I have a couple of concerns out Biden but, aside from age, my biggest concern is that the hold your nose and vote candidate never wins.
“Hold your nose and vote” is probably a bit strong but I see Biden as akin to Kerry. He’s fine but no one is overly enthusiastic about him. He’s kind of a place holder for a more ideal candidate that we all wish for. That lack of enthusiasm is deadly in a presidential election. Anyone but Bush didn’t work out for similar reasons. The left and many moderates were very very motivated to vote Bush out but that alone was not enough to carry the day. The masses need someone to vote for.
All of that having been said, of course I will vote for Biden if he gets the nomination and of course he will be infinitely better than Trump. But he is kind of the living embodiment of the establishment that the last election was a referendum on. That zeitgeist of dissatisfaction with the establishment has not gone away and while any rational person will vote for Biden, you need a coalition of rational voters and uninformed guy voters to win The Presidency.
Indeed, Rudymentum was short-lived. The only sadder candidate than Rudy was that Law & Order actor guy. Fred Thompson?
Timex
3178
I feel like we need to see at least one debate performance before we can start calling it for Biden.
Banzai
3180
Texas Tribune/UT poll of 1200 registered Texas voters, margin of error 2.8%
Your choice in a Democratic primary?
| Joe Biden |
23% |
| Beto O’Rourke |
15% |
| Elizabeth Warren |
14% |
| Bernie Sanders |
12% |
| Pete Buttigieg |
8% |
| Kamala Harris |
5% |
| Julián Castro |
3% |
| Tulsi Gabbard |
3% |
Would you vote to reelect Trump?
All Voters
Definitely 39%
Probably 11%
Probably not 7%
Definitely not: 43%
You’ve heard of:
| Joe Biden |
82% |
| Beto O’Rourke |
82% |
| Bernie Sanders |
81% |
| Elizabeth Warren |
74% |
| Kamala Harris |
62% |
| Cory Booker |
58% |
| Julián Castro |
53% |
| Pete Buttigieg |
51% |
| Bill de Blasio |
51% |
| Kirsten Gillibrand |
51% |
| Amy Klobuchar |
39% |
| Tulsi Gabbard |
30% |
| John Hickenlooper |
28% |
| Andrew Yang |
23% |
| Eric Swalwell |
22% |
| Tim Ryan |
20% |
| John Delaney |
18% |
| Jay Inslee |
16% |
| Michael Bennet |
14% |
| Steve Bullock |
12% |
| Seth Moulton |
10% |
| Marianne Williamson |
10% |
| Wayne Messam |
4% |
Possibly interesting times in these parts.
Public schools will weed students out once they get there. Private schools do everything to keep them in, once they get there.
Shut up shut up lalalala I can’t hear you!
Calamity may be overstating it, but folks around here suddenly really seem to dislike him, to a degree I would call overreaction. But hey, it’s soon to be primary season, and I suppose things always get overheated.
Dejin
3184
That matches my experience having taught at one of each. The grade inflation at the private school is crazy. It’s very hard to fail out, and the university will do everything they can to make sure you graduate.
I wouldn’t say the public school was actively trying to weed students out, but if you couldn’t cut it, you couldn’t cut it and they weren’t afraid to fail students.
They just don’t care. Trump has made Biden bulletproof.
Right now, I think the best bet is just to hope Trump’s internals are correct and don’t change- if Biden carries NC by 8, we get real change here as the state legislature will flip hard. If Biden can do that, I’ll forgive just about anything he does short of treason.
I’m not worried about hold your nose this time. The last four years means no one is holding their nose, the Dem base wants to punish the Republican base now. That’s the difference between 2020 and 2016. The Republicans finally got the culture war they wanted, Trump was their Pearl Harbor.
Timex
3187
Orlando sentinel had come out with their endorsement for 2020 already. Literally anyone but Trump.
This paper normally endorses Republicans. They aren’t a left leaning paper.
Did they endorse him in 2016? I don’t know, just asking. I can say the normally all Republican all the time Columbus Dispatch endorsed Clinton in '16, which was shocking and commendable.
Timex
3189
No.
They endorsed Democrats in 2016, 2008, and 2004.
This analysis seems to show that, for Democratic voters, gender is the largest factor in ‘electability’. Not that Dems won’t vote for a female Presidential candidate, but that they believe others will not and the female can’t win and so switch to the best male candidate in the primary race.
When gender is removed from the question, Warren has a small lead over Joe Biden. Fully 24% of respondents said they would switch their votes to a woman if gender were magically not an issue.
https://www.avalanchestrategy.com/electability?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top
Biden said this at a fundraiser in NY on Tuesday.
At some point, this sort of thing is going to hurt him. Unless, of course, old white racism apologetics play as well on the left as they do on the right, in which case maybe he’s a genius…
Thanks I’m going to start using this on everyone who tells me that they just want whoever is most electable. Let them change or just acknowledge and live with their own sexism.
“Politeness over convictions” is a guaranteed winner with the media. It ticks off all their boxes - bothsiderism, the idea that only losers actually care about political positions, and the myth of a Golden Age when America worked perfectly. (Only hardened mythmakers could paint the mid-to-late 70s as a Golden Age of American Politics, but Uncle Joe and his media groupies are determined to try.)
Biden’s accommodating tone towards racists and the GOP is gonna play terribly with the Dem base, though. I don’t give a crap about whether anyone is polite: I care about stopping the GOP’s terrible policies, rampant corruption, and gross incompetence. Likewise, Joe acts all shocked that people consider the GOP “the enemy,” but the base knows from hard experience that the GOP declared Dems the enemy way back in 1994 (if not earlier.) They’re not likely to reward someone whose can be counted on to kick every time Lucy holds out the football.
Not even the WaPo reporter, though, could swallow all of Biden’s Dixie nostalgia:
The Democratic presidential candidate, who has led his competitors in early polls of the crowded nominating contest, briefly impersonated the southern drawl of the Mississippi cotton planter, lawyer and lawmaker. “He never called me ‘boy,’ " Biden said. “He always called me ‘son.’ ”
Biden’s campaign didn’t immediately return a request for comment about why it would be notable that the Dixiecrat — who thought black Americans belonged to an “inferior race” and warned that integration would cause “mongrelization” — didn’t call Biden “boy,” a racial epithet deployed against black men. [my emphasis]
Joe Biden, ladies and gents. “Hey, he wasn’t a racist asshole to me. How I miss him!”
While I have been supportive of this position, I also think that it is basically the ACA all over again. Make a lot of concessions to get GOP buy in, then end up with zero votes and a decade of attacks.
Wake me up when Biden gets an endorsement from a republican.
