5664

Yeah, on his very first National Campaign for President, be lost. People lose primaries.

George Bush Senior lost his presidential primary.
Joe Biden lost several presidential primaries.
Nixon lost to JFK before willing later on.

People lose elections sometimes, but that isn’t the end of their career.

Pete came in with less experience then Obama, and shot to the center stage for a good long while. He eventually lost to someone with decades more experience then him.

If he ran again, it would be as someone with over 4 years experience in DC, shepherding one of the largest programs of US history.

He would probably have a better, more experienced staff and he himself would be more experienced.

Plus, he was already a pretty good candidate, before the Bernie Bros started feeling threatened by him.

5665

Certainly it’s suboptimal! But — barring the unforeseen — if he wants the nomination, the political reality is that he gets it. And if he doesn’t want it, there are likely to be at least a dozen people contending for the spot. The real problem is if there is a late decision by Biden not to run, or to drop out, and little time for anyone else to build any momentum.

5666

I’d wager that some Democrats are privately organizing themselves a campaign apparatus for the very real possibility that Biden drops out. As was mentioned earlier, Biden’s not going to lame-duck himself out of half of his term. He’ll continue under the guise of running again but he’ll make way for a younger candidate, I think.

5667

I’m sure they are. The problem is that they can’t actually campaign for the job as long as Biden maintains his intention to run. If he maintains that intention through the start of the primaries, Democrats who want to run will find themselves in the same position they were in 1968: do they challenge a sitting President for the nomination? Back then, McCarthy and Kennedy managed to force Johnson to drop out, and there’s a strong argument that the entire exercise contributed to weakening the party’s chances in the general election. Of course a lot of other things happened! 1968 was a shitstorm, but there is every reason to believe that 2024 will also be a shitstorm.

5668

Of course, if Dems take a shellacking in 2022, Biden might decide his term is essentially over anyway and give up the reins, no?

5669

Maybe, but the party in power losing the midterms is normal, so I’m not sure that would change his mind.

If he doesn’t really mean to run, he’ll say so in plenty of time. But I think he means to run. That’s just a guess on my part, of course.

5670

My whole point wasn’t that Pete is a shoo-in, especially since so far Pete hasn’t shown an ability to connect with minorities in a real way and since strange things can happen in a national election. My point was that Pete’s engagement with the media(especially Fox News) has been a notable difference from the way other politicians deal with hostile media(either attacking or ignoring them). When he’s done it it’s been with enough skill that it doesn’t seem to play into their hands and they didn’t seem to know how to counter it either. And from my perspective it’s totally the right move, I really really wish other politicians would start doing it as well.

5671

The Democrats have a real problem in that the kind of candidate they need to win their primary is a weaker candidate in the general.

In other words appealing to minority candidates is a negative in the general but a positive in the primary, and there’s no easy fix to this because of the coalitional nature of the current Democratic party. Biden got the nod because of a sense of collective wisdom of the whole party putting winning first over their preferred choices, but this is unlikely to hold forever.

5672

I’m trying to think of historical times when the incumbent chose (or was forced at convention) not to run for another term.

1848 - Polk
1860 - Buchanan
1868 - Johnson
1908 - Teddy
1928 - Coolidge
1968 - LBJ

Coolidge is a bit of an odd case as he had really run for a term and a half, but he very specifically declined to run again, so I guess he was expected to. (I imagine the pre-FDR convention of only running for 2 terms was considered not to apply even if you had a pretty big chunk of an inherited term; see also TR.)

Anyway based on that extremely unscientific survey, only Coolidge and Teddy were cases where they declined to run and their party held power in the next election. Probably not a general principle that can be deduced from all this.

5673

I think this is mostly right, but I also think it’s an easier thing for Pete to do when he’s not the party candidate for President. When / if he is the party candidate for President, he’s going to get very different treatment from the right-wing media machine. Maybe he’ll deal with that better, maybe not, but he certainly hasn’t faced it yet.

Biden isn’t particularly adept at dealing with hostile media either. What he is, is relatively immune to the kinds of attacks the right-wing media tend to make. Everyone knows who Biden is, so when Fox News tries to cast him as a Marxist, the voters basically laugh it off as silly. I don’t think Pete has that kind of natural immunity, and I think he’s going to be vulnerable to that sort of thing, though he may well have skill to parry it effectively.

5674

Pete is very vulnerable when it comes to Minority Groups and our more progressive left, but I have my doubts that he is particularly vulnerable to the GOP attacks.

He is a married Gay man with 2 children that wears a suit and tie, and looks dorky as all hell. He bikes to work on a regular basis. He talks about pro-choice in the kind of disarming way that makes it seem like it’s not really pro-choice.
He is big on his small-town credentials, which the GOP loves, and African Americans don’t seem to connect with him well (which the GOP also loves).

His ideas seem positively mainstream (in fact, he was painted as a conservative by many in Reddit), like Joe Biden. When you paint a picture of a Conservative American, Pete is what Conservatives pretend to be, except with a husband instead of a wife. And these days, I don’t think that is as much of an issue as all that.

Honestly, 90% of Pete’s troubles would be getting through the Primaries and earning the African American and Hispanic Vote. Pete won’t have the benefit of having other moderates leave the race, as Biden did without the nod from minority groups, and frankly, other politicians will probably have that locked in.

But, I’m not sure what attacks the GOP would send at Pete, especially if he does so fantastically on Fox as he did during the primary, and completely undercuts their attacks by being on the shows that are most likely to strike out at him.

And being on Fox is a gamble, because it gives the right a lot of chances to throw shots at you, but every single time Pete was on there during the PRIMARY (while he was running) Pete has come out ahead.

And I should remind you, he got a standing ovation from the FOX Townhall after talking about Abortion Rights. You tell me if that isn’t a man that is 100% up to the task.

5675

Two words: Family values. They’ll motivate the conservative Christian voters who don’t want a queer in the White House with his queer husband and who-knows-what-THEY-are(!) children.

5676

Of course this. Just wait until Tucker Carlson and his expert guest are discussing the contours and dimensions of Pete’s hypothetical sex life every night for weeks on end.

5677

I can’t imagine those people voting for him anyway, so it’s just mobilizing a base that was already mobilized.

It’s probably safe to say that Gay Marriage is currently more of an issue for the GOP than the Democrats, and Family Value attacks, much like Defund the Police would probably keep a lot of right-leaning independents and Never Trumpers at home just as much as Donald Trump.

And let us face it, Gay Marriage is a fight the Democrats should be fighting, because its a Culture War Issue that the GOP actually lost big time.

5678

This piece on Gay Marriage might be an indicator that the Family Values line of attack might not work that well.

5679

Man, I really hate hearing this sentiment when it comes to discussing a candidate’s potential negatives. It blissfully ignores an issue because deep down we WANT that candidate to be President, and hell, they DESERVE to be President. It ignores the fact that a portion of the electorate that may have been uninterested in voting and would have just stayed home, might now get off their fat asses to keep Candidate X out of office because of ___________.

Now sure, you could apply this sentiment to Obama back in '08, but I think by that point in time, there were more people than not willing to have a Black president. A gay President? I’m not sure we’re there yet as a country, unfortunately. It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, but it’ll have to be eventually.

5680

I prefer to look at Politico’s analysis and punditry stuff with a skeptical eye, given the ideological bent of the people who run the rag.

5681

They got trans folks to bash instead, at least for next 10-20 yrs

I think in an open 2024 Dem primary, it will be someone unexpected who wins.

5682

I’m pretty sure Obama was helped a lot by the fact that the Republican administration and Congress had spent 8 years trying to destroy the country. We won’t have that going for us in 2024.

5683

It may be true that Republicans are coming around on gays, but Republican attacks wouldn’t necessarily be strictly about Buttigieg being gay. They’d also be about his gayness making it impossible for him to run the country, or command respect internationally.

None of it is fair, and none of it will be OK, but even if mainstream Republicans are OK with it, the ones who write the opinion pieces and have their own shows are not.