this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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If you're an anti-Trump diehard and committed Democrat voter, Biden's recent gaffes are highly unlikely to change your voting intentions. But it's the swing voters or people that have been on the fence about voting Biden that make recent events all the more concerning.
Kinda insane to think there are still swing voters at this point. I guess they just don't understand what trump and republicans stand for otherwise they'd be all for them if they're evil or completely against them if they're sane.
It blows my mind that so many people still don't get this.
The question to undecided moderates is if they're going to vote against Trump and project 2025. To do that, they have to vote for the Democratic presidential candate (and down-ballot Democrats if they have Republican opponents). At the moment, this happens to be Biden.
Biden at his worst is better than Trump at his best. That's the contest.
Heck, a sack of potatoes is better than Trump at his best.
Yes, it may be a contest between King Log and King Heron (boy the tropes of tyranny are old) but if Heron wins, he'll totally eat all the frogs. (That's us in this story.)
If enough moderates can't work out this math, then the United States was fucked at its founding. Then government actually by the people may not be possible (though we haven't yet tried sortition).
Voting out Trump should be a no-brainer. 2016 should be a lesson to us we can't second guess ourselves. We also need to make sure elections are fair and conducted in good faith, and were prepared for coup d'etat actions procedural, legal or violent, and we should be prepared against civil war.
After all, if Democracy must die, it shouldn't go gentle.
I’m sure some people want him to step down because they think he is senile and can’t do the job, but I would bet that most of us want him to step down because he’s not going to win. I’d vote for a literal dead body before I vote for Trump. I honestly don’t care who it is. All I care is it needs to be someone who will beat him. Biden was already trailing Trump and many polls and after that debate and the obvious mental state that he’s in, it’s not gonna get any better. Furthermore, no arguments about Trump’s mental state or anything about him matter. Trump is a monolith. He is what he is. He has the support he has and nothing will change that short of him dropping dead. So either Biden can beat him or he can’t and most of us think he can’t.
Biden asked for that debate because he was behind in the polls and his unfavorable rating is abysmal. No president has ever been reelected with the approval rating Biden currently has. He shouldn’t even be polling even with Trump. He needs to be polling way ahead of him to have any chance of winning because of the way the electoral college works and favors red candidates.
Him stepping down still probably won’t matter and Trump will probably win but at this point, I think a lot of people realize Biden has no chance, so even though a replacement candidate this late in the game is dubious proposition. It’s probably better than what we have right now? What he’s doing is trying to run out the clock to prevent the possibility of somebody being able to replace him, purely because of his ego.
I would bet that most of us want him to step down because he’s not going to win.
It isn't clear to me that Biden is simply not going to win. Historically, July polls are not particularly meaningful. Heck polls still count on people who answer their phones from strange numbers, which narrows it to boomers and my generation. (Except I tend not to answer familiar phone numbers, either.)
Also it was Trump who challenged Biden to that debate, and then started walking it back for fear he might get clobbered. (Trump's rhetoric was also picked apart to include over 600 lies and false statements within his part of that 90 minutes, none of which was challenged by the format, in what is commonly known as a Gish gallop.)
Biden does have the Keys to the White House ( on Wikipedia ) Beau of the Fifth Column breaks it down on Youtube. So there are plenty of indicators that Biden is not going to lose the election. Not if it's secure and fair, anyway.
Of course, the Keys didn't account for the SCOTUS intervention of 2000, and may not account for cheating, coup attempts or civil war. Hopefully the US' allegedly robust (and partially compromised) surveillance state, national-security state and anti-terror state are on top of these threats.
Trump has historically underperformed in poles and because of the electoral college advantage that Republicans have, Biden probably needs to be at least up four or five points on him, which is what he was last election and it came down to 20,000 votes across several battle ground states.
yes, Trump lied during the debate. Trump is the worst candidate in the history of the United States and him being elected president would be a catastrophe for democracy. Which is exactly why many people in the Democratic Party including - if reports are to be believed - apparently Barack Obama, are trying to have Biden pushed out right now. That Biden is now taking a cavalier attitude that “he’s going to give it his best shot, and if he loses, well he tried his hardest and that’s what counts”…when his own campaign has been framing this threat from Trump as being detrimental to democracy, is the height of hubris.
There are numerous reports that they’ve been shielding him and his mental capacity for a long time now trying to drag him across the finish line. The cat is out of the bag, and it’s a pretty big gamble to assume more things are not going to happen between now and the election. Is that a bigger gamble than switching candidates? I don’t know but I think it is.
I understand why he felt he needed to do this press conference, but at the same time I can’t believe he did it because he would have literally had to be perfect for it to not just generate new headlines and memes about his decline (which it clearly has).
It seems like the headlines will never stop and they are being perpetuated by people on both sides, and he’s completely flailing because the fact is, he’s no longer capable of giving a stellar live performance that can put this all to rest.
Right after the debate, I felt that if Democrats had brushed his performance off, it would have dropped into the background and been totally erased if Biden did reasonably in other appearances and the next debate.
However, each time there is a new headline about a Democrat’s observation that he is not in good shape, I become more certain that he must end his campaign. Not necessarily because I’m more convinced about his mental decline, but because you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
So I’ve stopped weighing whether switching out Biden at a late stage was the optimal strategy in a vacuum. He’s been damaged enough by Democrats in liberal spaces that it’s absolutely the optimal strategy now. I’m not judging these Democrats for what they’ve done, I’m just saying it’s a hell of a gamble. So in my view, we might as well accept it that he’s gotta go and hope to hell their gamble pays off. Because there’s no way the guy can stay after all of this.