Biden has done a better job than I expected, but he should clearly retire. I think this is a huge, and almost necessary opportunity for Democrats. Incumbents are way more likely to get reelected. Since Trump has pissed off too many people, and he’ll sabotage any other front runners for his party.
Wouldn’t it make sense to get someone younger and a little bolder in now for the Dema? They have a very strong likelihood to win this round, and then they’ll be the incumbents next term. We could finally replace some garbage supreme court members.
This would go against Dem’s #1 policy: self-sabotage.
Yeah. I don’t know why the Dems aren’t running someone younger…
I wasn’t thrilled about Biden either, but I think Biden handled negotiations with Europe for Ukraine very well.
But yeah, I get jealous every time I look at other countries’ leadership and see how young they are…
because there isn’t anyone in the party with national name recognition who’d get wide spread support and who is acceptable to the corporate democrats.
Biden was a holdover from the Obama brand. People liked Obama.
Statistically, an incumbent has a huge advantage right out of the gate. Not to mention Biden could splinter the vote which is the worst scenario for a party that holds the seat. I don’t like it either, but Bidens low drama, non-world-ending and still-not-trump platform is the dems safest bet.
I agree! To clarify, what I meant was that I was disappointed that Dems, including Biden, aren’t backing someone younger. Whatever happened to uplifting the next generation?
It’d be easier if he picked a less boring running mate; maybe he could lure in somebody who’d otherwise be inclined to wait for 2028 - Whitmer, say - with a secret promise to resign halfway through his term. (which I hope he plans to do anyway, though he obviously can’t publicize that fact)
Because Democrats love losing. This is literally something that has been seen time and time again. They make more money through fundraising when they’re in the minority. They care about nothing but capital.
And this is an example of why we need to get rid of first past the post.
Please for the love of God end this geritocracy
Well there already almost a dozen republican candidates, we just need to collectively back one or two that aren’t Trump. Does anyone have any thoughts on William Hurd who just announced? I don’t know much about him.
Are there any promising Democrats that are running against Biden?
@furrious09 @trashhalo
Marianne Williamson, and to a lesser extent RFK Jr are going to be ignored by outlets with the biggest audiences. If the gestalt of the Democratic Establishment is that there’s no primary, the MSM isn’t going to do a thing for candidates running against Biden from the left. Williamson polls at 5%-9% and RFK 10%-15% yet MSM will give all the coverage to GOP candidates who are polling under 3% and not Dem challengers.I guess you could argue that Williamson is coming from the left, but RFK sure as heck isn’t.
We aren’t missing out on the next great president between those two if the MSM isn’t covering them as serious candidates, because the truth is they aren’t.
The media definitely won’t help, but both of them are pretty weak contenders either way.
RFK Jr. is a strident antivaxxer, which is a nonstarter for many people, especially those that vote in Democratic primaries. A good chunk of his press is arguably off the back of the Kennedy name, rather than the merits of his policies.
Williamson is (or at least was) a self-help guru, which could cause people to see her as untrustworthy. And unlike RFK, she doesn’t have a political career or established name to draw on, just vaguely progressive “vibes”.
I don’t think a more established figure like Sanders would be doing well in the polls right now, either. We’re a year out from the actual primaries, people’s thoughts on them are vague, and they’re more likely to just go with the default of Biden if asked. But RFK and Williamson don’t have particularly strong cases beyond being non-Biden choices.
@catcarlson an actual elected official would be unpersoned by the media, and that’s a known threat that anyone else but Williamson and RFK Jr would happen - if Al Gore (5 years Biden’s junior) were to throw his hat into the ring he’d be blamed for everything including the fortune that he’s gotten from Occidental Petroleum or from MBS via al Jareeza buying his Current TV, and every skeleton in his closet to ruin his reputation.
The Democratic Party is wholly undemocratic I it’s top-down ways
To be fair, I didn’t want Biden the first time either. He just happened to be not Trump. I’ll vote Biden again, but I’m not pleased those are my only (real) options. We really need ranked choice voting here in the US…
there’s candidates running that support ranked choice voting. why not vote for them?
Such is the abject failure of most voting systems in use that if you vote for a candidate who has no chance of winning, you’re effectively making it easier for one of the two big candidates to win.
It’s the same in the UK and I hate it.
You may as well vote for the ranked ballot itself…
No one wanted Biden in 2008 either. In 2020 the media kept saying he was the front runner with no evidence to support that… He was behind in polls and if he didn’t win the South Carolina primary he would have dropped out. Everyone would have moved on to Buttigieg or Bernie.
Now we’re essentially in the same place we were in in 2016…
“Who are you excited for?”
“Neither of them.”
I’d vote for an actual potted plant over trump. At least the potted plant hasn’t committed massive fraud, stochastic terrorism, election fraud, attempted coups, been twice impeached, repeatedly bankrupted, and is a fascist to boot.
Neither one is likeable. You are going to have people who would normally vote for either party who don’t like their candidate, or the other sides candidate. It is a recipe for massive numbers of people not wanting this matchup.
“Biden remains the top contender among Democrats, however, and Trump’s lead over the other GOP contenders widened following his federal indictment earlier this month.”
Given that one is the clear favorite among Democrats, and the other is the favorite among Republicans, it’d be perverse if we didn’t get a rematch between them, unless that changes between now and the election.
This is how it is supposed to work in a two-party system. The favorites of each party get to compete. If there were somebody else who was the favorite of their party, they’d get to compete.
If it were a different system (e.g. a parliamentary system), then the rules would be different. Although tbh when I look across the pond to the UK, I can’t say they consistently do a better job picking leaders than we do.
Trump’s lead over the other GOP contenders widened following his federal indictment earlier this month.
…it widened after this? Jesus.
Republicans see him as a martyr and the indictments as vindicating his persecution-by-the-deep-state complex
That’s depressing. What would they need to see to drop this guy?
As a Briton the idea of any of the last three PMs in a presidential system is really scary in my opinion. It’s easier to depose a leader that’s failing badly in the UK which is a good thing, I think the problem is the fact too much of our actual machinery of government is based on centuries-old gentleman’s agreements which is fine up until you get a complete stranger to honour like Boris Johnson who will abuse our fairly fluid constitutional arrangements to cling onto power like a tick.
In theory the monarch is supposed to be the last line of defence against a genuinely scary and out of control government that Parliament can’t reign in but we saw how well that worked over the last three years.
Just get rid of Trump, DeSantis, Marjorie, Ted, Boebert… all republicans and we’ll be fine.
I live in Europe and from the outside it looks like the Republicans stand for everything I hate about the USA
It looks that way from here too.
When when does what Americans want actually effect what America does? Not holding my breath.
There’s gotta be some better people out there right?
Cornel West is running.
Dude is legit, I’d vote for him.
marianne williamson is running
I want Buttigieg to run
there aren’t.
if there was one you’d know their name. you can’t name anyone though.
Well prepare for disappointment, and make it double.
It’s funny how we all forget that JB ran as a “place holder” candidate to begin with and said he had no desire or intention to run for a second term. The thought was that by now one of the other primary candidates (Klobachar, Harris and Buttigieg) would have gotten tapped and run on Biden’s behest. There was clearly a king maker deal cut so that they would all drop out and throw their support behind him to cut off Sanders momentum. They combined this with a media “bombshell” that Clyburn backed Biden over Sanders, after telegraphing support for Sanders previously. This combination of factors was snowballed into a media blitz that never let up and pushed Biden to the top seemingly by just repeating itself ad nauseam.
Still though, the tap for the next in line never came and the old guard stays in place again just by merely having a pulse. Dems have once again squandered full control and couldn’t cobble together any protections from a clear and present danger in radicalized right political zealots. We could all argue about the spoilers and that we couldn’t re-do the filibuster but I’m sure a couple million could have been back channeled to make that happen. They didn’t want it to.
At the knifes edge is exactly where they want us to be and they will take full fascism over even moderate movement toward actual implemented progressive policy. Now they will tell you up and down that they want things like student loan forgiveness or clean energy policy with teeth, but they will never implement it in a way that ensures it’s survival. It’s just platitudes that are built to fail and “vote for us harder and we’ll get it done next time.”
I’m so tired of this political system where we’ve been held hostage for the better part of 2 decades. All the while our hopes for a meaningful America just slips further by and we’re powerless to stop it. The only option we’re presented is to press a pause button for 4 years so that we can have permission to feel ok until the election starts again in 2 years. I would take a rouge sentient AI resting control of the country and threatening our nuclear destruction, unless we do as were told, over this. At least then it would probably make at least some meaningful strides to correcting the course of our nihilistic self destruction.
Dems have once again squandered full control and couldn’t cobble together any protections from a clear and present danger in radicalized right political zealots.
The mistake lies in thinking that they want to. One can believe they are bumbling fools who trip over their own feet for only so many generations before it becomes apparent that the agenda they somehow fail to foil over and over again is actually one that they wholeheartedly embrace themselves, too.
Honestly I think it’s all the neo-liberal echos of Reagan. Something broke in the minds of Dem strategists and politicians when he so handily swept the entire country. For them it was a sign that the waters were rich if they could just wiggle a little more to the right economically and shake off the remaining vestigial support of Keynesian economics. Once both parties saw that you could feast on the corpse of America for decades without having to deliver anything outside of photo ops and being likable that was it.
Maybe it’s all just that thing where people look back on George Bush and say they’d want to have a beer with him. It’s identity politics and we’re made to look through a prism at these people and see how our personalities would intertwine with theirs. I think we need to find a way to start trusting the boring and awkward candidates, or forcing our boring awkward friends to run for office. We need politicians who are visibly uncomfortable speaking at a podium.
You’re right. The cereal can only be “Oops, all berries” so many times before you know that machine was built to only make berries and lie about it.
To quote Douglas Adams
it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Maybe. The Democrats had already spent decades helping to kill the labor movement, build up the carceral state, and rampage across the world in imperial war-making prior to Reagan. So while he may have been a catalyst for further open embrace of reactionary ideology (see: Clinton), I can’t quite buy that he was the absolute beginning of it.
Christ I’m glad at least one other person has been paying attention. Well articulated analysis of the problem democrats are facing.
Establishment democrats have this death grip on the neck of the party and then act like its their constituents fault that everyone is suffocating.
That’s not a fair assessment. The Democrats have not had a solid majority in both houses of Congress and the presidency at the same time in a long time. Other than the promises they make, there is very little evidence of what they would do if there wasn’t any Republican obstruction to stop them. They could very well do everything they say they’ll do, for all we know.
As for Sanders, I’m not inclined to believe conspiracy theories about him. Look around you; this country is thoroughly right-wing. The vast majority of Americans are reflexively suspicious of avowed leftists like Sanders. He was never going to win the presidential primary, with or without shenanigans.
I believe it to be a fair assessment, and not because of my feelings or desire for change, but simply because I (and apparently some others further up this thread) saw basically the same thing happen.
I’ve worked closely enough to the Dem party/staffers/organizers that I’ve seen the same pandering play out locally, statewide and nationally in much the same way. It’s mainly about playing ball to keep your funding streams up and to fill your little black book for the next cycles war chest. Certainly, some politicians are more genuine than others in the party but for the majority politics comes to be little more than moves to jostle purse strings from PACs, donors and the party itself. At the end of the day there’s endless things that Dems could be doing to fight back against the takeovers of state level governments, school boards, appointee positions and the like, but they aren’t.
We can say “but we’re the one’s who fight the good fight” but there’s no keeping the genie in the bottle on the GOP side and Biden should have pushed his powers to the limit to gain every protection or have the courts limit his and future presidents power as a guardrail.
There certainly is always a narrative around these events, but Sanders was consistently polling as the most well liked politician in America for years around that time. There’s no conspiracy around the ways that coverage began slanting as standings solidified, and every other contender in the race threw their support behind Biden (including Warren, which left everyone scratching their head.) Here’s another article about MSNBC. If your actually interested that one has all of the measured instances laid out in google docs you can look at. I don’t know any people alleging that the votes were manipulated in terms of ballot stuffing or anything, so if you mean that by conspiracy then I’d have to agree with you there.
Your assessment of political leanings in America also seems to be very skewed and there’s a graph there that shows Dem/left sentiment at its highest point since 2008 during those primaries. Although it does seem to be ticking back conservative, but when Joe Biden still chooses to punch left on dem socialists after a failed insurrection that’s not much of a surprise.
Your opinions lean pretty heavily on the findings of pollsters. 2016 taught us all not to listen to pollsters. Only the actual elections paint an accurate picture of US politics, and, well, there are still plenty of Republicans in office.
As for left sentiment being at its highest point since 2008, don’t expect that to last. The economy is in the tank now, and people tend to vote hard right when they’re hurting for money. They are of course exceedingly unwise to expect Republicans to solve their financial problems, but that’s American voters for you.
LOL, no they don’t? Your rehashed conclusion is:
- “after 2016 all polls are wrong because Hillary lost” K…
- “only elections show the outcome of elections” how is that relevant at all to the main point of opinion manipulation by the media?
- The 2008 part you reference incorrectly because you didn’t understand the context and clearly couldn’t trouble yourself with looking at any of the supporting material I provided.
- Funnily you re-support the conclusion I came to and say that American voters can be easily swayed, despite what might be in their best interests. <—Proving my point
Overall, you’ve wasted both our time and shown that you don’t really want to discuss anything in good faith.
Sweet. That’s a wrap for me.
“The choice is between two terrible people. One is actively trying to kill me and the other doesn’t care if I die.” --A old post I’m unable to find but truly sums up american politics.
It’s not like that’s any different from any other presidential election we’ve had though. Kind of negates the impact of this poll…
Damn. Too real.
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But if you have to choose between a shit sandwich or a shit sandwich with glass… obviously hold the glass, right?
It looks like they are getting that matchup since DeSantis is too far behind Trump and RFK Jr is too behind Biden.
RFK Jr? Is this a joke suggestion haha why would he be a contender?
Hard disagree. That would be much worse than an election involving Biden. Biden, at least, is sane, reasonably competent, and non-fascist.
RFK Jr is an anti-vax and conspiracy theory nut. DeSantis is basically the home schooled version of Trump.
DeSantis vs RFK Jr wouldn’t really be much of an improvement. Just a different flavor of shit. Like lemon flavored shit instead of lime flavored shit.
RFK isn’t a Democrat
Hopefully by 2028 Trump dies so it’s not Trump and his massive-ass base vs the newcomer Dem candidate.
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Hey, maybe DeSantis will put out a hit on him, that will become public, and it’s a 2 birds one stone situation 🥴
vs the newcomer Dem candidate.
Copmala “Prison Slavery is a Valuable Pool of Labor for the State” Harris, you mean?
Ugh I think I’d rather amend the constitution to let biden run again 🤢
Well if we’re amending the constitution to allow corpses to run, might as well just go with FDR or Lincoln
