Remember when we had functional adults running for president?
Feels like lifetimes ago, but it only stopped being a thing when Trump showed up and Dem leadership decided we don't need to find a good candidate anymore.
There were moments during the debate last night where I just sat there dumbfounded at the absurdity of our current reality
You mean when they started to argue like children who the better golfer was? The people don't give a shit who is better at golf. Unless we can end wars with a golf-off between world leaders.
Oh my God yes! I was dying!
By all accounts, trump is actually pretty good at golf, yet he still cheats, because he's a cheater to the core. Cheat at golf, cheat at life.
No, it was when I found out we beat medicare.
The worst part is trump has been exactly the same the last three elections.
His bullshit is normalized to most voters.
Biden wasn't great in 2020, but he's a hell of a lot worse now. Which is why we never see him compared to other presidents when they were in office.
So for Republicans last night went fucking perfectly. And for Dems, it went about as bad as it could have.
There's just no reason to run a candidate voters don't like or agree with just because the other candidate is so much worse. Even if we stop the worst, we still don't get what we want.
None of it makes logical sense, which is probably why Biden's few supporters only want to talk about how dangerous trump is. It's really really hard to come up with a reason Biden should be the candidate. Even being an incumbent doesn't matter when you have terrible approval ratings, those make incumbency a hindrance not an advantage
While I agree that Biden no longer really seems fit to be president, the dangerous Trump argument is absolutely not one to be downplayed. A man that attempted to overthrow the government in a tantrum when he didn't get his way should be absolutely nowhere near close to becoming president again. A sack of potatoes or Biden's literal decomposing corpse would be a better president.
I agree that it's disappointing that these are our only two options and that the Dems could not figure out a better candidate this go around.
the dangerous Trump argument is absolutely not one to be downplayed
Which is why it's so bad Biden insists on staying in the race.
If he thought beating trump was the most important thing, he'd have announced years ago that he wouldn't run again.
But he'll never stand down. Because he wants a second term more than stopping trump from having a second.
And people realizing Biden is risking that for his own ego, makes him even less likely to stop trump.
Historically "vote for me or else" doesn't work well
We know what works to motivate Dem voters: young, charismatic, and progressive sounding candidates.
We can't get that to stop trump, because 82 year old Biden won't retire.
Part of these past two elections feels like it's just the hubris of the top candidates, unable to bow out or allow anyone else to stand in for them. 2016 was Clinton psyching herself up to be The First Female President and thinking that Trump was a joke (most of us did see him as a joke candidate and that'd it'd be a cakewalk). I think in Biden's case, he didn't see any other strong mainstream Dem contenders and felt he was the best shot the Dems had at beating Trump. They seem to completely ignore their progressive wing and just assume they need a centrist candidate to have a hope of winning. I just wish he'd change his VP pick, Harris is just dead weight. He needs to shake-up his campaign and pick Stacy Abrams or something (though obviously this didn't work for McCain/Palin).
Shaking up your strategy only works for progressive (or progressive-lite) candidates. For the conservatives they'd need to find a somehow even whiter and even more masculine VP to bolster their chances.
Dem leadership decided we don't need to find a good candidate anymore.
People had Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar to pick from. Voters picked Biden.
Lol, this guy thinks primaries are fair...
The thinking people picked Bernie. The masses picked who the superdelegates said to pick, which was Hillary and then Biden. That is why the DNC created the superdelegates, so that they have more control over the primaries.
I kind of doubt most people were thinking about super delegates in the polling booth. That’s pretty a wonky and most people don’t pay attention to that.
IMHO, it was the super simple stuff that we see in elections all over the world. A candidate gets a leg up if they are well known or is a continuation of a recent administration that people liked.
People pay attention to who is leading in the polls and more likely to win. It doesn't make a lot of sense but there's a huge portion of the population that wants to be "on the winning side". So whichever candidate is getting reported as the strong leader in the news, gets their vote. The news includes the super delegates in their reporting, despite the fact that the super delegates have only voted against the popular vote one time in all of history. So, the whole situation is misleading for the masses because they don't understand how the system works and they want to vote for the "winning" candidate. The DNC understood how this would play out when they created the super delegates, and it has served them well in installing a pro-institutional candidate in all of the elections. After 2016 there were reforms made for the 2020 election about when super delegates can vote and the way they're reported due to strong backlash from Democrat voters over the shenanigans they pulled against Bernie.
This was the election where Biden seemed to have actually turned the whole election around in his VP debate with Paul Ryan. Obama did pretty shitty in his first match-up with Romney, just really put in a poor performance, then Biden came in and it was like a kick in the butt, he virtually walked all over Ryan.
And he was a decade younger then. Past time for all the old farts to be put to pasture(good and bad) and let us other generations have a go at the wheel of power. This death grip they have thinking no one else can do it is going to literally kill us.
Makes me wonder what our world would be like if Biden had run against Hillary and Bernie in 2016.
God I wish we had two sane non-geriatric candidates again. I’m a huge Bernie supporter and I would never vote for Trump in a billion years. I’d literally vote for a turd before casting my vote for Trump. But between Romney and Biden…. especially after that abysmal performance by Biden… I’d be struggling. This is not the best this country has to offer. It’s very very sad actually.
Isn't it insane that out of 330 million people, we have these two to pick from?
Yeah. But that was Obama. And it was back before the entire right wing lost they damned minds
It was a few years into them being pissed at the audacity of a black man becoming President.
And Obama trainwrecked that debate. Incumbents usually do at their first one. We thought we were fucked. Total panic among Obama volunteers. He did better in the next ones and won so it was ok in the end.
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