He just caught COVID, so he’ll be a bit less dynamic and energetic. Sigh.

Well, in his defense, he’ll give his best. That’s what this is all about…

I’d also be happy to see a Harris/Shapiro (PA gov) ticket.

This is a pretty telling question to be asking in the first place. Given the ostensibly center-left corporate media’s literal barrage of ‘Biden old’ and ‘replace Biden’ narrative over the past month or two, it’s hardly surprising that a number of Democrats think this is a good strategy. Note that they did not ask who these Democrats intend to vote for, the same way many of these stories focus on nebulous ‘approval ratings’ rather than pointed questions that might tease out who Democrats actually intend to vote for as well as whether they’re enthusiastic or simply settling.

What should be telling, however, is that Republicans want to see Biden replaced. Why?

If Biden is an old pushover with bad approval ratings… what’s the danger in letting him run? Republicans are more supportive of Biden throwing the towel in than Democrats. That doesn’t suggest to me that they’re terribly confident about Trump beating Biden.

I know why Democrats think someone else should replace Trump: because he’s absolutely terrifying. A Trump presidency with this current Supreme Court would be an absolute disaster for the fabric of every useful part of government and a gigantic win for corporate interests.

But Republicans? Why? Biden isn’t a stand-out among Democrats on his policies, he’s the mainstream. Most other Democrats would be doing the same things.

I think it’s because Biden is actually extremely likely to win.

Why start pushing stories about replacing an incumbent president after the primaries? Why not before? Because it’s too late to do it. All these stories can do now is discourage Democrats and pull Independents who are on the fence. They can’t help even if they were intended to, because it’s too late.

Ignore all this crap. Go vote in November. Get as many people as you can to vote for Biden. The rest is a distraction by the people who have the money to manufacture as many distractions as they could ever want.

Don’t get distracted.

The primaries are more of a formality when there’s an incumbent. Nobody bothers to run against the incumbent because they have such a huge advantage.

Dean Phillips is the most known candidate to have run against him. Everyone else stepped aside to the the incumbent run, either because he was the incumbent, or they didn’t want the political backlash of running against the incumbent.

Good point. I think it’s too late to be making this decision, unfortunately.

Smallish sample size aside, cold calling is a terrible way to conduct political polling. I worked in a call center and was a refusal converter, calling people who already told us to go away and getting them to complete the study anyway. The study I spent the most time with was the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Study, which I’ve administered I think four versions of? I also worked on the Sonya Slifka Longitudinal Multiple Sclerosis Study, a tobacco use study for the University of Colorado, and a number of other studies for smaller periods of time on everything from politics to experiences of abuse.

The people who will actually talk to a cold caller tend to fall into one of three categories, by my estimation. They’re either lonely, particularly cooperative, or particularly opinionated. These aren’t such big confounding factors for a health study, but they’re absolutely massive when it comes to politics.

Reporters don’t recognize this at all. They see numbers and cited source and just run with it. As someone who helped collect those numbers, I would not be taking them at face value. Social biases may not have much of an effect on how many carrots you eat in a month, but on your vote? I would struggle to come up with a better way to make your sample less representative.