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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Its still crazy to me so many people wanted to keep Biden. He wasn't only hurting our chance at the presidency, a poor presidential candidate hurts chances for gains in House/Senate too.
Biden had too many valid issues that was hurting Dem turnout.
Lots of people couldn't hold their nose for Biden, and likely weren't going to show up to just vote down ballot.
Kamala is far from perfect, but has practically zero baggage in comparison to Biden. So running her is going to help pick up more seats elsewhere.
If she does the "now that I'm in office I'm going to start trying to find out if I can do anything" that Biden did tho. We'll get nothing accomplished with those 2 years and lose one or both in midterms.
There's no excuse to be unprepared in January, it shows voters that the candidate wasn't really serious about fixing shit, and it's almost impossible for a candidate to recover.
Considering a primary in 2028 is incredibly unlikely, we can't afford Kamala to fuck this up.
She needs to start doing shit to help Americans day 1.
Traditionally, the incumbent has a huge advantage. I don't believe that the party of any sitting president that was primaried ever won the election. There are only a few cases of a sitting president that was eligible for another term stepping aside, and those were a very long time ago.
There was very little precedent for what Biden did, and I think very few could have predicted the enthusiasm for Harris - I remember her last campaign. It wasn't inspiring.
I think Biden felt like the safest choice to many, though obviously that's been proven incorrect. Hopefully the Democratic party will take a lesson from this and be more willing to replace an incumbent in the future if there's a better option.
Yeahhhhhhhhhh they won't. They never do
And let's be real here. The enthusiasm isn't so much for Harris. It's for anyone not 80 years old or Trump.
Sure they do. The lesson they invariably take is "we need to move to the right."
Probably because the party was already in a really weak position in the first place, which led to both the nominee getting primaried and the party still losing the general anyway. Like, if someone has a massive coronary and ends up dying during emergency heart surgery you're probably not going to blame the surgery for killing them.
And I've never heard of a single person dying during open heart surgery who didn't have a condition that required open heart surgery...
Looking at just that and refusing open heart surgery wouldn't make much logical sense if you had a condition surgery could help...
Right?
Because lots of people have died because they didn't have surgery they needed. Similarly incumbents have lost elections because they were too weak of a candidate and shouldn't have been on the ticket in the first place...
You should be awarded for coming up with an argument this bad
Every argument they start derails into being bad faith like this. They're absurdly good at the initial post being somewhat plausible. Then whatever position they took falling apart upon further discussion.
I get it. Changing the engine out mid-flight comes with a lot of uncertainty. Would selecting a new candidate go smoothly, would a new candidate be able to get momentum, what happens if a new candidate is worse, etc.
Biden wasn’t great, but people were worried about all the unknowns.
If they were worried than they weren't listening to the criticisms of Biden...
Like, I understand why they were wrong, that doesn't mean they weren't wrong.
In your example, not changing the engine would have likely resulted in a crash...
So people insisting we kept trying to fly and just ignored the burning engine we needed to replace wouldn't exactly be considered logical
What a strange place you've chosen to grind your axe. This article is about the House of Representatives.
The article is about the change from Biden to Kamala is showing signs it will boost the House...
It's literally the first line in the article...
Did you just read the headline and comments? That might be why you're confused
I get what he's saying. You're here grinding your anti-Biden ax, long after Biden's no longer on the ballot. You might have had a valid question about why everyone was so hesitant to change horses mid-race. Jesus answered that question. We took a risk that could have resulted in a much worse outcome because frequently in history, it has. And Harris was an uninspired candidate in 2020, which many of us worried she'd be in 2024. That should be good enough to end this conversation...maybe with a 'Gee, I'm glad Harris upped her game between 2020 and now because we needed what we got this last month,' if you ABSOLUTELY have to.
But you're harping on Biden in an article about the House of Representatives. You're getting heavily downvoted and questioned about your motive. Maybe read the room? Biden is yesterday's news. The only reason we think you're harping on him is to try to depress Democratic turnout and we're telling you to knock it the fuck off.
Mate...
Read the first sentence of the article...
But the whole article is literally about how switching from Biden is showing signs of helping the House, it's what the article is literally about...
How is commenting on the subject of the article not relevant to the article?
First, I'm not your mate so knock that shit off.
Second, the article is about the House, not about Biden. I don't fucking care what the first sentence says because the article is no more about the first fucking sentence than it is about the headlines or comments. Again. We're seeing your concerns and telling you to fuck off with that bullshit.
Well, you definitely didn't read any of that, because the whole article is quotes of people saying Biden stepping aside is helping down ballot races...
Like this:
Or this:
Seriously, it's the entire article mate.
Removed, civility.
I understand the content of the article, I just didn't understand the necessity of your comment in relation to it. There isn't a way we can quash this easily, let's just move on.
Just saying that people knew Biden was a risky candidate, and people worried that swapping out the incumbent might increase the risk.
People were making their best guesses with the information they had at the time. The only way to know for sure is to have a multiverse Time Machine.
Correct. A repeat of 1968 was not just possible but likely. Thankfully all resources and support were put behind Harris instead of fracturing across multiple candidates. Had the opposite happened it would have been 1968 all over again.
Or they could have listened to what was perhaps the largest outcry from voters of the Dem party, or polls, or Biden himself when he (rarely) spoke in public.
Which is why I said:
But this:
Makes it sound like there was no way to tell Biden was a poor candidate, and people who spent months saying he was were just coincidentally right.
We just disagree man, you think there was no way to tell, I think it was blatantly obvious and everyone should have been able to tell
It's not a big deal that we disagree, we don't have to keep rehashing it
Coming from the person whose full-time job is apparently commenting the same 2-3 stale arguments on literally any thread that even tangentially involves Biden, Harris, or the Democrats, that's absolutely rich.
Removed, civility.
Not sure what you’re trying to say with this. Are you saying she shouldn’t try to do anything? If so what is the point of electing her? As I see it, it’s the exact opposite and she should immediately try to accomplish some goals. Why wait?
It wasn’t good phrasing, but I think their point is she needs to take action on day 1, not start researching/planning on day 1. “Trying to find out” being the operative words, versus, “now that I’m in office, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.”
That she shouldn't just put her feet up after the election like Biden did
If she wins in November, then she needs to have a plan ready in January for at least some things to get moving.
Like, Biden said he'd de-criminalize cannabis federally to get votes. Then in January declared he'd "look into it'" and stalled till we lost the House in midterms and said he couldnt. Which still wasn't true.
Shit like that depresses Dem turnout.
I thought the last line was as simple as I could make it...
Right, which is why I found the one sentence I quoted strangely at odds with the rest of what you said. Most of your comment suggests she should get started right out of the gate, and then that one seems to say she shouldn’t.
IMO If she doesn’t already know what she can do by that time, she had darn well better start finding out ASAP so she can get it done immediately…
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Overall I agree heavily with what you are saying. I really was hoping for the feeling of whiplash when Biden took office because I expected him to drop like 20 executive orders on day 1 to undo the worst of the worst Trump shit. No reason not to have that shift drafted and ready to go before inauguration. But it didn’t really play out that way.
I hope hope hope that if they manage to take back the White House and Congress that the democrats have an agenda ready to rock and roll because that otherwise it’s hard to maintain enthusiasm from the public when it seems like not much is happening.
I just thought it was me.
But for some reason a lot of people seem to be getting confused with what I'm saying today.
It ain't even just political stuff.
This question has been asked and answered; to death. Trends strongly indicate it's a disaster to primary the incumbent for very obvious and often-repeated reasons.
What do you mean by this?
It really felt like Biden slow-walked or bailed on a TON of his campaign promises. And then he proceeded to nominate a limpdick/arguable quisling AG who took two fucking years to do literally anything in terms of prosecuting Trump for his unprecedented open insurrection - by which time, most of the public’s attention span had lapsed, so the poLiTicAL PerSecUTiOn angle pushed by the GOP gained a lot of traction.
Biden did a bunch of good stuff, but he also did a bunch of really dumb stuff, and had an absolute SHITLOAD of missed opportunities - both in terms of making and executing policy, as well as effectively leveraging the bully pulpit. Not to mention, it became abundantly clear that he’s generationally out of touch with the majority of the country at this point.
Just throwing this out there, he walked into office with a pandemic going on and a mess to clean up.
Sure, but January 6th should have kicked off a very fucking serious and rapid set of criminal prosecutions against a plethora of Trump admin officials (including the orange man himself), and Biden’s ass-tier pick of an AG has done basically nothing meaningful, and nothing meaningful will actually get done before the election. I know airtight court cases take time, but it seems to me there just wasn’t any sense of urgency around how the cases have been conducted. And the cases should very fucking much have been treated with urgency. I don’t get how they haven’t managed to nail him on anything serious after four fucking years. That looks a lot like just not doing your job to me.
There's tons of people in the Democratic party who loved how "ineffective" Biden was at getting anything progressive done while he kept the taxpayer money to cops and for profit businesses flowing. They were making incredibly stupid arguments, but the hardcore Biden supporters were very much not stupid people.
I wanted to keep Joe Biden from 2020. Sadly, that man doesn't exist anymore.
Being president is hard AF apparently, you can see how it aged each of the past one rapidly. Just imagine the state that raggedy ass trump would be in after another term, hardly fit to change his own shirt probably
It's the stress. In office all he did was golf and watch TV, so he didn't age as rapidly. Donald has been aging faster out of office because he has so many high consequence cases.