2024 Elections Thread

[dismalist]

Washington Post headlines:

"Watching Biden, many see the heartbreaking indignities of aging."

"Five senior House Democrats, in private call, say Biden should step aside."

I don't think what we see is the consequences of aging. We did not see a lost debate, either; we saw a meltdown.

Aging leads to: Where are my car keys, honey? Biden is closer to: What does "car keys" mean?

The sooner he's replaced, the better.

 

[Ruralguy]

Maybe not quite *that* bad, but pretty close.

[ciao_yall]

Maybe not quite *that* bad, but pretty close.

I just hope all these high-powered D's pushing him to drop out can quickly coalesce around a Plan B.

[AmLitHist]

CNN is reporting that he's sent a letter to Congressional D's, essentially telling them to f--- off and shut up.  We could do this easy, or we could do this hard. Either way, if somebody else is going to run, they'd better get their ass in gear and declare within the next couple of days and get rolling.

[Langue_doc]

Live Election Updates: Biden Tells Congress He Is 'Firmly Committed' to Staying in Race
President Biden sent a letter to congressional Democrats a day after some high-ranking House members privately told colleagues that he should end his campaign.

Scroll down for a transcript of the letter, most likely sent by his advisors which includes Jill and Hunter.

In other news,

Biden's woes worsen as Hunter plays adviser: 'The s*** is going to hit the fan'

Axios separately reported on Sunday that Biden's own connection to felony convictions, his adult son Hunter, has seemingly become a liaison between his father and the outside world — a barrier deciding who does or doesn't get to speak to the president.

As for the interviews,

Radio Host Who Was Fed Questions by Biden Campaign Leaves Philadelphia Station
WURD said that the interview with President Biden was not up to its standards and that the host, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, had resigned in a mutual decision.

Last but not least,

Biden's Strategy to Make the Race About Trump Is Suddenly in Doubt
The Biden campaign's effort to raise questions about Donald J. Trump's ability to be president has boomeranged into a referendum on the president's own competence.

[Sun_Worshiper]

This is the week. If Biden gets to the weekend without dropping out, then he's going to be the nominee.

[Sun_Worshiper]

CNN is reporting that he's sent a letter to Congressional D's, essentially telling them to f--- off and shut up.  We could do this easy, or we could do this hard. Either way, if somebody else is going to run, they'd better get their ass in gear and declare within the next couple of days and get rolling.

Nobody is going to declare. Maybe Senior Democrats will go to Biden privatly and tell him it is over. If he accepts that, then he'll withdraw from the race and Harris will become the nominee.

[apl68]

Last but not least,

Biden's Strategy to Make the Race About Trump Is Suddenly in Doubt
The Biden campaign's effort to raise questions about Donald J. Trump's ability to be president has boomeranged into a referendum on the president's own competence.

Now there's an understatement!

[Langue_doc]

Two more NYT articles, the first one below:

James Carville: Biden Won't Win. Democrats Need a Plan. Here's One.

Mark my words: Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race. Whether he is ready to admit it or not. His pleas on Monday to congressional Democrats for support will not unite the party behind him. Mr. Biden says he's staying in the race, but it's only a matter of time before Democratic pressure and public and private polling lead him to exit the race. The jig is up, and the sooner Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders accept this, the better. We need to move forward.

But it can't be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We've got to do it out in the open — the exact opposite of what Donald Trump wants us to do.

For the first time in his life, Mr. Trump is praying. To win the White House and increase his chances of avoiding an orange jumpsuit, he needs Democrats to make the wrong moves in the coming days — namely, to appear to rig the nomination for a fading president or the sitting vice president or some other heir apparent. He needs to be able to type ALL CAPS posts about power brokers and big donors putting the fix in. He needs, in other words, for Democrats to blow it.

We're not going to do that.

We're going to nominate a new ticket in a highly democratic and novel way, not in the backrooms of Washington, D.C., or Chicago.

We're at the stage where we need constructive ideas for how to move forward. Representative Jim Clyburn and the Times Opinion columnist Ezra Klein have spoken about a Democratic mini-primary, and I want to build on that.
I want to see the Democratic Party hold four historic town halls between now and the Democratic National Convention in August — one each in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. We can recruit the two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. They may not represent every faction under our party's big tent. But they care as much about our democracy as our nation's first president, they understand what it takes to be president, and they know how to win.

Town halls — high-stakes job interviews for the toughest job in the world — would surely attract television and cable partners and generate record numbers of viewers. Think the Super Bowl with Taylor Swift in the stands. The young, the old and everyone in between will tune in to see history being made in real time.

How will potential nominees be chosen to participate in the town halls? There is no answer here that will satisfy everyone, but hard choices must be made, given the tight timetable, and I think leaning on the input of former presidents makes good sense. So I would advise Presidents 42 and 44 to select eight leading contenders out of the pool of those who choose to run, with Ms. Harris most definitely getting a well-earned invite.

I believe the vice president would be a formidable opponent for Mr. Trump. She has spent the past four years crisscrossing the country and the globe, serving the American people. She has a hell of a story — one that more people should know. She stood up for ordinary Americans against big banks. She locked up sexual predators. You want the prosecutor, or you want the criminal? Not the worst question to put to the American public this November.

Maybe Presidents 42 and 44 can make the candidate selection even more democratic by consulting the nation's 23 Democratic governors in the town hall selection process. Governors deal in the practical, not the theoretical. But I'm not a details guy. I say we leave it up to 42 and 44.

To be clear, we have a lot more than eight Democrats who could beat the pants off Mr. Trump. But if we don't limit the town halls to a manageable number of people, we'll get sound bites, not substance.

Town halls will give Americans a fresh look at Ms. Harris and introduce them to our deep bench of smart, dynamic, tested leaders. In addition, Democratic delegates will get to further grill and stress-test these leaders in public and private meetings before a formal vote of all the delegates at the Democratic convention.

A word about those delegates: I trust them to reach a majority decision at the convention after a public and substantive process like this one, and you should, too. Sure, we've got some folks on the fringes, God love 'em. But an overwhelming majority of Democratic delegates are pragmatic patriots. They work hard and care deeply about their communities and our country. They come from small towns and big cities and everywhere in between.

I'm not worried about our delegates. They're in it to win it.

I'm not worried about our talent. We have a staggeringly talented new generation of leaders.

I'm not worried about the money. Americans will be fired up by this open process, and many are already fired up to beat Mr. Trump.

I'm not worried about time. We have excitement and momentum on our side.

And our opponent? The one born with a platinum spoon but no moral compass? The pathological liar? The felon? The predator found liable for sexual abuse? The wannabe dictator? The Putin lickspittle?

I'm not worried about him, either.

It's been an agonizing time for those of us who think President Biden more than earned a second term but isn't going to win one. But now we've got to move on.

Although my friend Rahm Emanuel usually gets credit, I've heard more often that it's Winston Churchill who is said to have advised, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." A superdemocratic process — the opposite of what Mr. Trump and his MAGA minions would do — is how we're going to honor that wisdom in our own "Will democracy prevail?" moment.

[Langue_doc]

The Ezra Klein article referred to by James Carville:

Jim Clyburn Is Right About What Democrats Should Do Next

President Biden faces a problem with no solution. No interview or speech will convince a doubtful public that he is still fit to serve. Perceptions of him had years to harden. In June 2020, 36 percent of voters said Biden was too old to serve. By 2024, that number had roughly doubled. In the Times/Siena poll conducted in February, 73 percent said he was "too old to be an effective president." In the April poll, 69 percent said the same. In the June poll, 70 percent. After the debate, 74 percent.

The debate didn't change what voters believed about Biden. The debate made it impossible for the Democratic Party to continue ignoring what voters already believed about Biden.

And make no mistake: They were ignoring it. After calling for Biden to step aside in February, I had a lot of conversations with top Democrats about Biden's age. They universally knew it was a serious, perhaps lethal, political problem. So why didn't they do anything? They thought the criticisms were unfair to Biden, who has been a good president; they thought the problem was unsolvable, because he would not step aside; they thought there were no other options; and above all, they thought Donald Trump's malignancy would overwhelm fears of Biden's infirmity.

They now know it won't. In a post-debate Data for Progress poll, voters were asked which concerned them more: Biden's age and physical and mental health or Trump's criminal charges and threats to democracy. By 53 percent to 42 percent, they chose Biden's age.

The Democratic Party is realizing it must act. But how? If Biden steps aside, it has two options: a coronation or a contest. In a coronation, Biden names Vice President Kamala Harris his successor and asks his delegates to throw their support to her. To some Democrats, this is the safest path. My newsroom colleagues Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg report that "several Democrats said that no matter the risks, a new nominee could bring a host of benefits to the party, particularly if Mr. Biden anointed a successor in an effort to assure a smooth transition and minimize intraparty battling."
But a coronation would repeat the mistakes that brought the party to crisis in the first place. What Democrats denied themselves over the past few years was information. If Biden had run in a competitive primary race, including debates, Democrats would have seen earlier how he'd perform. If Biden had routinely sat for extended, tough interviews and given news conferences, his shortcomings would've been clearer. In February, the special counsel's report questioning Biden's memory and cognitive capacity led to an extraordinary evening press conference in which Biden mixed up Mexico and Egypt, deepening the very doubts he'd meant to quell.

But that press conference was the exception; I suspect that Biden, in his fury over the special counsel's report, demanded to speak, and that he and his team immediately regretted the decision. They certainly did not begin scheduling more press conferences in the aftermath. By June 30, 2012, Barack Obama had given 570 news conferences or interviews. At the same point in his presidency, Trump had given 468. Biden had given 164.

What Democrats — or at least the Biden campaign — thought they were doing was playing it safe. A primary campaign could only weaken Biden. Difficult interviews could create viral moments that harmed him. News conferences could reveal him flat-footed. But Democrats missed the risk they were running: They didn't know how he would perform in a re-election campaign until it was nearly too late. Perhaps even Biden didn't know how he'd perform.

Denying themselves information is not a mistake Democrats should make again. Which is why the most important comment I saw a Democrat make last week was from Representative Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina elder statesman who saved Biden's campaign in 2020 and is one of its co-chairs in 2024. In an interview on CNN, Clyburn said on Wednesday that if Biden leaves the race, the party should hold "a mini-primary."

"You can actually fashion the process that's already in place to make it a mini-primary, and I would support that absolutely," Clyburn said. "We can't close that down, and we should open up everything for the general election. I think that Kamala Harris would acquit herself very well in that kind of a process, but then it would be fair to everybody."

If Democrats need to choose another candidate, they need to make the process as competitive and open as possible. Harris would be the front-runner, and there's a good case to be made that she's underrated. But she needs to prove her mettle. To anoint her because it would minimize conflict would be madness. Imagine the intraparty battling if Democrats, after unwisely closing ranks around Biden, close ranks around Harris and lose to Trump.

The cliché used to be that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. In recent years, Republicans have fallen apart and Democrats have fallen in line. But a fear of disorder can become a pathology all its own. Some problems cannot be solved without opening yourself to uncertainty. Some information cannot be surfaced without a bit of chaos and conflict. We have all had seasons in our lives in which we lost control, only to discover new strengths and possibilities. As it is for people, so it is for parties.

A coronation would also deny Democrats the reward of a contest: constant media coverage from here until their convention. Imagine Trump's fury if he spent the next few months barely able to break into a news cycle. In an interview with Politico, a Democratic National Convention delegate from South Carolina said aloud what many Democrats have told me privately. "I think it would be fantastic for the party. I mean, think about it: People would watch it. It would get the ratings: It has the drama that people would pay attention to. And if multiple candidates were seeking our nomination, you would have wall-to-wall, weeklong, prime-time coverage of all of our best rising stars, delivering the party message that, frankly, Joe Biden couldn't against Donald Trump."

Democrats have spent so much time imagining what could go wrong if Biden steps down that they struggle to imagine what could go right. But this is a party suffused with talent. This is a party that knows how to win where it needs to win. Take the seven states that will almost certainly decide this election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats control the governor's mansion in five of them. Democrats won 11 of the 14 Senate seats across them.

And this is a party facing a weak opponent. Another way of looking at the polls above is this: Around 70 percent of voters believe that Biden is too old to serve as president, yet Trump has generally led by only a few points. What would happen to that lead if voters were actually excited by the Democratic nominee for president?

But to find that nominee, Democrats need to hold a real contest. They need to see the candidates giving interviews, debates, news conferences, town halls, speeches. The candidates should seek out forums where the interviewers and the voters disagree with them — Pete Buttigieg, for instance, never looks better than when he is on Fox News.

Democrats tried to play it safe and failed. It is time to open themselves to risk. The candidate next in line is not always the best choice. The leaders who look perfect on paper don't always perform under the klieg lights. But contests do not just feature disappointments. They reveal who is ready to rise to the moment. Democrats should give themselves, and the country, the gift of finding that out.

[Parasaurolophus]

Carville is high on The West Wing.

Not only will that process be much uglier than he imagines, but the mere fact that it will be delegates choosing, and not registered Democrats, will undermine the process's claims to openness and transparency.

[Sun_Worshiper]

That's not how it would go down anyway. It will be Harris or Biden.

[dismalist]

Carville is high on The West Wing.

Not only will that process be much uglier than he imagines, but the mere fact that it will be delegates choosing, and not registered Democrats, will undermine the process's claims to openness and transparency.

That's not how it would go down anyway. It will be Harris or Biden.

Yeah, what Carville means is anybody but Harris, as certainly as possible, as openly as necessary.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Harris has her weaknesses to be sure, but she also has some claim to have electoral support and she has the largest nation-wide profile. The average American at least knows who she is, which is probably not true of Whitmer or Beshear or even Newsom.

But I think Biden is probably going to hold on, given how things are lining up. And despite all his weaknesses I'd give him a solid chance against Trump - truly an awful candidate let's remember.

[kaysixteen]

Sure, Drumpf is a truly awful candidate, but consider those two caveats I mentioned above:

1) Biden has a repeat performance at the upcoming Sept debate

2)or, Biden has even a Moscow Mitch-style health moment say in Oct.

I am not a  Wimbeldon fan, but I believe the phraseology is 'game, set, and match'.

Now to the other point, viz., Biden does stand aside now, but somehow, some way, a VP Harris desiring the nomination is denied it.   Then, well, what say the millions of (mostly) Black women Democrats, the most loyal and deepest core element of the Demo base, to that action?