I’m not even a huge fan of Kamala or anything but like I feel like parties shouldn’t be so democratic at least at the think involvement layer of voting. They should be pretty powerful organizations that voters get to choose between.
"I’m inclined to agree that we need more gatekeepers and less intra-party democracy."
Yeah, no. Trump won because the gatekeepers had been banning all talk of immigration restriction or trade populism for decades and he was the first guy who didn't need their approval to show how popular these issues were and how completely unrelated the prevailing GOP dogma was to what GOP voters wanted. If they had been less restrictive, maybe it would have become a more acceptable viewpoint and real politicians with social skills would have pushed forward on this.
Gatekeepers bad.
Right I think the problem was he didn’t need their approval. And so without strong support of his party he was able to capture it via revolt.
I think parties should be restructured to be more grass roots connections but not in a low commitment kind of way like voting it should be on the level of church joining. But they should be independent, powerful institutions which act not weak ones which are mostly acted upon.
Those views should have had to go with the long work of institution building not just some rando through money and/or charisma can bring the wrecking ball to a party and replace it with something else.
I agree with everything here except your final point. Trump needs to be elected if for no other reason than to break this death cycle of lunacy. The DNC power brokers won't change if it keeps on kind of working
Whatever lesson you think you're teaching somebody, you aren't.
I can list a dozen reasons for Generic Democrat losing 2024 to Trump without "voters don't like power brokers" ever showing up.
"Power brokers" though really means "The system is rigged and folks like you can never win". That's a huge part of Trump's appeal.
Thinking you have a choice within the two-party duopoly is the biggest rigged scheme of all.
I'm pretty sure this counts as the kind of critical media piece FDB is looking for? Unless the WSJ doesn't count as "media" for this purpose...
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/joe-biden-age-condition-before-election-drop-out-c9fc46ef?st=rieyoltzvcg3une&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Everyone is exhausting, huh?
I can at least respect this coming from a liberal person. But seeing this type of outrage from right wingers like that Batya woman is hysterical.
It’s truly, genuinely insane that the sitting President dropped out of the race via tweet, with no concrete plans to address the nation. I understand he allegedly has COVID or whatever, but the way the media and his team covered up his very obvious infirmities makes me completely unwilling to trust anything they say going forward. The general aura of confusion and deception around his candidacy for the last year has erased whatever minimal shred of credibility the Democratic establishment was left clinging to.
> I understand he allegedly has COVID or whatever,
If it turns out he "pulled out of the race" because he's dead, I will laugh very, very, very hard.
I wouldn't be glad about it, per se, it would be a horrible thing. But it would be the ultimate capper to this insane election cycle.
Check out the video footage of him flying back to Delaware. It's horrifying.
According to NBC he walked "gingerly". That's all I need in a president. Ignore the fact that he acted like Tim Conway's famous "old man" character.
I still recommend watching the video, which is widely available online. Maybe the real reason he stepped down is he realized he couldn't handle the travel.
If he died I don't think anyone would cover it up. Harris being the President instead of the Vice President would be to her advantage, both in the general election and at the convention. It would also mean less hard questions for the Democratic leadership. Biden being dead is something they could spin as an unfortunate freak occurrence that was out of their control. Him withdrawing while still alive raises a lot of questions as to how things were allowed to get this bad.
These comments are wild.
The problem is that Biden isn't done yet--he needs to fight off calls that he should also step down as President. Coughing and hacking into a microphone in a public address wouldn't have helped that cause.
I don't see what's so unreasonable about Biden's manner of announcing that he's dropping out. He was (is?) indisposed at the moment and not at the White House. He said in his tweet that he would address the nation properly at some point this week. Waiting until a time when he could make the announcement in a proper speech from the Oval Office would probably mean waiting a few more days, and we need all the days of notice that we can get.
Why insane? Tweeting, I seem to recall, was Trump's preferred method of communicating when he was President.
Therefore, insane!
el-oh-el 😀
Non-zero chance he got delirious with covid and various functionaries started saying stuff like "Joe we've got the pope on the phone... he says drop out"
I'll be voting for Kennedy. I think its odd how people barely know why he's running, or why they don't hear much about it.
HarrisX has Trump up by 10 points or so.
It all seems so pointless. Trump's lead versus Harris is larger than his lead against Biden. What was the point?
You haven’t seen what Kamala unleashed can do.
So you're saying that Trump's lead will be up to 15 points here in a little bit?
Underestimate Kamala Harris at your peril. She is a Windbag Deflating Machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxaRt-LlpEk&t=1s
Made Up Phrase is made up.
She went after Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries. Even had the t-shirts made. Do you remember those t-shirts? Hey, what windbag ended up winning that primary anyway?
If you say that Republicans are under-estimating her, yes, they are. But "OH QUEEN KAMALA IS SO AWESOME! PROSECUTOR AGAINST DRUMPH, CONVICTED FELON DRUMPH, FELON FELONFELOEOFDLONTGOGR" isn't really a strategy.
Check out Peter Savodnick's article in The Free Press. The R's were preparing for Harris at their convention.
What did she do in 4 years as VP? I genuinely would like to know where she’s been the past few years. I want nothing more than to rally behind our D candidate, but why are we left to reach back to her track record as senator/AG of Ca? What has she done as VP to prove her fitness as president?
Blow Willie Brown? Keep prisoners incarcerated past their release date and force them to work. Does that make Harris a Black slaver?
I have this suspicion that voter preferences are entrenched to the point Harris might not do much worse, but I guess time will tell. The most entertaining outcome would be Trump proceeding to lose the election to Harris. Doubt it will happen, but to be really frank the Democrats' goose was cooked either way. This was still better than running the empty husk of Joe Biden and forcing everyone to pretend he wasn't sundowning.
Like, can you think of a single person you know who planned on voting for Biden that would switch to Trump now because Harris is the candidate? I sure don't. Most Democratic voters would vote for an empty can of Pabst with a D next to it.
I don’t know why Biden didn’t select a new VP as the Hail Mary instead of this chaos.
I think Trump is leading Harris by double digits in Forbes latest poll. I don't know what the difference is but she's losing by a bigger margin than Biden.
That's fair, but I'd like to actually see polls once her campaign was underway. Either way at worst you're just trading one losing candidate for another. I don't think there was a viable path to victory for Biden regardless
What was the point in that case? I suspect mindless panic have played a role here.
The main one was avoiding a competitive primary. They wanted Biden in the race just long enough to get the primary process wrapped up. After that my guess is they wanted to replace him, that's why the debate was so early. I also guess he was way more stubborn than the party insiders assumed he would be.
They could still just pick someone other than Harris at the convention. I maintain that the Democratic party brass finds losing to Trump preferable to the social democratic wing of the party getting any kind of control. That's really the only lens through which their actions make sense. Beating the left was more of a priority than beating Trump.
One point for Biden would to be to go out as a one-term president by choice. He'd leave as a winner. Going into a reelection campaign might easily have him come out a loser. That might matter to him.
Media reports are that he was forced out though and didn't go voluntarily.
Hail Mary pass?
Yeah, but they knew that Harris was going to be the receiver.
So?
It was a really low probability pass.
The point is that biden couldn’t plausibly be president for four more years and that the debate revealed that to everyone who isn’t online, thus the whole apparatus turned on him the next day. The whole thing was rather unbecoming.
I am absolutely baffled by the selection of Harris. Do the Democrats want to lose to Trump as some kind of 4 dimensional chess move that I’m just too stupid to see? Or do they genuinely think that Harris is the candidate that can win? If so, HOW?!?!?!? How could they possibly think that?
Who do you think they should run instead?
Whitmer / Shapiro.
Get Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and the Democrats win.
I agree, although you still need to figure out how to get Evers on the ticket.
Whitney and Shapiro might legitimately think they have better odds in 2028 rather than to try to run from behind now.
I think that is definitely true and definitely playing a part in their thinking.
That said, I'm very confident that Whitmer would wipe the floor with Trump in 2024.
My Michigan friend gets angry at me every time I suggest this because he doesn’t want the nation to poach his governor.
I have no idea whether she would be more popular than Harris, and I don’t want to commit the Pundit’s Fallscy, but I think she’s pretty awesome.
100% this. Unfortunately.
True. Remember that the next time the Dems say that Trump is a permanent threat to democracy. Like, they all seem to be planning on a 2028 America.
Yeah, this crossed my mind. I personally believe that electing Trump means a nonzero chance of a major illiberal slide, but _if_ the cynical explanation for Whitmer et al.’s behavior is true, it speaks ill of them.
On the other hand, they could well be thinking some blend: “At this point the odds would be stacked against me to get the nomination in a short time AND it would be hard to win, AND if it didn’t work it would hurt the eventual candidate’s chances, so my staying out is better both for me and for the country.”
That has the ring of truth to me. Not exactly noble, but not exactly evil either.
Oh, I don't think it's evil at all. It's just that they don't think democracy is over if Trump wins.
Somebody who hasn’t bombed out of a presidential primary previously.
Somebody who isn’t so vulnerable on immigration, an issue that Trump is going to flog incessantly.
Ideally somebody who has enough distance from Biden that they can say with a straight face that they didn’t lie to the voters about his capacity for months/years.
She probably is in a much better position to articulate more persuasively for reproductive rights, which is going to be a major motivating issue for many women.
I don't think she can articulate anything persuasively, but as many many women want a woman telling them what they want to hear on the topic, I agree with your larger point. A pretty, professional, childless woman telling pretty, professional, childless younger women "vote for me or Donald Trump will lock you into birthing chairs" will be very effective.
Abortion will never, ever, ever be resolved for the simple reason that women can reliably get all het up about it and Democrats will never ever give that up, period.
Someone who’s also the first female VP…
Maybe it's just panic desperation. Biden was going down in flames so they did what they could without considering what comes next.
The other possibility is that Biden screwed them on the way out by endorsing Harris when he wasn't supposed to.
Biden not being supposed to nominate her is very funny possibility, and one that feels more right to me than anything else I’ve heard.
Like maybe the people threatening him with the 25th wrote the letter and made him sign it and then a pissed off aide tweeted off the endorsement. I don't think Biden's capable of much on his own.
The explanation I've seen (and I don't know if this is true, but it seems to make sense) is that since she was already on the ticket she has access to war chest – money, staff, etc. If they run some new guy, it would require starting from zero.
The Democrats (unlike the Republicans) have no imagination; that's a large part of the problem. They ran Joe Biden again in 2024 because in modern American history, incumbent presidents run for reelection at the end of their first term. President Biden didn't seriously consider switching up his VP because in modern American presidential politics you just don't do that. Then when this incumbent president dropped out, of course leading Democrats are falling back on what seems to be the default course of action: have the (both sitting, and candidate for) VP step up and take his place. This is a party that doesn't know how or when to think outside of the box.
Exactly. Not to mention, the Democrats are still playing by the old rules. They have no idea how to play the shady game like Republicans do. I'm not advocating for them being sleazy, but a bit of backbone would be good.
How nice of you to call the Republicans, who have nominated the same guy 3x with whom they would blindly trot off a cliff, imaginative.
They were willing to pay attention to their constituents (too many of whom would blindly trot off a cliff after Trump) and bucked the norm of not running a candidate who lost a previous election, a norm which hadn't been challenged since Nixon's comeback in 1968.
Because they don’t actually care if they win. THEY will be fine.
I think parties exercising some more control is good. We had outsiders showing up to run for President -- *for President of the United States* -- in the parties despite never having done anything for the party in the past. And in one case it worked! Whoever called the parties "fully fueled jet airliners waiting to be hijacked" was right.
Parties in other countries don't risk control of their party to something as uncontrollable as the public.
It would be nice if the VP wasn’t a product of the California machine with seemingly little gift for politics, but I guess we are where we are.
This is pretty par for the course in Parliamentary countries, BTW. I think Theresa May and Rishi Sunak both became prime minister running unopposed for party leader.
What do you want the Democrats to do if Biden’s people didn’t realize he didn’t have enough of the ol’Bidemite to carry on this election until forced to realize it.
They knew. That they didnt know he had PD is a lie.
The thing is that Biden's people and a lot of the media probably knew months ahead of time but kept quiet until the debate.
Sunak and May we're under quite different circumstances. Sunak makes a lot of sense because a PM was required, pronto, and he had just come 2nd in a leadership contest. It's a flawed contest for sure, but it's something.
The next step is for another Democrat to put their name in contention. At that point, the wrangling will begin. Once a credible non-Harris candidate is announced, the power of the DNC will be tested.
And, while I don't disagree with the criticism of the Democrat Power Brokers, including the terrible decision making paired with lack of any accountability, I don't feel like any result at this point would be very "democratic," since the delegates are not reflective of the population as a whole.
Trump was a terrible president, failing to even pursue his signature policies and instead simply giving a massive tax cut to further the ever growing wealth imbalance. I loathe the idea of him being reelected. So some form of open convention, while definitely imperfect, would be a way to have some form of voter input on the nominee while providing energy and attention to the campaign.
Why would a credible Democrat run against Harris, or even be her VP pick? If she wins, good for her, good for Dems. If she loses, the field is clear for 2028 rather than taking the L here?
I think it would be a freebie. If anyone but Harris were the candidate, they would have the obvious excuse that they needed a full campaign, and they would become the most recognizable candidate for 2028. Certainly risky.
People "waiting for the right moment to run" need to realize windows can close awfully fast. Maybe while your resume is baking in the oven a Barack Obama comes up and steals your rightful spot.
I've been waiting on Roy Cooper. Someone pointed out he's 67 years old already.
That is part of the problem. Had biden announced last year that he was not running Harris would have started a campaign as well as other candidates. At this point, though, anyone who challenges her pretty much has to win the nomination and the election. If you challenge her and lose nomination and she goes on to lose general election you will be blamed for her loss. If you defeat her and win nomination but lose general election, you will be blamed. Either way your political career is over. Of course if she wins, great, but that is not looking very likely. At this point it is going to be tough to beat Trump with Harris or any realistic candidate. I, personally, think Manchin could but that is not going to happen.
Maybe... considering nothing about our national politics makes much sense to me right now, I'm extremely hesitant to make any proclamations about the 2028 election.
In reference to FDB's earlier post, it is all just feelings at this point.
If Trump is a super weak candidate you run now. If Harris wins you're locked out for eight years and the next eight will probably be Republican.
No, your best bet if you can’t have a full campaign at Trump, which is obviously not possible now, is for Harris tot take the loss and you take advantage of the blowback from Trump’s presidency.
The obvious issue there is if Trump's term sees significant economic improvement. At that point you're looking at the possibility of a third Trump term with JD Vance (or another Republican) as President.
Let me also make the preemptive point that nostalgia for Trump's first term is driving a lot of his success at the polls right now.
We are overdue for a bad economic time, I think it's going to hit the fan in the next 4 years.
I think the recession has started. Look at the jobs report. Rising unemployment is probably going to trigger the Sahm rule next month.
Curious what you see as the subjects of this nostalgia? I remember mostly chaotic churn without much in the way of results, other than a big tax cut for the wealthy and effectively shifting the federal courts.
We don't have to wonder. The same polls that reveal the phenomenon indicate that it's based on the economy.
Trump got rolled by the GOP establishment. He assumed they shared his goals and that if he gave them a tax cut (which he wanted, as well) that they'd go along with immigration, etc. Bad call. Won't happen this time.
And Trump did an excellent job of stalling illegal immigration and asylum even within that. He was a very impactful president. I hope he does more if he wins.
Full disclosure: I think Trump is a buffoon. I did not and do not want him anywhere near the presidency. BUT, I do think the US needs a secure border and a revamped immigration policy (my rationale is our current approach pushes hundreds of millions of dollars to the smuggling cartels which victimize tens of thousands of people a year and which pump all sorts of bad stuff into our country). I did not expect that Trump would lead on an improved policy but he campaigned every day on securing the border. And he had a Republican House and Senate for the first two years of his term. Despite these advantages, he got NOTHING done. I believe the estimates are that less than 80 miles of new border wall were built during his four years. And the immigration rates that he reduced were for legal immigrants being denied entry. Obama stopped and deported many, many more illegal immigrants each year than Trump (check out the graphs in the link below). In short, Trump failed to do the one thing he promised (not to mention that obviously Mexico didn't pay any of it, we did). He was a failure on this issue and I do not understand why any rational supporter would look past it.
Here's a summary from the CATO institute: "the population of illegal immigrants remained about the same as when [Trump] took office."
https://www.cato.org/blog/president-trump-reduced-legal-immigration-he-did-not-reduce-illegal-immigration
I wouldn't believe a single thing that CATO said about immigrants. But in order to *reduce* illegal immigrants he'd have to deport, and that was getting worked on but wasn't a priority. Seems to me that Biden's term reveals that population *just not growing* is a big deal.
Also, Trump reduced legal immigration which is an excellent thing as well.
Like I said, Trump got rolled. I don't think he'll make that mistake and contrary to what a lot of people believe about JD Vance and overconfidence, I think Vance was a turnout booster, a promise that he wouldn't get fooled again.
You can see the same numbers in the WSJ and the Economist, along with dozens of other news sources. Trump had the opportunity to secure the border and crack down on illegal immigration but he utterly failed to do either. Obama stopped/deported 60% more people than Trump, despite the overheated rhetoric.
Not sure why you think Trump would keep his word this time.
Seems like you're falling victim to prioritizing feelings over facts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-trump-has-deported-fewer-immigrants-than-obama-11564824601
Trump absolutely did crack down on illegal immigration, and Obama had a shitty economy that led a lot of illegals to leave anyway.
The Dems want a lot of immigration. I don't. I'm glad Obama saw it as politically useful to deport, even though he stuck us with that ridiculous DACA nonsense and tried to do even worse. But Trump had good policies that kept asylum and new illegals to a minimum and until we have better courts I don't count on deportations working. I'd rather everify and yes, I want a wall.
When Trump promised over and over to build a wall across the entirety of the Southern border, and to make Mexico pay for it, did you think that meant 50-80 miles of new wall, with US taxpayers footing the bill for billions of dollars?
When Trump promised (and continues to promise) to deport 3 or 11 or 18 million illegal immigrants, did you think that meant he would stop/deport about 250,000 people a year for four years, well under Obama's numbers?
You clearly like Trump's vibe and his tough talk. And you make up excuses for him, while also confidently proclaiming his failures won't happen again. Look at the timeline. Trump was elected and put in place his tax cuts for the wealthy by the end of 2017. That was his top priority, but he still had another full year of Republican control of the House and Senate. Did he go to work on the immigration issue? Obviously he did not. Instead he floated an amnesty plan for 1.8 million DACA youth in 2018 that was DOA and then waited until May 2019 to share his immigration plan, which went nowhere. If you insist without any evidence that this time it will be different, you might need to take "realist" out of your screen name.