Board of editors of the NYT already wrote an article suggesting he step aside. Big donors have a say too. There are lots of people who can let the president know that they don't approve. Whether he will listen is another matter, but acting like no one else can or will place pressure on him is unrealistic.
His family and friends could look at this Astral Codex Ten post, think to themselves "Defeating Trump is extremely important and Biden isn't the best candidate to do so", then ask Biden to withdrawal. It doesn't seem like they will do so, but they could.
Scott's whole post is about people disagreeing on prediction markets and personally I agree with them. You should either bet up Biden or bet down the alternatives
Remember that betting things like this is a culturally weird move that's highly specific to this SSC/LW crowd. Anyone who doesn't do it isn't necessarily not saying something less strongly than someone who does. It hasn't caught on enough to be more than a *cultural* symbol thus far.
You might be saying "Signal your membership in our club. Then you and I will go do secret handshakes and have a deeper conversation on this matter." That's also a kind of legit, as far as it goes....
But it isn't what it isn't.
>Remember that betting things like this is a culturally weird move that's highly specific to this SSC/LW crowd.
I know, but it's one of the things about us that's actually better than everyone else, not just a quirk like many things of the things that make us different.
I'm not trying to signal membership in the club. I am saying, if it's true that Biden is the best choice like the guy I replied to claimed, there's free money for him by either betting up Biden or betting down the other options. If he's confident in his beliefs, he should be willing to put money on it. At the very least, play money on Manifold. And if he's not confident, he should add that disclaimer.
Previously I had my Manifold bets on Biden doing well, then I ditched that after seeing the debate. Right now I'm not confident about what will happen, just what I want to happen, and I expect the current markets know better than I do.
> unless things have changed VERY recently
The *entire point* of the linked post is that Biden's debate performance was a very recent change of sufficient magnitude to change polling and prediction markets which try to measure his chances for victory.
But it will end his presidency, and if it happens his family will be ostracized from the Democratic Party. If he runs and loses the same thing will happen. They seem to be making it so the best endgame for the Biden family is that they step aside without making a fuss so that they can salvage what remains of their name.
How? Section 4:
> Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Good so far.
> Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office
All Biden has to do is say "Nah, I'm good" and he's back in office.
At this point he can be removed again, but it requires some time and, finally, it goes to the House and Senate and that requires a 2/3 majority in both to remove him. That's a higher bar than impeachment.
I think the calculation of whether or not he's easier to beat is more important, plus the longer he stays around, the longer they can "humiliate" him.
But, you could be right. We are definitely in ucharted territory here.
If the party tried to pressure him out and he didn't want to go, it would probably fracture the party and guarantee Trump the election. They can and should try to persuade him to drop out behind closed doors though.
It would only fracture the party if the party itself was divided on getting rid of him. He alone can't cause a fracture if the democrat party machine aligns on getting rid of him.
"The party itself" isn't really a thing that can make decisions. Maybe if every convention delegate agreed on it, but since Biden won all the primaries the convention delegates are all people specifically chosen because they support him so it doesn't seem likely they'll go along with it.
The whole point of the modern primary system is to prevent there from being a "party machine" that can overrule the voters on who the candidate should be. Most people thought this was a good thing since it's more democratic, but we're seeing there are downsides.
(We saw something similar with Trump: the party establishment hated him but he won the primaries so there was nothing they could do to stop him and now he owns the Republican party.)
> The whole point of the modern primary system is to prevent there from being a "party machine" that can overrule the voters on who the candidate should be.
Couldn't the Democratic Party just change their bylaws though, if push comes to shove. Surely they have a mechanism to do that?
Even more extreme is they could expel Biden from the party. Cant be party leader of a party you're not in.
> Couldn't the Democratic Party just change their bylaws though, if push comes to shove. Surely they have a mechanism to do that?
Again, in a conversation like this I don't think it's useful to talk about "the Democratic Party" as a single abstract thing that can make decisions. If I understand correctly the specific people who would make a decision like this are the party delegates at the convention, but again since Biden won all the primaries those delegates were specifically chosen to support him so it's unlikely that they'd go along with this sort of thing.
But there is an entity called "Democratic Party" isn't there? An official legal entity with a chairman and a board and all that stuff.
The procedure for how the Democratic candidate is elected is, presumably, described in the party's bylaws. They could in theory change this. Also they'll certainly have some mechanism for expelling people. If a member of the democratic party started saying egregious stuff or committing crimes they'd need some way of officially saying "No he's not one of us anymore".
Sure, but he's been in politics for decades and has lots of loyal allies in the party. Plus, Israel-Palestine is an extremely fractious issue on its own, I think that could fracture the party on its own in a lot of circumstances.
Think about how contentious Hillary vs Bernie was, and that was a primary with both the leadership and primary voters pretty solidly behind Hillary with no major issue Democrats disagreed on in the news. If Biden resists being replaced, it'd be a thousand times more chaotic than 2016 for the Dems.
That's not how politics work. You can't pressure the president out, especially when the primaries are over. What pressure can you even apply? It's not like he's going back into politics after being a president and 80+ years old.
Everyone around him has agency too. They aren't just going to shut up and say 'well he doesn't want to step down, that's it I guess'. There are lots of ways to pressure a figurehead into stepping down. Most likely just by increasing friction to the point where it will be clear to him that he won't be able to get anything done and his immediate peers will be disappointed or lose respect for him. If he fights through that, then the public discourse could turn really sour if the media turns on him too.
Being the president is still a socially constructed position, despite all of the institutional rules. If the people or your fellow politicians don't accept your rule, you're gonna have a bad time, within the confines of those institutional rules of course.
> There are lots of ways to pressure a figurehead into stepping down. ...increasing friction ... he won't be able to get anything done ... peers will be disappointed or lose respect for him... the public discourse could turn really sour...
If you're Biden and you want a second term, there is a simple strategy that he could use to defeat all of this: ignore it and continue to run.
Just because Biden is on his way out (of politics and life), doesn't mean there's nothing important to him.
Maybe he cares about his legacy. Maybe he cares about his family. If one man wants to stand in the way of an entire party establishment - Washington powerbrokers, corporations, special interest groups vested in a democrat rising to power - they *will* get him to fold & resign if they want.
This is how it usually goes, if it were to go: resign gracefully now, or we will make your life hell, and then you'll resign.
That's just ridiculous. Of course if the whole party would stand against him and would go out and openly say they want Biden to resign he would have little choice, but that's a naive fantasy scenario.
Dems might want him to leave, but they won't do anything that would reduce Biden's chances of winning if he's not resigning. The party establishment would never openly go to war against Biden and just give away the presidency to Trump.
You really think Dem establishment is some kind of gang that will on purpose throw any chance of winning just to send a message to Biden?
Biden is still 100x better than Trump so if he refuses to resign they will go with him and put all their money and power behind him.
> Of course if the whole party would stand against him and would go out and openly say they want Biden to resign he would have little choice
He would absolutely have the choice. He won the primary, and the nomination is his by right. He is legally entitled to it. The only thing he needs to do in response to naysayers is to say no, and it seems he intends to do so.
> Maybe he cares about his legacy.
Maybe he cares about being President for another term.
> If one man wants to stand in the way of an entire party establishment - Washington powerbrokers, corporations, special interest groups vested in a democrat rising to power - they *will* get him to fold & resign if they want.
That theory didn't seem to work for Trump in 2015-2016 when he commandeered the Republican party over the emphatic objection of the entire GOP establishment. I'm not sure why we should expect it to work for Biden now.
He already won the primary. He got the votes. He is *entitled* to be their nominee. And he and his family seem entirely uninterested in changing course. I think this is the time to be more specific about the "influence" that these "invisible levers" have. I don't see it.
This is [not quite the case](https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2024-Call-for-Convention.pdf): "All delegates to the National Convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them."
I don't think it's likely that the delegates all decide that that the "sentiments of those who elected them" are to vote for someone other than Biden, but they legally could.
Nobody has the power to replace Biden. Biden must replace himself.
The first step to solving the Biden is to admit we have a Biden.
The truth is, when you take refuge in Biden, the motivation is fear. We must each of us seek out the Biden in our heart and replace him. If you meet Biden on the road, you must slay him.
Above to all the Bidens, below to the crawling bugs, all have Biden-nature. Why is it that Trump has not?
The [1872 election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_United_States_presidential_election) set the precedent that votes for a corpse aren't valid and won't be counted.
I remember [this SSC post](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/6aISXaSxl7) from about 4 months ago asking about Biden’s faculties. I got into some heated discussion with others who were absolutely certain Biden was dementia ridden, when the evidence was poor at best.
There were a few slip ups with words where you really knew what he was trying to say (from a guy with a history of a stutter). Some tripping, walking slow, falling off a bike etc., stuff that happens to literally everyone that age all the time. I was not impressed at all by the evidence at the time other than to conclude that “he’s getting old, but obviously not senile”
Now is a different story. Given this was the debate, this was supposed to be his A-game. Him looking like he fell asleep (literally) while Trump rambled about Putin and terrorism (which is conveniently left out of most clips) was terrible. He could at least have had the energy to keep his head up and not look at his thumbs for 30 seconds straight. Even when he was looking up, it was completely slack jawed, (literally) it looked as if he was baffled to be on stage. It’s not that hard to shut your mouth, look serious, and repeat some simple talking points (Trumps a felon, Trump caused the Covid crisis, our administration has a lot of success) especially with the mic muting format. “We beat Medicare” after a completely incoherent ramble (truly no idea what he was trying to say) was even worse. Him getting mad at Trump calling his son a sucker (which may or may not have even happened) looked like my 5 year old nephew in the playground. Him engaging with Trump about golf was playing right into his hands, and he also lies about his golf handicap! (it was 6, then 8).
As in Biden tripping isn’t really indicative of anything. It’s to be expected occasionally considering the time he spends in public and didn’t indicate anything about his mental faculties.
Pointing it out in an attempt to show that he’s senile had the opposite effect on me. “If that’s the best evidence they’ve got, surely they’re cherry-picking to stretch the truth.”
> I was not impressed at all by the evidence at the time other than to conclude that “he’s getting old, but obviously not senile”
Were you under the impression that his mental faculties would stay constant over time?
Was it important to you only that he stay lucid through the election, or do you also think it is important to have a lucid president all the way through his term (at the end of which he would be 86 years old)?
It seems completely foreseeable that we'd end up where we are today. It is one of the mysteries of modern America that so many smart people appear not to have foreseen it.
Trump is 3 years younger than Biden. There’s enough variation in the rate of degradation in the elderly that a 3 year gap is not a significant consideration for me personally.
The argument being made at the time wasn’t that Biden was getting worse. It was that he was already senile. The evidence presented at the time was very weak in my opinion, and was all obviously extremely politically motivated. You either got clips from those against Biden editing things in the least favorable way possible or no clips from the pro-Biden camp. I looked up the context for the clips sent to me, and almost all were completely benign when seen with 10 seconds before and after the flub. One I remember was him mispronouncing the name of someone with a non-Anglo complicated Japanese name twice in a row and apologizing. This seemed normal in the speech. Divorced from the context though it looked like he couldn’t even manage to speak English then apologized for it. No surprise, because he wasn’t.
All I was really shown was that he flubbed his words occasionally and had some of the behaviors of a typical 80 year old.
I’m no supporter of Biden either, and did not vote for him. However the attempt to portray Biden as senile was clearly done using underhanded tactics, misrepresentation and there wasn’t public evidence of any real senility beyond the average early-80s adult.
With my current information I wouldn’t vote for Biden (I wasn’t beforehand) but if that was my intention I’d be seriously considering 4 years of lucidity as not guaranteed, or even unlikely. Depending on my hypothetical aversion to Trump in this scenario, I could see this debate being an important factor. We shall see if he manages to pull it together for a second debate. For all we know he was actually suffering from some temporary cold or sickness that degraded his performance.
I'm one of the people who said he had dementia at the time and I don't see what has changed so much as to change everyone's opinion so dramatically. It has been apparent for some time that he is severely cognitively impaired.
Maybe you are simply not as good in evaluating evidence as you thought you were?
Obviously, we shouldn't make diagnoses on people we don't meet personally and if we are not qualified to do that. But for experienced evaluators they could see the signs clearly and while they couldn't be 100% sure, they had very strong priors that this was going to happen.
I have seen people who gradually developed dementia and then died making their partners heart broken.
And then I remember reading the hospital discharge letter of my late father where the doctor had characterized him to be demented and I thought, no, that's clearly an exaggeration.
We are not able to assess our loved ones objectively and doctors usually refuse to treat their relatives. If you have any conflict of interest, you are biased. Period.
But distancing from this particular case, most people are averse to admitting how much functionality is lost due to old age. This whole covid fiasco happened because the society pretended that for those old and sick people who are near death bed dying from covid is a big deal. Only Sweden followed a sane policy that was well balanced between different risks.
And yet, all those who agreed with Tegnell were killers of old aunties or even worse.
We often are not able to assess loved one’s dementia because they aren’t in a position where they need to respond with coherent answers, or are emotionally invested in believing they are fine.
“Hey dad, how’s it going?” “Just fine.” A satisfactory response, and one that could easily be given with dementia. If they have a spouse taking care of them, it’s even more common to go unnoticed.
Biden can’t respond to people with easy answers. He doesn’t get to sit at home watching TV all day. The [speeches and remarks archive](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/) includes hundreds of public speeches he gives, not including the more informal public appearances and remarks. It’s quite easy to find a video for each one, so like many others, you’re free to look through the hundreds of hours and pick the worst cases.
If Biden has dementia, it should be trivial to find those examples from hundreds of public appearances. Why then, do the people arguing for his dementia have to send me a video of him walking slowly, or mispronouncing a Japanese name in a foolish-looking but completely understandable way, but cutting it in a way that he’s presented as demented?
I don’t understand the relevance of last two paragraphs.
“Talking points” are just topics that invite discussion or argument. Trump caused Covid, Biden wants to kill babies, Biden is inviting terrorists across the border, etc. None of those are literally true, but are hyperbole attacks on the opponent.
Trump was in charge when Covid started, and made many decisions regarding the response. People died as a result of those decisions. Whether that number is less or more than if other decisions were made, who’s to say? Biden can claim Trump caused the Covid crisis just like Trump can claim Biden caused inflation. Both are literally untrue or at least unsubstantiated, but in the presidential debate that really doesn’t matter.
Biden didn’t have to go up and make a sane rational argument, just stick to broad talking points that are prepared in advance.
I think it's still next to impossible to have a sane public discussion that tries to resolve who was at fault, or even what actually happened.
Obviously the disease itself wasn't under anyone's direct control (except perhaps the people trying to get around international treaties to outsource dangerous possibly illegal research).
People seem to have a very spotty memory when it comes to what happened when and who gets credit/responsibility for it. And that's before even touching more subjective questions like whether particular policies _were_ justified, whether they legitimately _seemed_ justified at the time (or shouldn't have), and whether the government had the authority to do half the things it did under either president.
Then, beyond the obviously strongly emotional political divide that's coloring people's perceptions and recollections, a lot of us are _still_ trying to recover from the massive economic and psychological effects of the last four years. So that's 2x more bias for free. I haven't seen any kind of consensus on how much we should blame on the fear of the general public vs the fear-laden policies of both administrations vs how much of the responsibility belongs to the state governments, or how each of those plus the media all influenced each other. It also seems that different geographic subcultures/legal-jurisdictions handled it differently and had results that don't correlate well with simple up/down questions about their behaviors.
Heck we're _still_ uncovering new things with regard to the origin of the virus, how much public health officials knew, and what they said privately that contradicted what they said publicly. I don't think the mix of opinion about how much was the disease itself and how much was policy will settle for years to come.
But to attempt to steer away the political side of things towards a view we maybe _can_ discuss, I think it's a mistake for either candidate to be focusing on how 'rona was handled as part of their campaign. The way you treat a pandemic on day 1 isn't going to be comparable to how you treat it on day 200, so any good campaign strategy is going to be on shaky ground when trying to _differentiate_ their candidate on pandemic performance. And as the administrations transitioned in early 2021, I don't recall any sudden large change, or difference between them on policy once you account for that. Just some tweaks around the edges of how things were messaged. Not to mention I think most people are absolutely sick of the topic. Anyone who wants people to listen should be talking about something else.
Well, I mean, it's one thing to say Trump handled the situation badly, maybe he did (or could have handled it with more tact), but to say "Trump caused the Covid crisis" is a little much, don't you think?
Not sure if OP meant it literally, but claiming it should have been one of Biden's talking points during the debate seems a little batty to me, and he would have rightly had his ass handed to him had he been aware enough to have made it.
And hell, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Trump did indeed cause the Covid crisis. But I'd like to see some evidence pointing to such a conclusion. An extreme blanket statement of this nature with absolutely nothing to show for it shouldn't be met with firm nods of agreement, even if one doesn't like the guy.
> Well, I mean, it's one thing to say Trump handled the situation badly, maybe he did (or could have handled it with more tact), but to say "Trump caused the Covid crisis" is a little much, don't you think?
I do not believe that this is the intended meaning, but to some people, the "Covid crisis" was entirely the response to the virus and the disease, and no crisis would have occurred even with the exact same circumstances around the virus spreading around the world, if governments had just responded without restrictions of any kind. To those people, it would be accurate to say that Trump caused the crisis, since he was the leader at the time when the government enacted its policies in mitigating the damage of the virus, and according to this view, executing on these policies were the entire cause of the crisis.
> imagine that tomorrow, Biden has completely recovered, he easily wins his next debate with Trump, and everyone agrees the most recent debate was just a fluke - in that world, he is both more likely to be nominated and more likely to win.
I know this is only a hypothetical scenario, but the next debate is scheduled for long *after* the nominating convention, and I have serious doubts it would even happen if Biden's poll numbers don't recover.
The point is, there are very few opportunites for him to recover prior to the convention and his problems as a candidate are not ones that get resolved with age, so I think this possibility should be weighted in some way.
The real crux is that poll numbers are generally looking at things like likely general election voters. But the way the primaries are done has a lot less to do with public opinion than the general. There's a lot of influence from how much power you have inside the party itself. Purely grassroots movements like we saw for Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders have a hard time moving the needle against someone who's been a major player in a core faction of the party. That in-house network of supporters is hard to see let alone evaluate from the outside.
> The last week hasn’t been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don’t seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don’t even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like “Trump is also bad” or pretending that nothing is really wrong.
The key insight is that these party elites are taking this position because they know they are stuck with Biden, and are making the calculation that standing by Biden when he is their nominee is a better play than denouncing Biden when he is their nominee. In other words, they have correctly concluded that "denouncing Biden to obtain a different nominee" is not an option, so they are choosing the best option that remains.
The party elites were all in on ejecting Biden in the immediate aftermath of the debate. But in the two or three days afterward, it became clear that Biden will not step aside, so now they have switched modes to gritting their teeth and defending him.
>So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t,
Kind of a motte-and-bailey here, with senile meaning either "totally incapable of daily functioning" or "somewhere in the process of gradually declining mental faculties." Accusations towards Biden tended to be along the lines of the former, hence the secret drug theory. The latter is obviously true of both candidates.
The Biden-doomers are plentiful right now, but I'm surprised no one talks about the 2024 primaries. Both candidates won by landslides. I dutifully voted for Nikki Haley and she dropped out before my vote was counted. If you want to speculate about how well hypothetical candidates would do, why not look at the performance of actual contenders?
But there were no contenders on the dem side. That's the problem. If we had an actual primary where we could have seen Biden debate last fall, he very well may not have gotten the nomination. Instead everyone sat out to wait their turn for 2028. And now we have this.
If there were no contenders a few months ago, what makes you think that they'll suddenly appear now?
My prediction is that if Biden gets struck by lightning or whatever, the DNC will simply award the nomination to Kamala Harris because the alternative--nominating somebody who wasn't in the primary--would be the equivalent of Jan 6 to their own process.
My suspicion is that plenty of people would have loved to run against him but were told by the DNC that if they did so they would not be supported by the party, and doom their careers.
Now most of those people could jump in as long as Biden steps down and the DNC says it's a free for all.
But yes, I agree Harris is the most likely replacement.
I doubt the DNC *told* them this. It's obvious.
Incumbents almost never receive credible primary opposition (it's true that incumbents are usually more popular than Biden is at this point, but that makes it even worse. A primary has candidates sniping at each other. There's always a risk that this weakens the eventual candidate. If that does end up being Biden then you've made things a lot worse).
As for Harris, she's the only obvious candidate. She might not be anyone's favorite, but everyone has a different favorite that they support for different reasons. Kamala is the only candidate who has good reasons for being the nominee outside of being your favorite.
It's odd how often people say this. There was an actual primary. Dean Phillips ran. He's a credible congressman with an impressive background. He ran on the theory that Biden was great in terms of policy but too old. Bill Ackman endorsed him. But the Democratic primary voters didn't vote for him. If he got more votes, Biden would probably have had to debate him. But he didn't. Democrats made this bed.
He was a total unknown, started his candidacy way too late, and received no support or coverage by the DNC or the media. It's not the same as someone with a national platform, like Newsom, challenging him. You're right it was technically a primary, but he basically tried to Michael Bloomberg it without the billions or name recognition.
Voters who thought Biden's age was disqualifying should have taken any port in a storm. Phillips offered a credible alternative. Don't blame "the DNC" or "the media." They would have followed the voters' cues as the first results started rolling in. Phillips' name was right there on the ballot. Primaries are staggered by state and he pounded the pavement in the states as they came up. The fault here lies entirely with Democratic voters. It's unseemly to try to deflect it.
By the time it got to my state, Dean Phillips didn't look like he stood a chance in hell. I voted for Nicki Haley instead because I figured she had a better chance at beating Trump, though even her chance looked dismal.
It's frustrating. Like in 2020, with Biden being so popular in the primary when I had many other choices I'd have preferred (like Sanders), or the same story in 2016. I don't know why Democrats keep making the choices that they do.
In the scenario where Biden decided immediately after the debate to not run, I feel like that plays out exactly like it has so far. You can't even hint at it until you're sure and you have some sort of plan in place. This is how they would have to act while they were putting the plan in place.
I guess *politics* is all plutonium at this point, basically.
Which makes me wonder, was there really a time back in some yonder past when people disagreed politely?
No.
>[These theories may be new, the dynamics are not. In fact, they go all the way back to America’s earliest years: In the late 1790s, Jedidiah Morse, the congregational minister in Charlestown, Mass., and a well-known author of geography textbooks, drew national attention by suggesting that a secret organization called the Bavarian Illuminati was at work “to root out and abolish Christianity, and overturn all civil government.”](https://time.com/5892376/early-american-conspiracy-theory/)
And
>Amid the political and media storms a dramatic conspiracy theory emerged. This held that Prime Minister Pitt and Queen Charlotte were colluding to seize power from the Prince of Wales so that they could rule in the king’s stead.
>[Though these reports were circulated (and probably paid for) by the government’s opponents, they were reported and reprinted in numerous newspapers. Such was the clamour against the queen and the prime minister that the Times newspaper bluntly accused the opposition party of slandering them both, in an attempt to force through a regency bill which favoured their supporter, the Prince of Wales](https://theconversation.com/how-conspiracy-theories-around-george-iiis-madness-and-queen-charlottes-scheming-took-hold-of-the-18th-century-british-press-226850)
And
>[During the hotly contested 1828 campaign, Jackson’s opponents, too, trafficked in conspiracy theories: In particular, administration men accused Jackson’s supporters of plotting a coup d’état if their candidate lost to President Adams. This “theory” held that pro-Jackson congressmen, upset about the national government’s attempts to impose a new tariff on imports, held “secret meetings” to discuss “the dissolution of the Union.” One pro-Jackson supporter “declared that he should not be astonished to see Gen. Jackson, if not elected, placed in the Presidential Chair, at the point of fifty thousand bayonets!!!” The thought of a national military hero such as Jackson leading a military rebellion had no basis in reality, but the conspiracy theory fit the tenor of the times.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-abounded-19th-century-american-politics-180971940/)
Just for a few. Go back further and you get into things like blood libel, witchhunts and stuff like that.
I'm pretty confident in saying "no." People have always fought over the best way to run a society.
Whether or not the public discourse was more civil is a different question, but imo people have always disagreed sharply (and violently) over politics.
It's really not. I've removed three comments in this thread so far. That's not a lot. And none of them had reports on them. If something annoys you, report it and bring it to our attention.
I’ve been suggesting it for over a year here on Reddit and was told to STFU and that I must be a militant MAGA. I’m not all that smart, it was just so obvious that Biden’s handlers weren’t going to be able to keep a lid on his plainly apparent decline the way they did during the Covid election.
Yeah, the problem was MAGA were the people posting the videos etc. and they really were edited. They made a huge deal over things that were not really things, like tripping or walking slowly, but then when you actually watched Biden, he seemed old but totally with it.
I'm not sure if I was in denial or in a bubble or if there really wasn't enough evidence yet. It's probably always hard to see if your opponent's attacks on your side are true when your opponent is a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Thing is, if you were watching without the least bit of packaging or commentary, you might have even noticed a very very old man, with extraordinarily weird pacing and speech patterns seeming to wobble through his lauded State Of The Union address.
He's always had weird pacing and speech patterns, to be fair. But there's also a difference between old and slowing (been obvious) and getting totally lost like he did during the debate a few times.
> But there's also a difference between old and slowing (been obvious) and getting totally lost like he did during the debate a few times.
The latter is what age-related slowing progresses into. And the progression will continue from here.
Maybe I'm biased here because I've watched one of my grandparents go through that same tragic descent into the abyss. I figured most people have had that experience, but perhaps not. It seemed plain as day to me that this is what the future held for Biden as early as the 2020 primary debates.
Of course, back then we all assumed he'd be a one-term president, because who would be so crazy to run again at that age and capacity -- and if he did, what voters would be so crazy as to enable him?
Of course, even before that, one of the reasons Obama selected him as VP was that he was too old to harbor his own presidential ambitions.
I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere.
I started getting actually worried when reading this TIME interview:
https://time.com/6984968/joe-biden-transcript-2024-interview/
Also worth noting that he is already talking about having a cold there. That was early *June*, is this a very long cold? Are they two different colds? Is it just an excuse?
They have flushed their credibility. There is no point in analyzing what they say because it is simply, literally, un-believable. They’ve been exposed and they are so arrogant that they do not care. There is nothing they will not say to convince you that your own eyes and ears are lying to you. And this shamelessness and power-craving will cost the country in the form of a Trump election win.
The right is always going to edit clips to exaggerate their point, and the left is always going to find ways to excuse and deny until it's undeniable. The question isn't "as someone on the left, can I find a way to excuse this which convinces me?", it's "Am I having to work to make excuses in the first place?". Or better yet, let go of your attachment to the left (even if they happen to be right more often, in your view) and ask "Is the left having to work to make excuses here?". You don't have to look at any of the clips on the object level to know whether it's true or not. You can step back to the 10,000 foot view and notice which side has been laughing at the other for years, and which side has been uncomfortably making excuses and convincing themselves that their inside view is the best anyone can do.
The reason this works is that you're using the entire collection of people who don't want a thing to be true to crowd source your fact checking. I used to caricature the situation with Biden as president as "Weekend at Bernies", not because I thought it was necessarily true but because it's funny and kinda seems to fit. And I noticed that none of the left leaning people that I said this to -- who read all the stuff the best left leaning minds have to say on this topic -- ever laughed at me for saying something dumb. And never explained that I was actually way of base and that Biden is unusually with it. Or even pushed back at all, the way they'd do on other things when they had a respectable case to be made.
I'm sure if someone were to come at them pushing the right wing idea that "Biden needs to step down and you need to agree!", they would have found all sorts of arguments with which to push back. But that's not the measure of actual belief.
Well, obviously. Most people aren't in denial on purpose. I did look at some of the clips MAGA posted and their context and I didn't see real evidence. I think I probably did err at taking the word of the people surrounding Biden because it now seems like they were covering it up, so lesson learned there I guess. (It's not that I thought they wouldn't lie in principle, I just didn't believe they were lying.)
I still haven't seen a clip that looks as bad as that debate did, come to think of it.
You say "Well, obviously", but then go right back to saying things like "I did look at some of the clips" and "I still haven't seen a clip that...". My whole point is that this is that by choosing this level of analysis you are missing the forest for what is at risk of being just the picture of trees you want to believe in.
You can't see past your ideological barriers by consulting your own inside view, and refraining from saying "I hereby intentionally deny the truth!" is not enough. You have to take a step back and notice when the other side is *genuinely* laughing at you, and when your friends are showing signs of cognitive dissonance. You have to recognize that whether your friends are engaged in efforts to discredit apparent evidence is *more important* than whether you personally find their arguments valid.
By watching the videos and saying things like "I didn't see any real evidence" as a statement about reality rather than a statement about yourself, you're indulging in the self-flattering idea that you're not too ideologically blinded to see the evidence if it's there. If you're aware of this, and you're out-predicting everyone, then have at it; correctness is a valid defense against accusations of arrogance. If you find yourself blindsided, out-predicted, and wondering if maybe you were in denial, then the way out is to *stop* watching the videos, *stop* listening to the content of people's speech, *stop* listening to your own ideas of whether dishonest partisan hacks are "lying", and watch the *processes* which people are engaging in when they watch the videos. Watch it on mute. Do they look like they're winning? Do they look like they're hurting? Excusing? Acting? Putting on a poker face? That's how you find what people sense to be true as separate from what they want you to believe (that they believe).
I honestly think I'm better than most at seeing the cognitive dissonance on my side. I grew up in Orthodox Judaism and it used to drive me crazy when I saw my friends doing that.
"I didn't see any real evidence" could be a statement about me OR about the "evidence." You're assuming I saw clips that should have convinced me, yet you don't know that to be the case. I just went looking now and I can find one clip that looks like the episodes during the debate ("Joe Biden appears to forget the word 'Hamas' during key speech") but I don't recall having seen that before now.
I did see a lot of clips like him tripping on stairs or not being able to put his jacket on by himself on a windy tarmac or just kind of standing there while younger people danced that the right waved around as evidence of dementia, but I don't see how an impartial observer could be convinced of those.
When you read the fable of the boy who cried wolf, do you criticize the townspeople for not getting over their biases and believing the boy when he was actually telling the truth?
> The reason this works is that you're using the entire collection of people who don't want a thing to be true to crowd source your fact checking.
This is one of those points that I wish I didn't find so obvious, since it's befuddling to me that almost no one seems to follow it. I'm a Biden supporter who voted against Trump twice (I'll probably vote for Biden again this time); given that, I know for a fact that I'm hopelessly biased in Biden's favor and cannot be counted on to judge his mental faculties accurately or objectively. I will always "err" ("err" in quotes, since it's actually intentional, just subconsciously intentional) in ways to paint a rosy picture, even when I'm consciously actively trying to get aas accurate a view as possible. Now, Biden's haters are no less biased than me, but at the very least, I can mostly count on their biases being in the opposite direction as mine, and so when they say something that paints Biden in a bad light, especially if it goes directly counter to my biases, my impulse is to take that *more* seriously, not less and to encourage *more* of those criticisms, not less. That way, I can use them to triangulate at the truth, which will always be beyond the grasp of my hopelessly biased judgment when it comes to Biden.
The inside view matters, of course, but when it comes to things as heated as politics in the USA in 2024 right now, I don't know that anyone has enough maturity to be trusted to have anything more than a hopelessly biased perspective in favor of whatever candidate/policies/side they happen to like. Even after all my efforts to take in the right wing attacks on Biden's age, I was *still* surprised by what I saw last Thursday - the best I can say in my favor is that I was less surprised than what I perceive most other Democrats as being, since I was fully expecting his poor mental faculties to be on display, just not to be basically the ONLY story of the debate - which tells me that my current level of effort of listening to right-wing criticism of Biden and Dems in general is not enough and ought to be recalibrated.
All you have to do is watch a speech of his from 30+ years ago and compare it to any speech today. The decline is obvious. I've made this comment (with supportive links) before and it's usually downvoted to hell. I suspect there are a lot of bots working for Dems on reddit.
You don’t have to go back 30 years. There’s a clip circulating on twitter of a Biden Debate performance from 2019 vs 2024. The difference is staggering. And it’s not “cheap fake” editing. Biden today could not begin to affect the mental acuity of the Biden from just five years ago. Almost as if having one of the most demanding jobs in the world that has been known to upwardly age fifty year olds shouldn’t be given to an obviously declining and elderly over *Eighty* year old.
Again, there's a difference between "decline" and actual incompetence. EVERYBODY declines between 51 and 81, or even 41 and 71. That doesn't mean that everybody at that age would have the same kind of episodes he had during the debate.
Even the most strident supporters have surely suggested it behind closed doors.
For the record I like a lot about him. It’s just sad to see an old man struggle.
> They [Certain prediction markets] usually overestimate Republicans’ chances, partly because Democrats’ opposition to online political betting has turned the pool of online political bettors disproportionately red
I don't think this is even a little true
I made a bunch of easy money last election betting that Biden would win, after the races were all called, because enough people will still putting money on the other side. There are a solid chunk of utterly deluded people out there.
Predictiit especially, though not sure how to find a good article and trades only go back 30 days for a screenshot. But you could bet against trump winning hawaii even.
I’m on predictit quite a bit too, and while I wouldn’t say there’s a consistent or significant R bias, I agree there is a subset of people who are clearly there to bet on their team (usually R) and you can absolutely exploit that fact.
Looking at predictit, the difference between a woman being elected president in 2024 and Kamala Harris elected president in 2024 is 9 cents, which makes no sense to me. Surely these two must be the same thing, or at least very similar. There simply must be an opportunity for arbitrage, considering I highly doubt the 9 cent difference is the result of Whitmer.
Yeah that's another example - but part of predictit being bad is fees, so I'd have to check the math but I don't think you can actually make money on less than a 10 cent spread.
Bias has also gone down as it got more popular, real money was early, but some is still there.
Haley is trading around 3-4 cents so that’s some of the difference. The rest is definitely an opportunity. The markets unsurprisingly have been wild the past few days so gaps like that are bound to emerge in lightly traded markets.
A thread I made about it at the time (November 19, 2020):
[Betting markets currently think Trump has around a 15% chance of being the next president and are still accessible to new participants](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/jx2hqv/betting_markets_currently_think_trump_has_around/)
It wasn't 100% certain that Biden would be president after the races were called. You think you collected free money. I think the market was correctly pricing the risk of Trump stealing the election.
How much money are we talking these markets had roughly 1/100th liquidity of pre election markets.
The illiquidity leads to inefficiency. It’s much easier to make money on 4th league Azerbaijani soccer than the English premier league.
It seems true that prediction markets overrate Republicans (they had Trump at 40% in 2020 and then above 10% after the election!) and wishful thinking on part of the participants in the market seems like a plausible explanation.
I've read a few times that truth social tends to talk about prediction markets more than the average guy out there, that, if true, could skew things by itself.
Would be nice if someone could confirm since I'm not really keen on using that site.
I think it leans gray, as in gray tribe, as in the kind of people who hang out here. Because what kind of nerds would want to jump through hoops to bet specifically on politics? Tech bros, mostly libertarians.
I believe it was popularized by Scott's essay ["I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/), which describes it briefly in section IV. This was a very influential post during SSC's 2014-era boom, where a lot of other Rationalist lingo spread from (like the concepts of ["Moloch"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) and [motte-and-baipey arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/).)
Then go complain to Scott. The subreddit rules are clear.
> When making a claim that isn't outright obvious, you should proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
I can't make heads or tails of what you're saying.
Are you trying to say that because Scott violated the rules of this subreddit in his blog post, anyone pointing that out should... IDK what?
You can't possibly be saying that the subreddit rules allow for requiring proofs of negatives if a quote from off-sub makes a wild assertion without evidence?
For some reason I didn't get a notification of your response.
What I mean is that since Scott posted outside of the subreddit, he is obviously not bound by the rules of the subreddit. I agree he ought to have backed that claim up better.
But for the people making claims in *this* location, we should follow the rules.
> You can't possibly be saying that the subreddit rules allow for requiring proofs of negatives if a quote from off-sub makes a wild assertion without evidence?
Mostly because I don't think it's productive to meet with . Where's the value in that? If you want to convince others of your claim, back it up. That's why the rule exists. Scott obviously didn't consider it a wild claim.
As of November 13th, 2020 (literally a week after the election) Betfair had an 8% chance of Trump winning - [source](https://theconversation.com/joe-biden-how-betting-markets-foresaw-the-result-of-the-2020-us-election-150095). I couldn't find a way to look at Polymatket odds, but there was a [separate market](https://polymarket.com/event/will-donald-trump-be-inaugurated-for-his-second-term-as-president-of-the-usa-on-inauguration-day-january-20th-2021?tid=1719924576136) created to determine if Trump would be inaugurated, not just winning, that was created a week after the election that managed to soak up $30M of bets.
[Here's some reddit comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/sportsbook/comments/jrp8fr/betting_on_biden_post_election/) with betting odds 5 days after the election in various markets that are objectively insane.
How does January 6th tie in to the view that the 8% (for example) was wrong? Was it not a real threat to who would wind up being sworn in? Could a more extreme version not have happened?
I'm not sure you can just in hindsight say that all of the markets were wrong.
I think it’s a bit too late for that. The debate was an absolute disaster in showing Biden’s ability to speak in a coherent and clear manner. But we don’t what the effects would be on polling. There is so much election machinery and infrastructure on Biden that makes difficult to switch with just 5 months left. We also have no idea how other candidates could perform against Trump. Biden is only guy who have defeated Trump. People thought Ron DeSantis had a real chance against Trump, which is now absurd to think about.
Until we see accurate and consistent polling that Biden’s polling numbers have dropped significantly, I still support Biden in the race.
So, now that literally everyone has said he's too old and everyone said he should quit, everything *he* does looks good. The bar is beneath the floor. Also, he gets some "underdog advantage" which Trump has been hogging through the last three election cycles. I expect to see him Early 2000s Pete Townshend this with the help of the best PR firms and millions of dollars of democrat money and the cynical media machine and AIPAC on his side.
'This candidate has a bad reputation, therefore anything he does will look good in comparison to that reputation and it's actually an asset for him' is the most galaxy-brained thing I've heard this month.
If you assume that voters are rational, then you'll never be able to explain Trump's continuing base of support. If you assume voters are irrational, then it's perfectly logical to look at irrational justifications.
The most consistent theory of voting is identity based votes where they vote for the candidates that hit the most key works and actions to do the “secret handshake” and identify with your in-group.
For example the Evangelical voters vote for the candidate which most strongly matches their identity, in this election Trump
There's nothing irrational about supporting Trump if you think he's more aligned with how you'd like the country to be governed and you think the benefit of potentially getting a President aligned with your preferences outweighs the greater risk that he'll lose compared with other Republican candidates who aren't aligned with your preferences.
Biden has in my estimation 5-10% chance of winning — his performance at the debate was a national humiliation, and he’ll have more senior moments. Furthermore, democrats down the ballot will get demolished. If Biden runs it will be among the worst landslides in history.
This discourse seems to be missing a key element of political analysis. Namely, demographics. The democrats are dependent on the black vote. Trump has been gaining ground with blacks. And black people really don’t like it when they’re passed over for jobs because they’re black.
From an objective standpoint, Kamala is the most qualified candidate to replace Biden. She is VP. Her primary job is to replace a dying Biden. To skip over her is to admit that it was a mistake to pick her as VP, and/or that the Biden administration has failed. Only Kamala can run as a continuation of Biden’s administration. The democrats as a party need to run on Biden’s accomplishments, and Kamala is best positioned to do so.
Now, the argument against her is that she’s unelectable, or less likely to win than other candidates. I question if this is indeed true later on, but let’s imagine it is true. Even if you can convince black Americans that Newsom is more likely to beat Trump, the implication is that it’s because America is racist against blacks.
Now, you may think this doesn’t make sense. Michelle Obama, who has always said she does not want to run, is hugely popular. And obviously, Barack is still the most popular Democrat.
However, after Hilary lost in 2016, one key narrative was that “America just isn’t ready for a woman president.” That’s why Biden, already an old man, was the 2020 nominee. The democrats sacrificed their values of social equality to pick a normal white man to beat Trump.
Biden awkwardly promised to pick a woman VP, and a black woman Supreme Court justice, not just because of wokeness and George Floyd, but in order to counteract the perception that he himself was benefiting from white male privilege due to the expectation of racism and sexism in the electorate.
When the case against Kamala and for Newsom or Whitmer is made, never is it claimed that the white candidates are more qualified than Kamala. Frankly, it’s not a plausible argument. Except to the extent that electability is a qualification.
And on the point of electability, it’s been well-demonstrated that mid-western whites underperform with black voters. See Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Blacks see these figures as mediocre; that they are graded on a much more favorable curve than blacks (or Asian or Hispanics). Whitmer is a textbook mediocre midwesterner.
Newsom, a coastal elite, is sharp, handsome, articulate. Compared to the midwesterners, at least he represents American excellence. However, he also represents the smarmy sociopathic hypocritical politics that Trump is purpose-built to destroy. Newsom is the candidate of mask mandates for thee but not for me.
While Newsom is in general more electable than Kamala, specifically against Trump, Newsom is a bad matchup. The mediocre midwesterners would fare better, because they represent decency in contrast to Trump’s depravity.
Head to head with Trump the felon, Kamala the prosecutor fares well. Remember, part of why she underperformed in the 2020 primary was her history as a tough-on-crime prosecutor.
Summing up, Democrats should back Kamala because she’s actually their best shot. And still, she will be an underdog. But so will the others.
What little actual evidence exists (polling, predictions markets, approval rating) suggests that other Democrats would have a better chance than Kamala against Trump.
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/f99e148f-4051-40f9-b0c6-22eb10289854_1500x1091.png That’s the polling that the Biden campaign has released. Kamala is in pole position. The prediction market data is currently weak. While prediction markets in general are high-signal, the presidential markets are heavily biased by people backing their preferred candidate. On favorability polling, all of those numbers are subject to big change as the candidates get a huge influx of national media. Kamala has been intentionally kept behind the scenes, only to be brought out in public to talk about abortion. Some insiders have suggested that Biden has been intentionally hiding Kamala — if she had been more visible in 2021-23, there would have been overwhelming pressure on Biden to make way for her in 2024. See this Nate Silver tweet: https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1807617167803748545
I saw that in the OP, but it's the only post-debate poll we have, it's four days old now, and the sample size was relatively small. Prediction markets and approval ratings tell a different story.
What we really need is some good polling of undecided voters in swing states on a ballot that includes minor candidates. That's what's actually in play here.
I think prediction markets are going to have a hard time calling this one. Any would-be replacement may look better in a debate if you could just substitute a better looking person for that one aspect. However they'd be playing from behind in terms of time to setup their campaign apparatus, and getting a message together. There'd likely be more than one jumping in if Biden stepped out, and anyone challenging the incumbent will look like a traitor to half of the party insiders and donors.
That means their _actual_ chances, both in challenging Biden and winning the general, are going to be really hard to foresee. To get the kind of victory people _imagine_ they would, the new candidate would need to consolidate or find good replacements for basically everything Biden has accumulated, and then also have good judgement in choosing and sufficient charisma in presenting the topics they focus on during the campaign.
PredictIt seems to think that Biden stepping down is [likely](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7057/Who-will-win-the-2024-Democratic-presidential-nomination), for some reason. [Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11379/2024-democrat-nominee-for-us-prez/) is less sure, but seems to be changing fast.
Such an overreaction. The incumbent typically loses the first debate. The polls shift for a bit, then they shift back. The first debate has never mattered much, and this one was the earliest ever.
The Biden campaign just needs to circle the wagons and change the topic. Have Obama call his people and tell them to shut the fuck up and get on board. Then, you go right back to reminding America who Trump is, what he did and what he'll do if elected again.
It is incredibly galling to frame the issue as Biden losing the debate rather than him demonstrating massive cognitive decline that will obviously get progressively worse.
Even if Biden's debate performance is representative rather than merely a fluke, Trump as president would be worse. Biden is in fact president right now, and the country is puttering along well enough as far as I see it, however demented he might seem to be at present. So his current level of dementia is at least clearly insufficient to majorly fuck things up in the way that Trump might were he to regain the presidency. And Biden's dementia might get worse over the course of a second term but I doubt it could worsen enough to create problems for the nation any more serious than those that would be created by Trump at least before Biden was 25thd or resigned or died in office anyway, all three outcomes of which would be preferable to a second Trump term.
> Even if Biden's debate performance is representative rather than merely a fluke, Trump as president would be worse.
The question isn't whether he can govern, but whether he can *win.*
A lot of the electorate sees this cycle as two equally bad choices. I don't happen to agree with that and my thinking is more in line with yours, but the only people who really matter are undecided voters in swing states. If they move away from Biden, he's sunk, and I don't think the "Trump is worse" approach is proving very persuasive to them after that debate performance.
All of this may be true, but the question isn't whether or not it's true, the question is whether or not you can convince enough voters in enough swing states that it's true. I'm skeptical of this possibility.
he still seems a lot smarter than the other guy, who wants to do things like curtail the rights of my friends and family. also political power doesnt disappear as you get senile, and political power is why he is in power and gets (some) stuff done.
> smarter than the other guy
*Better* than. As one famous person said, I would vote for a jar of blue fluid with Biden's severed head in it over Trump.
But let's not turn our eyes from elephants in the room. It's not even just that debate. He drops plenty of half-legible sentences everywhere. Even his lauded state of the Union was weak, horribly paced, etc. Watch the debate between him and Ryan in 2012, and yes Biden is clearly a mere shadow of his former self, and in major mental decline.
I think it's clear that *if it were anyone other than Trump* we would shake our heads at the very notion of that Biden fella standing in the room making decisions when things are moving faster than kids at a BCG consult. Or representing the USA among leaders of foreign countries. Or so much as being the CEO of a small cap firm we have money in.
Edit: Also, I'm pretty sure DeSantis is smarter than either of them. Smarter than Trump by 12-15 IQ points -- and that makes him *worse* IMO.
> I think it's clear that *if it were anyone other than Trump* we would shake our heads at the very notion...
> Edit: Also, I'm pretty sure DeSantis is smarter than either of them. Smarter than Trump by 12-15 IQ points -- and that makes him *worse* IMO.
Emphasis in the original. Belied by your own edit.
>The Biden campaign just needs to circle the wagons and change the topic. Have Obama call his people and tell them to shut the fuck up and get on board.
This has already happened, and Biden has lost ground in the polls. He probably needs to be up 3% nationally to be a coin flip to win due to Electoral College effects. He's closer to trailing by 3% nationally.
The optimal reaction very much depends on whether you are winning or losing. Biden is currently losing. Circling the wagons can keep current Biden voters in line, but it doesn't do anything to attract new support.
> The Biden campaign just needs to circle the wagons and change the topic.
They have been trying to 'circle the wagons and change the topic' on the question of his age since before the primaries started. It worked until it didn't: it is not a one-time problem that you can finish dealing with and move on, it is a fight that is going to have to be refought each and every time Biden looks old in public.
>Then, you go right back to reminding America who Trump is, what he did and what he'll do if elected again.
We knew who Trump was in 2016. That didn't stop candidate quality from mattering in the race against him then, and it won't stop it from mattering now.
I think this take leaves out some important points.
The next and only remaining debate is scheduled for September 10th, which is more than two months away. If Biden's poll numbers haven't recovered by then, it's hard for me to imagine Trump showing up.
Trump didn't feel the need to debate any of his primary opponents and there would be no advantage to him in giving Biden a chance to redeem himself. If Biden stays in, I think there's a good chance the first debate will be the only one.
Second, Biden didn't just lose; he seemed incoherent at times.
Third, it was entirely plausible to believe Obama just had a bad night in 2012, because he'd been out on the campaign trail having plenty of unscripted conversations and sitting for interviews. There have been widespread doubts about Biden's capacity for months, yet he hasn't done any interviews and his appearances are always on a teleprompter, so when he failed to rise to the moment, it confirmed voters' fears.
Finally, even if we accept the Obama example as a constructive comparison, the analogy is diminished by the post-debate response. In the days following Obama's poor debate performance against Romney, he went directly to the people. He sat down for a national [interview on ABC](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-vows-determined-performance-debate/story?id=17442090) and [called in to a nationally syndicated radio show](https://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2012/10/10/barack-obama-tom-joyner-mitt-romney-debate-election-2012/1624549/) to address the doubts.
Biden tried to show his vigor at a rally the following day, but it was again on the teleprompter. He hasn't done any unscripted events yet and his team has seemed intent on not allowing the voters to see any of those for months. I do think it's still possible for him to turn this around, but the way to do it is not by hiding.
Does that *really* work in any reasonable estimation? Do people even need to be reminded who Trump is?
Biden needs to have humility and step out gracefully, make way. A much younger candidate - *not* Harris - would electrify the race - similar to what Obama brought when he first ran.
Yes. Clearly they do. And they will be subjected to a huge media campaign to make sure they do.
And replacing Biden isn't as easy as just swapping him out with Whitmer or Newsom and continuing. It's way too late for a new candidate to put together an entire funding apparatus now. They don't just take over the Biden-Harris campaign money. All those people on the ground work for Joe.
And you can't have Biden step down and not have Harris slot in as the candidate without facing all kinds of questions about the legitimacy of both. That's what you *have* to avoid.
FWIW Ezra Klein has been the most prominent voice on the left talking about replacing Biden and was doing so way, way before the debate.
He’s actually addressed all of the points you’re making (Harris, fundraising, the mechanics, etc.) pretty throughly.
I don’t think it’s a horse race thing, people in the Democratic Party are reacting to polling numbers and prior to the debate the majority of Americans, including Dems, thought he’s too old for a second term.
You should check out Ezra Klein’s latest op-ed if you’re curious.
All fair points. It's just so frustrating to see this all play out; how on earth are Democrats risking handing someone like Trump a second term. He should be a walkover...
There's always a risk of losing an election, no matter the candidate. Would Newsom beat Trump? You sure? The slick California liberal? Whitmer? We all saw how America reacted to a woman at the top of the ticket in 2016.
I'll say again, this is an overreaction that feeds the horse-race reporting. It looked like Trump was done in May, now he's not. That drives the media in an election year.
The expectation is not for democrats to fix anything.
The expectation is for them to present a candidate that people want to vote for. It's an incredibly low bar to clear, and they are failing spectacularly. The purpose of the entire election is to prevent Trump from having a second term and they are going with a candidate that might very well not survive another 4 years.
I’m not sure you can replace Harris, she’s the only politician the public has had a say in electing.
You can’t say it’s the election to save democracy if you’re putting up Gavin Newsom, parachuted in by party apparatchiks rather than the person who was on the ticket.
> The incumbent typically loses the first debate.
People aren't upset because Biden recapitulated Obama's poor performance in his first debate against Romney. They're upset because he was frequently incoherent and visibly incapacitated by age. "Lost the debate" is an understatement.
This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I've always seen the American political system, elections and what's labelled as a democracy to be nothing more than a distraction and appeasement of the lower classes, while the elite continue running the country uninterrupted. Like a petty sports rivalry to get people invested in it and feel like they're somehow involved.
Honestly, really consider if the president does have much power. People were panicking and thinking the US will change drastically when Trump became president. But nothing of significance changed, any significant promises that we're diverging from the status quo have been broken, nothing more than part of the show that is the election cycle. Then look at when Biden and the left gained power they desperately wanted, did they accomplish anything of note? Maybe free healthcare (not that hard to accomplish when most developed countries have done it)? Nope.
Kind of reminds me of my childhood where school presidents in school making so many big promises, then when they take the role they achieve absolutely nothing because the people that actually run the school silently sit them down and tell them, "sorry billy we can't do that". I would guess the actual people with power steering the country to be the corporations , lobbies and top individuals in the military complex, cia and other secretive government agencies
Even if the president did have much power, is it much of a democracy when your input on the country is just between 2 candidates/parties. Game theory would suggest that it would yield little choice as both will be centrists, where the difference might not be meaningful
if America actually cared about meaningful elections and giving their citizens a real voice in choosing the direction of the country, they would replace the first past the post voting system with any of the other representative or at least non devolving to bipartisanship systems. But if you're like me and think the elections are nothing more than entertainment for the masses (like giving a child a game controller that's not connected to the playstation while you play your game type of entertainment) you'd be silly to expect a change
I'd bet the people at the top of cia, military and other non elected officials have more influence in what's done overseas. They keep the president informed, but I don't think Biden or Trump is making much in the way of significant decision making there. Foreign policy is so steady across different presidents, despite election promises to the contrary.
Bush got us into Iraq. No one but he would have done that. He was massively influenced by Cheney, but that was his choice. Biden got us out. These are huge significant changes that cost trillions of dollars and directly influence the lives of millions of people (not Americans, so we don't care very much). I mostly vote for a President on their willingness to keep us out of wars.
Biden, before the invasion, was very outspoken for getting the US in to Iraq. He also voted for it.
I think the result wouldn't have been any different if you replaced Bush with Biden at the time. And it was inevitable that troops would get pulled out of an invasion after installing an Iraqi government that was beneficial to America, and the dust settles a little, regardless of who is president. Most wars end at some point.
I wouldn't give Biden much credit for getting you out, and he was just as likely to get you in it.
The choice in president likely isn't apocalyptic or doing anything irreversible. But it does have major impact.
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/the-positive-case-for-joe-biden
That post has some fairly concrete differences between Trump and Biden. Choice in president does change where billions, even trillions of dollars get allocated to.
Nobody has the power to replace Biden. Only Biden can recuse himself. It doesn’t look like he will.
People may put various kinds of pressure on him.
Who will do what now? Get real.
His family, Obama, the DNC, his physician and the cabinet could all put pressure on him.
Board of editors of the NYT already wrote an article suggesting he step aside. Big donors have a say too. There are lots of people who can let the president know that they don't approve. Whether he will listen is another matter, but acting like no one else can or will place pressure on him is unrealistic.
> Whether he will listen is another matter I would argue that this is the central matter, and the other matters are peripheral.
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The voters, mainly.
The vote counters of course
His family and friends could look at this Astral Codex Ten post, think to themselves "Defeating Trump is extremely important and Biden isn't the best candidate to do so", then ask Biden to withdrawal. It doesn't seem like they will do so, but they could.
We should ask the prediction markets what they think about this scenario.
But will we do that? How can we know?
Prediction market?
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Removed low effort comment.
"Defeating Trump is extremely important and Biden isn't the best candidate to do so" all the evidence points otherwise
Evidence points to defeating Trump isn't important, or that Biden is in fact the best candidate?
Sorry. unless things have changed VERY recently, the evidence points that biden is still the best one to beat trump again.
Scott's whole post is about people disagreeing on prediction markets and personally I agree with them. You should either bet up Biden or bet down the alternatives
Remember that betting things like this is a culturally weird move that's highly specific to this SSC/LW crowd. Anyone who doesn't do it isn't necessarily not saying something less strongly than someone who does. It hasn't caught on enough to be more than a *cultural* symbol thus far. You might be saying "Signal your membership in our club. Then you and I will go do secret handshakes and have a deeper conversation on this matter." That's also a kind of legit, as far as it goes.... But it isn't what it isn't.
>Remember that betting things like this is a culturally weird move that's highly specific to this SSC/LW crowd. I know, but it's one of the things about us that's actually better than everyone else, not just a quirk like many things of the things that make us different. I'm not trying to signal membership in the club. I am saying, if it's true that Biden is the best choice like the guy I replied to claimed, there's free money for him by either betting up Biden or betting down the other options. If he's confident in his beliefs, he should be willing to put money on it. At the very least, play money on Manifold. And if he's not confident, he should add that disclaimer. Previously I had my Manifold bets on Biden doing well, then I ditched that after seeing the debate. Right now I'm not confident about what will happen, just what I want to happen, and I expect the current markets know better than I do.
> unless things have changed VERY recently The *entire point* of the linked post is that Biden's debate performance was a very recent change of sufficient magnitude to change polling and prediction markets which try to measure his chances for victory.
Not anymore, after that incident
Biden can be threatened with the 25th.
He would only be replaced during this term. Would not mean anything for who's on the ticket.
But it will end his presidency, and if it happens his family will be ostracized from the Democratic Party. If he runs and loses the same thing will happen. They seem to be making it so the best endgame for the Biden family is that they step aside without making a fuss so that they can salvage what remains of their name.
If they do a coup to oust him, the delegates that pledged to vote for him, would still vote for him.
How? Section 4: > Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Good so far. > Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office All Biden has to do is say "Nah, I'm good" and he's back in office. At this point he can be removed again, but it requires some time and, finally, it goes to the House and Senate and that requires a 2/3 majority in both to remove him. That's a higher bar than impeachment.
80% of the *public* wants Biden replaced. There will be no problem getting Congress to go along.
The GOP might vote "no" if they think it will be easier to beat him rather than TBD Democrat in November.
And lose the opportunity to humiliate Biden?
I think the calculation of whether or not he's easier to beat is more important, plus the longer he stays around, the longer they can "humiliate" him. But, you could be right. We are definitely in ucharted territory here.
That's not how politics works. If his party wants to pressure him out, they can.
If the party tried to pressure him out and he didn't want to go, it would probably fracture the party and guarantee Trump the election. They can and should try to persuade him to drop out behind closed doors though.
It would only fracture the party if the party itself was divided on getting rid of him. He alone can't cause a fracture if the democrat party machine aligns on getting rid of him.
"The party itself" isn't really a thing that can make decisions. Maybe if every convention delegate agreed on it, but since Biden won all the primaries the convention delegates are all people specifically chosen because they support him so it doesn't seem likely they'll go along with it. The whole point of the modern primary system is to prevent there from being a "party machine" that can overrule the voters on who the candidate should be. Most people thought this was a good thing since it's more democratic, but we're seeing there are downsides. (We saw something similar with Trump: the party establishment hated him but he won the primaries so there was nothing they could do to stop him and now he owns the Republican party.)
> The whole point of the modern primary system is to prevent there from being a "party machine" that can overrule the voters on who the candidate should be. Couldn't the Democratic Party just change their bylaws though, if push comes to shove. Surely they have a mechanism to do that? Even more extreme is they could expel Biden from the party. Cant be party leader of a party you're not in.
> Couldn't the Democratic Party just change their bylaws though, if push comes to shove. Surely they have a mechanism to do that? Again, in a conversation like this I don't think it's useful to talk about "the Democratic Party" as a single abstract thing that can make decisions. If I understand correctly the specific people who would make a decision like this are the party delegates at the convention, but again since Biden won all the primaries those delegates were specifically chosen to support him so it's unlikely that they'd go along with this sort of thing.
But there is an entity called "Democratic Party" isn't there? An official legal entity with a chairman and a board and all that stuff. The procedure for how the Democratic candidate is elected is, presumably, described in the party's bylaws. They could in theory change this. Also they'll certainly have some mechanism for expelling people. If a member of the democratic party started saying egregious stuff or committing crimes they'd need some way of officially saying "No he's not one of us anymore".
Sure, but he's been in politics for decades and has lots of loyal allies in the party. Plus, Israel-Palestine is an extremely fractious issue on its own, I think that could fracture the party on its own in a lot of circumstances. Think about how contentious Hillary vs Bernie was, and that was a primary with both the leadership and primary voters pretty solidly behind Hillary with no major issue Democrats disagreed on in the news. If Biden resists being replaced, it'd be a thousand times more chaotic than 2016 for the Dems.
Biden himself has much of the campaign funds, so fracturing the money would have an effect on the ability to campaign
Unless of course they replace him with a certain cop.
Which is why they'd threaten him with the 25th behind closed doors. Biden will do as he's told.
What do you mean "threaten" him? Just play a game of chicken and threaten to bring down the any Democrat's chances if he doesn't willingly step down?
The 25th is kind of hard to "threaten" with. Biden could fire the cabinet if he wanted to after such a threat.
That's not how politics work. You can't pressure the president out, especially when the primaries are over. What pressure can you even apply? It's not like he's going back into politics after being a president and 80+ years old.
Everyone around him has agency too. They aren't just going to shut up and say 'well he doesn't want to step down, that's it I guess'. There are lots of ways to pressure a figurehead into stepping down. Most likely just by increasing friction to the point where it will be clear to him that he won't be able to get anything done and his immediate peers will be disappointed or lose respect for him. If he fights through that, then the public discourse could turn really sour if the media turns on him too. Being the president is still a socially constructed position, despite all of the institutional rules. If the people or your fellow politicians don't accept your rule, you're gonna have a bad time, within the confines of those institutional rules of course.
> There are lots of ways to pressure a figurehead into stepping down. ...increasing friction ... he won't be able to get anything done ... peers will be disappointed or lose respect for him... the public discourse could turn really sour... If you're Biden and you want a second term, there is a simple strategy that he could use to defeat all of this: ignore it and continue to run.
Just because Biden is on his way out (of politics and life), doesn't mean there's nothing important to him. Maybe he cares about his legacy. Maybe he cares about his family. If one man wants to stand in the way of an entire party establishment - Washington powerbrokers, corporations, special interest groups vested in a democrat rising to power - they *will* get him to fold & resign if they want. This is how it usually goes, if it were to go: resign gracefully now, or we will make your life hell, and then you'll resign.
That's just ridiculous. Of course if the whole party would stand against him and would go out and openly say they want Biden to resign he would have little choice, but that's a naive fantasy scenario. Dems might want him to leave, but they won't do anything that would reduce Biden's chances of winning if he's not resigning. The party establishment would never openly go to war against Biden and just give away the presidency to Trump. You really think Dem establishment is some kind of gang that will on purpose throw any chance of winning just to send a message to Biden? Biden is still 100x better than Trump so if he refuses to resign they will go with him and put all their money and power behind him.
> Of course if the whole party would stand against him and would go out and openly say they want Biden to resign he would have little choice He would absolutely have the choice. He won the primary, and the nomination is his by right. He is legally entitled to it. The only thing he needs to do in response to naysayers is to say no, and it seems he intends to do so.
> Maybe he cares about his legacy. Maybe he cares about being President for another term. > If one man wants to stand in the way of an entire party establishment - Washington powerbrokers, corporations, special interest groups vested in a democrat rising to power - they *will* get him to fold & resign if they want. That theory didn't seem to work for Trump in 2015-2016 when he commandeered the Republican party over the emphatic objection of the entire GOP establishment. I'm not sure why we should expect it to work for Biden now.
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He already won the primary. He got the votes. He is *entitled* to be their nominee. And he and his family seem entirely uninterested in changing course. I think this is the time to be more specific about the "influence" that these "invisible levers" have. I don't see it.
People need to watch The Wire
Can’t they nominate someone from the convention floor? Just like in the west wing
Only if Biden recuses himself. Then delegates are free to choose. Otherwise they are bound to Biden by the primaries process.
This is [not quite the case](https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2024-Call-for-Convention.pdf): "All delegates to the National Convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them." I don't think it's likely that the delegates all decide that that the "sentiments of those who elected them" are to vote for someone other than Biden, but they legally could.
Nobody has the power to replace Biden. Biden must replace himself. The first step to solving the Biden is to admit we have a Biden. The truth is, when you take refuge in Biden, the motivation is fear. We must each of us seek out the Biden in our heart and replace him. If you meet Biden on the road, you must slay him. Above to all the Bidens, below to the crawling bugs, all have Biden-nature. Why is it that Trump has not?
I find it weird he won't be pushed
He might die...
Some chance they still find a way to run him
According to /r/politics he will even win, because obviously even a corpse is better than Trump.
The [1872 election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_United_States_presidential_election) set the precedent that votes for a corpse aren't valid and won't be counted.
He won by 45k votes spread across 3 states. In GA, Trump lost by 12k votes - and 33k left the prez box blank on the ballot. We are 1000% fucked.
Weekend at Biden's
Too soon to tell whether he will or won't.
I remember [this SSC post](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/6aISXaSxl7) from about 4 months ago asking about Biden’s faculties. I got into some heated discussion with others who were absolutely certain Biden was dementia ridden, when the evidence was poor at best. There were a few slip ups with words where you really knew what he was trying to say (from a guy with a history of a stutter). Some tripping, walking slow, falling off a bike etc., stuff that happens to literally everyone that age all the time. I was not impressed at all by the evidence at the time other than to conclude that “he’s getting old, but obviously not senile” Now is a different story. Given this was the debate, this was supposed to be his A-game. Him looking like he fell asleep (literally) while Trump rambled about Putin and terrorism (which is conveniently left out of most clips) was terrible. He could at least have had the energy to keep his head up and not look at his thumbs for 30 seconds straight. Even when he was looking up, it was completely slack jawed, (literally) it looked as if he was baffled to be on stage. It’s not that hard to shut your mouth, look serious, and repeat some simple talking points (Trumps a felon, Trump caused the Covid crisis, our administration has a lot of success) especially with the mic muting format. “We beat Medicare” after a completely incoherent ramble (truly no idea what he was trying to say) was even worse. Him getting mad at Trump calling his son a sucker (which may or may not have even happened) looked like my 5 year old nephew in the playground. Him engaging with Trump about golf was playing right into his hands, and he also lies about his golf handicap! (it was 6, then 8).
> stuff that happens to literally everyone that age all the time this is the entire problem though? explaining the cause doesn't make it go away
As in Biden tripping isn’t really indicative of anything. It’s to be expected occasionally considering the time he spends in public and didn’t indicate anything about his mental faculties. Pointing it out in an attempt to show that he’s senile had the opposite effect on me. “If that’s the best evidence they’ve got, surely they’re cherry-picking to stretch the truth.”
> I was not impressed at all by the evidence at the time other than to conclude that “he’s getting old, but obviously not senile” Were you under the impression that his mental faculties would stay constant over time? Was it important to you only that he stay lucid through the election, or do you also think it is important to have a lucid president all the way through his term (at the end of which he would be 86 years old)? It seems completely foreseeable that we'd end up where we are today. It is one of the mysteries of modern America that so many smart people appear not to have foreseen it.
Trump is 3 years younger than Biden. There’s enough variation in the rate of degradation in the elderly that a 3 year gap is not a significant consideration for me personally. The argument being made at the time wasn’t that Biden was getting worse. It was that he was already senile. The evidence presented at the time was very weak in my opinion, and was all obviously extremely politically motivated. You either got clips from those against Biden editing things in the least favorable way possible or no clips from the pro-Biden camp. I looked up the context for the clips sent to me, and almost all were completely benign when seen with 10 seconds before and after the flub. One I remember was him mispronouncing the name of someone with a non-Anglo complicated Japanese name twice in a row and apologizing. This seemed normal in the speech. Divorced from the context though it looked like he couldn’t even manage to speak English then apologized for it. No surprise, because he wasn’t. All I was really shown was that he flubbed his words occasionally and had some of the behaviors of a typical 80 year old. I’m no supporter of Biden either, and did not vote for him. However the attempt to portray Biden as senile was clearly done using underhanded tactics, misrepresentation and there wasn’t public evidence of any real senility beyond the average early-80s adult. With my current information I wouldn’t vote for Biden (I wasn’t beforehand) but if that was my intention I’d be seriously considering 4 years of lucidity as not guaranteed, or even unlikely. Depending on my hypothetical aversion to Trump in this scenario, I could see this debate being an important factor. We shall see if he manages to pull it together for a second debate. For all we know he was actually suffering from some temporary cold or sickness that degraded his performance.
I'm one of the people who said he had dementia at the time and I don't see what has changed so much as to change everyone's opinion so dramatically. It has been apparent for some time that he is severely cognitively impaired.
Maybe you are simply not as good in evaluating evidence as you thought you were? Obviously, we shouldn't make diagnoses on people we don't meet personally and if we are not qualified to do that. But for experienced evaluators they could see the signs clearly and while they couldn't be 100% sure, they had very strong priors that this was going to happen. I have seen people who gradually developed dementia and then died making their partners heart broken. And then I remember reading the hospital discharge letter of my late father where the doctor had characterized him to be demented and I thought, no, that's clearly an exaggeration. We are not able to assess our loved ones objectively and doctors usually refuse to treat their relatives. If you have any conflict of interest, you are biased. Period. But distancing from this particular case, most people are averse to admitting how much functionality is lost due to old age. This whole covid fiasco happened because the society pretended that for those old and sick people who are near death bed dying from covid is a big deal. Only Sweden followed a sane policy that was well balanced between different risks. And yet, all those who agreed with Tegnell were killers of old aunties or even worse.
We often are not able to assess loved one’s dementia because they aren’t in a position where they need to respond with coherent answers, or are emotionally invested in believing they are fine. “Hey dad, how’s it going?” “Just fine.” A satisfactory response, and one that could easily be given with dementia. If they have a spouse taking care of them, it’s even more common to go unnoticed. Biden can’t respond to people with easy answers. He doesn’t get to sit at home watching TV all day. The [speeches and remarks archive](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/) includes hundreds of public speeches he gives, not including the more informal public appearances and remarks. It’s quite easy to find a video for each one, so like many others, you’re free to look through the hundreds of hours and pick the worst cases. If Biden has dementia, it should be trivial to find those examples from hundreds of public appearances. Why then, do the people arguing for his dementia have to send me a video of him walking slowly, or mispronouncing a Japanese name in a foolish-looking but completely understandable way, but cutting it in a way that he’s presented as demented? I don’t understand the relevance of last two paragraphs.
Trump caused the Covid crisis? Didn't Trump help develop and push the vaccine?
“Talking points” are just topics that invite discussion or argument. Trump caused Covid, Biden wants to kill babies, Biden is inviting terrorists across the border, etc. None of those are literally true, but are hyperbole attacks on the opponent. Trump was in charge when Covid started, and made many decisions regarding the response. People died as a result of those decisions. Whether that number is less or more than if other decisions were made, who’s to say? Biden can claim Trump caused the Covid crisis just like Trump can claim Biden caused inflation. Both are literally untrue or at least unsubstantiated, but in the presidential debate that really doesn’t matter. Biden didn’t have to go up and make a sane rational argument, just stick to broad talking points that are prepared in advance.
I think it's still next to impossible to have a sane public discussion that tries to resolve who was at fault, or even what actually happened. Obviously the disease itself wasn't under anyone's direct control (except perhaps the people trying to get around international treaties to outsource dangerous possibly illegal research). People seem to have a very spotty memory when it comes to what happened when and who gets credit/responsibility for it. And that's before even touching more subjective questions like whether particular policies _were_ justified, whether they legitimately _seemed_ justified at the time (or shouldn't have), and whether the government had the authority to do half the things it did under either president. Then, beyond the obviously strongly emotional political divide that's coloring people's perceptions and recollections, a lot of us are _still_ trying to recover from the massive economic and psychological effects of the last four years. So that's 2x more bias for free. I haven't seen any kind of consensus on how much we should blame on the fear of the general public vs the fear-laden policies of both administrations vs how much of the responsibility belongs to the state governments, or how each of those plus the media all influenced each other. It also seems that different geographic subcultures/legal-jurisdictions handled it differently and had results that don't correlate well with simple up/down questions about their behaviors. Heck we're _still_ uncovering new things with regard to the origin of the virus, how much public health officials knew, and what they said privately that contradicted what they said publicly. I don't think the mix of opinion about how much was the disease itself and how much was policy will settle for years to come. But to attempt to steer away the political side of things towards a view we maybe _can_ discuss, I think it's a mistake for either candidate to be focusing on how 'rona was handled as part of their campaign. The way you treat a pandemic on day 1 isn't going to be comparable to how you treat it on day 200, so any good campaign strategy is going to be on shaky ground when trying to _differentiate_ their candidate on pandemic performance. And as the administrations transitioned in early 2021, I don't recall any sudden large change, or difference between them on policy once you account for that. Just some tweaks around the edges of how things were messaged. Not to mention I think most people are absolutely sick of the topic. Anyone who wants people to listen should be talking about something else.
Well, I mean, it's one thing to say Trump handled the situation badly, maybe he did (or could have handled it with more tact), but to say "Trump caused the Covid crisis" is a little much, don't you think? Not sure if OP meant it literally, but claiming it should have been one of Biden's talking points during the debate seems a little batty to me, and he would have rightly had his ass handed to him had he been aware enough to have made it. And hell, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Trump did indeed cause the Covid crisis. But I'd like to see some evidence pointing to such a conclusion. An extreme blanket statement of this nature with absolutely nothing to show for it shouldn't be met with firm nods of agreement, even if one doesn't like the guy.
> Well, I mean, it's one thing to say Trump handled the situation badly, maybe he did (or could have handled it with more tact), but to say "Trump caused the Covid crisis" is a little much, don't you think? I do not believe that this is the intended meaning, but to some people, the "Covid crisis" was entirely the response to the virus and the disease, and no crisis would have occurred even with the exact same circumstances around the virus spreading around the world, if governments had just responded without restrictions of any kind. To those people, it would be accurate to say that Trump caused the crisis, since he was the leader at the time when the government enacted its policies in mitigating the damage of the virus, and according to this view, executing on these policies were the entire cause of the crisis.
> imagine that tomorrow, Biden has completely recovered, he easily wins his next debate with Trump, and everyone agrees the most recent debate was just a fluke - in that world, he is both more likely to be nominated and more likely to win. I know this is only a hypothetical scenario, but the next debate is scheduled for long *after* the nominating convention, and I have serious doubts it would even happen if Biden's poll numbers don't recover. The point is, there are very few opportunites for him to recover prior to the convention and his problems as a candidate are not ones that get resolved with age, so I think this possibility should be weighted in some way.
The real crux is that poll numbers are generally looking at things like likely general election voters. But the way the primaries are done has a lot less to do with public opinion than the general. There's a lot of influence from how much power you have inside the party itself. Purely grassroots movements like we saw for Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders have a hard time moving the needle against someone who's been a major player in a core faction of the party. That in-house network of supporters is hard to see let alone evaluate from the outside.
> The last week hasn’t been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don’t seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don’t even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like “Trump is also bad” or pretending that nothing is really wrong. The key insight is that these party elites are taking this position because they know they are stuck with Biden, and are making the calculation that standing by Biden when he is their nominee is a better play than denouncing Biden when he is their nominee. In other words, they have correctly concluded that "denouncing Biden to obtain a different nominee" is not an option, so they are choosing the best option that remains. The party elites were all in on ejecting Biden in the immediate aftermath of the debate. But in the two or three days afterward, it became clear that Biden will not step aside, so now they have switched modes to gritting their teeth and defending him.
>So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, Kind of a motte-and-bailey here, with senile meaning either "totally incapable of daily functioning" or "somewhere in the process of gradually declining mental faculties." Accusations towards Biden tended to be along the lines of the former, hence the secret drug theory. The latter is obviously true of both candidates. The Biden-doomers are plentiful right now, but I'm surprised no one talks about the 2024 primaries. Both candidates won by landslides. I dutifully voted for Nikki Haley and she dropped out before my vote was counted. If you want to speculate about how well hypothetical candidates would do, why not look at the performance of actual contenders?
But there were no contenders on the dem side. That's the problem. If we had an actual primary where we could have seen Biden debate last fall, he very well may not have gotten the nomination. Instead everyone sat out to wait their turn for 2028. And now we have this.
If there were no contenders a few months ago, what makes you think that they'll suddenly appear now? My prediction is that if Biden gets struck by lightning or whatever, the DNC will simply award the nomination to Kamala Harris because the alternative--nominating somebody who wasn't in the primary--would be the equivalent of Jan 6 to their own process.
My suspicion is that plenty of people would have loved to run against him but were told by the DNC that if they did so they would not be supported by the party, and doom their careers. Now most of those people could jump in as long as Biden steps down and the DNC says it's a free for all. But yes, I agree Harris is the most likely replacement.
I doubt the DNC *told* them this. It's obvious. Incumbents almost never receive credible primary opposition (it's true that incumbents are usually more popular than Biden is at this point, but that makes it even worse. A primary has candidates sniping at each other. There's always a risk that this weakens the eventual candidate. If that does end up being Biden then you've made things a lot worse). As for Harris, she's the only obvious candidate. She might not be anyone's favorite, but everyone has a different favorite that they support for different reasons. Kamala is the only candidate who has good reasons for being the nominee outside of being your favorite.
It's odd how often people say this. There was an actual primary. Dean Phillips ran. He's a credible congressman with an impressive background. He ran on the theory that Biden was great in terms of policy but too old. Bill Ackman endorsed him. But the Democratic primary voters didn't vote for him. If he got more votes, Biden would probably have had to debate him. But he didn't. Democrats made this bed.
He was a total unknown, started his candidacy way too late, and received no support or coverage by the DNC or the media. It's not the same as someone with a national platform, like Newsom, challenging him. You're right it was technically a primary, but he basically tried to Michael Bloomberg it without the billions or name recognition.
Voters who thought Biden's age was disqualifying should have taken any port in a storm. Phillips offered a credible alternative. Don't blame "the DNC" or "the media." They would have followed the voters' cues as the first results started rolling in. Phillips' name was right there on the ballot. Primaries are staggered by state and he pounded the pavement in the states as they came up. The fault here lies entirely with Democratic voters. It's unseemly to try to deflect it.
By the time it got to my state, Dean Phillips didn't look like he stood a chance in hell. I voted for Nicki Haley instead because I figured she had a better chance at beating Trump, though even her chance looked dismal. It's frustrating. Like in 2020, with Biden being so popular in the primary when I had many other choices I'd have preferred (like Sanders), or the same story in 2016. I don't know why Democrats keep making the choices that they do.
In the scenario where Biden decided immediately after the debate to not run, I feel like that plays out exactly like it has so far. You can't even hint at it until you're sure and you have some sort of plan in place. This is how they would have to act while they were putting the plan in place.
Sure change candidates a few months before the election. It worked for adlai stevenson and hubert humphrey. Oh wait….
The culture war stuff is getting out of control on this subreddit in terms of comments. Sad.
I guess *politics* is all plutonium at this point, basically. Which makes me wonder, was there really a time back in some yonder past when people disagreed politely?
No. >[These theories may be new, the dynamics are not. In fact, they go all the way back to America’s earliest years: In the late 1790s, Jedidiah Morse, the congregational minister in Charlestown, Mass., and a well-known author of geography textbooks, drew national attention by suggesting that a secret organization called the Bavarian Illuminati was at work “to root out and abolish Christianity, and overturn all civil government.”](https://time.com/5892376/early-american-conspiracy-theory/) And >Amid the political and media storms a dramatic conspiracy theory emerged. This held that Prime Minister Pitt and Queen Charlotte were colluding to seize power from the Prince of Wales so that they could rule in the king’s stead. >[Though these reports were circulated (and probably paid for) by the government’s opponents, they were reported and reprinted in numerous newspapers. Such was the clamour against the queen and the prime minister that the Times newspaper bluntly accused the opposition party of slandering them both, in an attempt to force through a regency bill which favoured their supporter, the Prince of Wales](https://theconversation.com/how-conspiracy-theories-around-george-iiis-madness-and-queen-charlottes-scheming-took-hold-of-the-18th-century-british-press-226850) And >[During the hotly contested 1828 campaign, Jackson’s opponents, too, trafficked in conspiracy theories: In particular, administration men accused Jackson’s supporters of plotting a coup d’état if their candidate lost to President Adams. This “theory” held that pro-Jackson congressmen, upset about the national government’s attempts to impose a new tariff on imports, held “secret meetings” to discuss “the dissolution of the Union.” One pro-Jackson supporter “declared that he should not be astonished to see Gen. Jackson, if not elected, placed in the Presidential Chair, at the point of fifty thousand bayonets!!!” The thought of a national military hero such as Jackson leading a military rebellion had no basis in reality, but the conspiracy theory fit the tenor of the times.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-abounded-19th-century-american-politics-180971940/) Just for a few. Go back further and you get into things like blood libel, witchhunts and stuff like that.
I'm pretty confident in saying "no." People have always fought over the best way to run a society. Whether or not the public discourse was more civil is a different question, but imo people have always disagreed sharply (and violently) over politics.
One positive of the modern era is that senators aren’t regularly beating each other with canes
Is it a positive though?
🤷🏻♂️
Well.... https://apnews.com/article/senate-mullin-obrien-teamsters-fight-hearing-153e28d131973d1e10b539491c9e94a6
[Relevant xkcd.](https://xkcd.com/1127/) Politics was always divisive, but it wasn't always *this* divisive.
Yes. They still do that in Georgia. I come from the north. It’s weird. I have to bite my tongue.
It's really not. I've removed three comments in this thread so far. That's not a lot. And none of them had reports on them. If something annoys you, report it and bring it to our attention.
Everyone suggests replacing Biden.
I’ve been suggesting it for over a year here on Reddit and was told to STFU and that I must be a militant MAGA. I’m not all that smart, it was just so obvious that Biden’s handlers weren’t going to be able to keep a lid on his plainly apparent decline the way they did during the Covid election.
Yeah, the problem was MAGA were the people posting the videos etc. and they really were edited. They made a huge deal over things that were not really things, like tripping or walking slowly, but then when you actually watched Biden, he seemed old but totally with it. I'm not sure if I was in denial or in a bubble or if there really wasn't enough evidence yet. It's probably always hard to see if your opponent's attacks on your side are true when your opponent is a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Thing is, if you were watching without the least bit of packaging or commentary, you might have even noticed a very very old man, with extraordinarily weird pacing and speech patterns seeming to wobble through his lauded State Of The Union address.
He's always had weird pacing and speech patterns, to be fair. But there's also a difference between old and slowing (been obvious) and getting totally lost like he did during the debate a few times.
> But there's also a difference between old and slowing (been obvious) and getting totally lost like he did during the debate a few times. The latter is what age-related slowing progresses into. And the progression will continue from here. Maybe I'm biased here because I've watched one of my grandparents go through that same tragic descent into the abyss. I figured most people have had that experience, but perhaps not. It seemed plain as day to me that this is what the future held for Biden as early as the 2020 primary debates. Of course, back then we all assumed he'd be a one-term president, because who would be so crazy to run again at that age and capacity -- and if he did, what voters would be so crazy as to enable him? Of course, even before that, one of the reasons Obama selected him as VP was that he was too old to harbor his own presidential ambitions. I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere.
I started getting actually worried when reading this TIME interview: https://time.com/6984968/joe-biden-transcript-2024-interview/ Also worth noting that he is already talking about having a cold there. That was early *June*, is this a very long cold? Are they two different colds? Is it just an excuse?
They have flushed their credibility. There is no point in analyzing what they say because it is simply, literally, un-believable. They’ve been exposed and they are so arrogant that they do not care. There is nothing they will not say to convince you that your own eyes and ears are lying to you. And this shamelessness and power-craving will cost the country in the form of a Trump election win.
I'm just waiting to mark the "long covid" box on my Bingo board.
The right is always going to edit clips to exaggerate their point, and the left is always going to find ways to excuse and deny until it's undeniable. The question isn't "as someone on the left, can I find a way to excuse this which convinces me?", it's "Am I having to work to make excuses in the first place?". Or better yet, let go of your attachment to the left (even if they happen to be right more often, in your view) and ask "Is the left having to work to make excuses here?". You don't have to look at any of the clips on the object level to know whether it's true or not. You can step back to the 10,000 foot view and notice which side has been laughing at the other for years, and which side has been uncomfortably making excuses and convincing themselves that their inside view is the best anyone can do. The reason this works is that you're using the entire collection of people who don't want a thing to be true to crowd source your fact checking. I used to caricature the situation with Biden as president as "Weekend at Bernies", not because I thought it was necessarily true but because it's funny and kinda seems to fit. And I noticed that none of the left leaning people that I said this to -- who read all the stuff the best left leaning minds have to say on this topic -- ever laughed at me for saying something dumb. And never explained that I was actually way of base and that Biden is unusually with it. Or even pushed back at all, the way they'd do on other things when they had a respectable case to be made. I'm sure if someone were to come at them pushing the right wing idea that "Biden needs to step down and you need to agree!", they would have found all sorts of arguments with which to push back. But that's not the measure of actual belief.
Well, obviously. Most people aren't in denial on purpose. I did look at some of the clips MAGA posted and their context and I didn't see real evidence. I think I probably did err at taking the word of the people surrounding Biden because it now seems like they were covering it up, so lesson learned there I guess. (It's not that I thought they wouldn't lie in principle, I just didn't believe they were lying.) I still haven't seen a clip that looks as bad as that debate did, come to think of it.
You say "Well, obviously", but then go right back to saying things like "I did look at some of the clips" and "I still haven't seen a clip that...". My whole point is that this is that by choosing this level of analysis you are missing the forest for what is at risk of being just the picture of trees you want to believe in. You can't see past your ideological barriers by consulting your own inside view, and refraining from saying "I hereby intentionally deny the truth!" is not enough. You have to take a step back and notice when the other side is *genuinely* laughing at you, and when your friends are showing signs of cognitive dissonance. You have to recognize that whether your friends are engaged in efforts to discredit apparent evidence is *more important* than whether you personally find their arguments valid. By watching the videos and saying things like "I didn't see any real evidence" as a statement about reality rather than a statement about yourself, you're indulging in the self-flattering idea that you're not too ideologically blinded to see the evidence if it's there. If you're aware of this, and you're out-predicting everyone, then have at it; correctness is a valid defense against accusations of arrogance. If you find yourself blindsided, out-predicted, and wondering if maybe you were in denial, then the way out is to *stop* watching the videos, *stop* listening to the content of people's speech, *stop* listening to your own ideas of whether dishonest partisan hacks are "lying", and watch the *processes* which people are engaging in when they watch the videos. Watch it on mute. Do they look like they're winning? Do they look like they're hurting? Excusing? Acting? Putting on a poker face? That's how you find what people sense to be true as separate from what they want you to believe (that they believe).
I honestly think I'm better than most at seeing the cognitive dissonance on my side. I grew up in Orthodox Judaism and it used to drive me crazy when I saw my friends doing that. "I didn't see any real evidence" could be a statement about me OR about the "evidence." You're assuming I saw clips that should have convinced me, yet you don't know that to be the case. I just went looking now and I can find one clip that looks like the episodes during the debate ("Joe Biden appears to forget the word 'Hamas' during key speech") but I don't recall having seen that before now. I did see a lot of clips like him tripping on stairs or not being able to put his jacket on by himself on a windy tarmac or just kind of standing there while younger people danced that the right waved around as evidence of dementia, but I don't see how an impartial observer could be convinced of those. When you read the fable of the boy who cried wolf, do you criticize the townspeople for not getting over their biases and believing the boy when he was actually telling the truth?
> The reason this works is that you're using the entire collection of people who don't want a thing to be true to crowd source your fact checking. This is one of those points that I wish I didn't find so obvious, since it's befuddling to me that almost no one seems to follow it. I'm a Biden supporter who voted against Trump twice (I'll probably vote for Biden again this time); given that, I know for a fact that I'm hopelessly biased in Biden's favor and cannot be counted on to judge his mental faculties accurately or objectively. I will always "err" ("err" in quotes, since it's actually intentional, just subconsciously intentional) in ways to paint a rosy picture, even when I'm consciously actively trying to get aas accurate a view as possible. Now, Biden's haters are no less biased than me, but at the very least, I can mostly count on their biases being in the opposite direction as mine, and so when they say something that paints Biden in a bad light, especially if it goes directly counter to my biases, my impulse is to take that *more* seriously, not less and to encourage *more* of those criticisms, not less. That way, I can use them to triangulate at the truth, which will always be beyond the grasp of my hopelessly biased judgment when it comes to Biden. The inside view matters, of course, but when it comes to things as heated as politics in the USA in 2024 right now, I don't know that anyone has enough maturity to be trusted to have anything more than a hopelessly biased perspective in favor of whatever candidate/policies/side they happen to like. Even after all my efforts to take in the right wing attacks on Biden's age, I was *still* surprised by what I saw last Thursday - the best I can say in my favor is that I was less surprised than what I perceive most other Democrats as being, since I was fully expecting his poor mental faculties to be on display, just not to be basically the ONLY story of the debate - which tells me that my current level of effort of listening to right-wing criticism of Biden and Dems in general is not enough and ought to be recalibrated.
All you have to do is watch a speech of his from 30+ years ago and compare it to any speech today. The decline is obvious. I've made this comment (with supportive links) before and it's usually downvoted to hell. I suspect there are a lot of bots working for Dems on reddit.
You don’t have to go back 30 years. There’s a clip circulating on twitter of a Biden Debate performance from 2019 vs 2024. The difference is staggering. And it’s not “cheap fake” editing. Biden today could not begin to affect the mental acuity of the Biden from just five years ago. Almost as if having one of the most demanding jobs in the world that has been known to upwardly age fifty year olds shouldn’t be given to an obviously declining and elderly over *Eighty* year old.
Again, there's a difference between "decline" and actual incompetence. EVERYBODY declines between 51 and 81, or even 41 and 71. That doesn't mean that everybody at that age would have the same kind of episodes he had during the debate.
I wish
Even the most strident supporters have surely suggested it behind closed doors. For the record I like a lot about him. It’s just sad to see an old man struggle.
Agreed. I was with him until Thursday. But he needs a break. He's been an elected official non-stop since 1973.
> They [Certain prediction markets] usually overestimate Republicans’ chances, partly because Democrats’ opposition to online political betting has turned the pool of online political bettors disproportionately red I don't think this is even a little true
I made a bunch of easy money last election betting that Biden would win, after the races were all called, because enough people will still putting money on the other side. There are a solid chunk of utterly deluded people out there.
Predictiit especially, though not sure how to find a good article and trades only go back 30 days for a screenshot. But you could bet against trump winning hawaii even.
I’m on predictit quite a bit too, and while I wouldn’t say there’s a consistent or significant R bias, I agree there is a subset of people who are clearly there to bet on their team (usually R) and you can absolutely exploit that fact.
Looking at predictit, the difference between a woman being elected president in 2024 and Kamala Harris elected president in 2024 is 9 cents, which makes no sense to me. Surely these two must be the same thing, or at least very similar. There simply must be an opportunity for arbitrage, considering I highly doubt the 9 cent difference is the result of Whitmer.
Yeah that's another example - but part of predictit being bad is fees, so I'd have to check the math but I don't think you can actually make money on less than a 10 cent spread. Bias has also gone down as it got more popular, real money was early, but some is still there.
Haley is trading around 3-4 cents so that’s some of the difference. The rest is definitely an opportunity. The markets unsurprisingly have been wild the past few days so gaps like that are bound to emerge in lightly traded markets.
A thread I made about it at the time (November 19, 2020): [Betting markets currently think Trump has around a 15% chance of being the next president and are still accessible to new participants](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/jx2hqv/betting_markets_currently_think_trump_has_around/)
It wasn't 100% certain that Biden would be president after the races were called. You think you collected free money. I think the market was correctly pricing the risk of Trump stealing the election.
Yeah but we're not talking November 10th, you could make money much later, like all through December IIRC
How much money are we talking these markets had roughly 1/100th liquidity of pre election markets. The illiquidity leads to inefficiency. It’s much easier to make money on 4th league Azerbaijani soccer than the English premier league.
The same was true in 2016 after Trump won: you could buy Trump for like 93¢ and make 7% riskless profit. That doesn't really indicate a bias.
Certainly seemed true in the previous election
It seems true that prediction markets overrate Republicans (they had Trump at 40% in 2020 and then above 10% after the election!) and wishful thinking on part of the participants in the market seems like a plausible explanation.
I've read a few times that truth social tends to talk about prediction markets more than the average guy out there, that, if true, could skew things by itself. Would be nice if someone could confirm since I'm not really keen on using that site.
I think it leans gray, as in gray tribe, as in the kind of people who hang out here. Because what kind of nerds would want to jump through hoops to bet specifically on politics? Tech bros, mostly libertarians.
I only ever saw one article on the Gray tribe on Lesswrong. Are there others? Has this terminology caught on?
I don't know articles, but I've been seeing it around for a long time. e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7h1fs6/grey_tribe_values/
I believe it was popularized by Scott's essay ["I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/), which describes it briefly in section IV. This was a very influential post during SSC's 2014-era boom, where a lot of other Rationalist lingo spread from (like the concepts of ["Moloch"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) and [motte-and-baipey arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/).)
Then back it up?
Generally burden of proof is on those making claims.
Then go complain to Scott. The subreddit rules are clear. > When making a claim that isn't outright obvious, you should proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
I can't make heads or tails of what you're saying. Are you trying to say that because Scott violated the rules of this subreddit in his blog post, anyone pointing that out should... IDK what? You can't possibly be saying that the subreddit rules allow for requiring proofs of negatives if a quote from off-sub makes a wild assertion without evidence?
For some reason I didn't get a notification of your response. What I mean is that since Scott posted outside of the subreddit, he is obviously not bound by the rules of the subreddit. I agree he ought to have backed that claim up better. But for the people making claims in *this* location, we should follow the rules. > You can't possibly be saying that the subreddit rules allow for requiring proofs of negatives if a quote from off-sub makes a wild assertion without evidence? Mostly because I don't think it's productive to meet with . Where's the value in that? If you want to convince others of your claim, back it up. That's why the rule exists. Scott obviously didn't consider it a wild claim.
As of November 13th, 2020 (literally a week after the election) Betfair had an 8% chance of Trump winning - [source](https://theconversation.com/joe-biden-how-betting-markets-foresaw-the-result-of-the-2020-us-election-150095). I couldn't find a way to look at Polymatket odds, but there was a [separate market](https://polymarket.com/event/will-donald-trump-be-inaugurated-for-his-second-term-as-president-of-the-usa-on-inauguration-day-january-20th-2021?tid=1719924576136) created to determine if Trump would be inaugurated, not just winning, that was created a week after the election that managed to soak up $30M of bets. [Here's some reddit comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/sportsbook/comments/jrp8fr/betting_on_biden_post_election/) with betting odds 5 days after the election in various markets that are objectively insane.
How does January 6th tie in to the view that the 8% (for example) was wrong? Was it not a real threat to who would wind up being sworn in? Could a more extreme version not have happened? I'm not sure you can just in hindsight say that all of the markets were wrong.
I think it’s a bit too late for that. The debate was an absolute disaster in showing Biden’s ability to speak in a coherent and clear manner. But we don’t what the effects would be on polling. There is so much election machinery and infrastructure on Biden that makes difficult to switch with just 5 months left. We also have no idea how other candidates could perform against Trump. Biden is only guy who have defeated Trump. People thought Ron DeSantis had a real chance against Trump, which is now absurd to think about. Until we see accurate and consistent polling that Biden’s polling numbers have dropped significantly, I still support Biden in the race.
there are only 4 months left until November 5th
So, now that literally everyone has said he's too old and everyone said he should quit, everything *he* does looks good. The bar is beneath the floor. Also, he gets some "underdog advantage" which Trump has been hogging through the last three election cycles. I expect to see him Early 2000s Pete Townshend this with the help of the best PR firms and millions of dollars of democrat money and the cynical media machine and AIPAC on his side.
'This candidate has a bad reputation, therefore anything he does will look good in comparison to that reputation and it's actually an asset for him' is the most galaxy-brained thing I've heard this month.
If you assume that voters are rational, then you'll never be able to explain Trump's continuing base of support. If you assume voters are irrational, then it's perfectly logical to look at irrational justifications.
The most consistent theory of voting is identity based votes where they vote for the candidates that hit the most key works and actions to do the “secret handshake” and identify with your in-group. For example the Evangelical voters vote for the candidate which most strongly matches their identity, in this election Trump
Would you describe Trump's works and actions as "Evangelical Christian"?
There's nothing irrational about supporting Trump if you think he's more aligned with how you'd like the country to be governed and you think the benefit of potentially getting a President aligned with your preferences outweighs the greater risk that he'll lose compared with other Republican candidates who aren't aligned with your preferences.
Biden has in my estimation 5-10% chance of winning — his performance at the debate was a national humiliation, and he’ll have more senior moments. Furthermore, democrats down the ballot will get demolished. If Biden runs it will be among the worst landslides in history. This discourse seems to be missing a key element of political analysis. Namely, demographics. The democrats are dependent on the black vote. Trump has been gaining ground with blacks. And black people really don’t like it when they’re passed over for jobs because they’re black. From an objective standpoint, Kamala is the most qualified candidate to replace Biden. She is VP. Her primary job is to replace a dying Biden. To skip over her is to admit that it was a mistake to pick her as VP, and/or that the Biden administration has failed. Only Kamala can run as a continuation of Biden’s administration. The democrats as a party need to run on Biden’s accomplishments, and Kamala is best positioned to do so. Now, the argument against her is that she’s unelectable, or less likely to win than other candidates. I question if this is indeed true later on, but let’s imagine it is true. Even if you can convince black Americans that Newsom is more likely to beat Trump, the implication is that it’s because America is racist against blacks. Now, you may think this doesn’t make sense. Michelle Obama, who has always said she does not want to run, is hugely popular. And obviously, Barack is still the most popular Democrat. However, after Hilary lost in 2016, one key narrative was that “America just isn’t ready for a woman president.” That’s why Biden, already an old man, was the 2020 nominee. The democrats sacrificed their values of social equality to pick a normal white man to beat Trump. Biden awkwardly promised to pick a woman VP, and a black woman Supreme Court justice, not just because of wokeness and George Floyd, but in order to counteract the perception that he himself was benefiting from white male privilege due to the expectation of racism and sexism in the electorate. When the case against Kamala and for Newsom or Whitmer is made, never is it claimed that the white candidates are more qualified than Kamala. Frankly, it’s not a plausible argument. Except to the extent that electability is a qualification. And on the point of electability, it’s been well-demonstrated that mid-western whites underperform with black voters. See Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Blacks see these figures as mediocre; that they are graded on a much more favorable curve than blacks (or Asian or Hispanics). Whitmer is a textbook mediocre midwesterner. Newsom, a coastal elite, is sharp, handsome, articulate. Compared to the midwesterners, at least he represents American excellence. However, he also represents the smarmy sociopathic hypocritical politics that Trump is purpose-built to destroy. Newsom is the candidate of mask mandates for thee but not for me. While Newsom is in general more electable than Kamala, specifically against Trump, Newsom is a bad matchup. The mediocre midwesterners would fare better, because they represent decency in contrast to Trump’s depravity. Head to head with Trump the felon, Kamala the prosecutor fares well. Remember, part of why she underperformed in the 2020 primary was her history as a tough-on-crime prosecutor. Summing up, Democrats should back Kamala because she’s actually their best shot. And still, she will be an underdog. But so will the others.
What little actual evidence exists (polling, predictions markets, approval rating) suggests that other Democrats would have a better chance than Kamala against Trump.
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/f99e148f-4051-40f9-b0c6-22eb10289854_1500x1091.png That’s the polling that the Biden campaign has released. Kamala is in pole position. The prediction market data is currently weak. While prediction markets in general are high-signal, the presidential markets are heavily biased by people backing their preferred candidate. On favorability polling, all of those numbers are subject to big change as the candidates get a huge influx of national media. Kamala has been intentionally kept behind the scenes, only to be brought out in public to talk about abortion. Some insiders have suggested that Biden has been intentionally hiding Kamala — if she had been more visible in 2021-23, there would have been overwhelming pressure on Biden to make way for her in 2024. See this Nate Silver tweet: https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1807617167803748545
I saw that in the OP, but it's the only post-debate poll we have, it's four days old now, and the sample size was relatively small. Prediction markets and approval ratings tell a different story. What we really need is some good polling of undecided voters in swing states on a ballot that includes minor candidates. That's what's actually in play here.
Would you be interested in making bets at 10-1 odds? I'd happily bet $100 on Biden if I stand to win $1000.
I think prediction markets are going to have a hard time calling this one. Any would-be replacement may look better in a debate if you could just substitute a better looking person for that one aspect. However they'd be playing from behind in terms of time to setup their campaign apparatus, and getting a message together. There'd likely be more than one jumping in if Biden stepped out, and anyone challenging the incumbent will look like a traitor to half of the party insiders and donors. That means their _actual_ chances, both in challenging Biden and winning the general, are going to be really hard to foresee. To get the kind of victory people _imagine_ they would, the new candidate would need to consolidate or find good replacements for basically everything Biden has accumulated, and then also have good judgement in choosing and sufficient charisma in presenting the topics they focus on during the campaign.
PredictIt seems to think that Biden stepping down is [likely](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7057/Who-will-win-the-2024-Democratic-presidential-nomination), for some reason. [Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11379/2024-democrat-nominee-for-us-prez/) is less sure, but seems to be changing fast.
Such an overreaction. The incumbent typically loses the first debate. The polls shift for a bit, then they shift back. The first debate has never mattered much, and this one was the earliest ever. The Biden campaign just needs to circle the wagons and change the topic. Have Obama call his people and tell them to shut the fuck up and get on board. Then, you go right back to reminding America who Trump is, what he did and what he'll do if elected again.
It is incredibly galling to frame the issue as Biden losing the debate rather than him demonstrating massive cognitive decline that will obviously get progressively worse.
Even if Biden's debate performance is representative rather than merely a fluke, Trump as president would be worse. Biden is in fact president right now, and the country is puttering along well enough as far as I see it, however demented he might seem to be at present. So his current level of dementia is at least clearly insufficient to majorly fuck things up in the way that Trump might were he to regain the presidency. And Biden's dementia might get worse over the course of a second term but I doubt it could worsen enough to create problems for the nation any more serious than those that would be created by Trump at least before Biden was 25thd or resigned or died in office anyway, all three outcomes of which would be preferable to a second Trump term.
> Even if Biden's debate performance is representative rather than merely a fluke, Trump as president would be worse. The question isn't whether he can govern, but whether he can *win.* A lot of the electorate sees this cycle as two equally bad choices. I don't happen to agree with that and my thinking is more in line with yours, but the only people who really matter are undecided voters in swing states. If they move away from Biden, he's sunk, and I don't think the "Trump is worse" approach is proving very persuasive to them after that debate performance.
All of this may be true, but the question isn't whether or not it's true, the question is whether or not you can convince enough voters in enough swing states that it's true. I'm skeptical of this possibility.
he still seems a lot smarter than the other guy, who wants to do things like curtail the rights of my friends and family. also political power doesnt disappear as you get senile, and political power is why he is in power and gets (some) stuff done.
This seems to fluctuate between using "smart" to mean either 'the opposite of cognitive decline' or 'enacting the political policies I like'.
> smarter than the other guy *Better* than. As one famous person said, I would vote for a jar of blue fluid with Biden's severed head in it over Trump. But let's not turn our eyes from elephants in the room. It's not even just that debate. He drops plenty of half-legible sentences everywhere. Even his lauded state of the Union was weak, horribly paced, etc. Watch the debate between him and Ryan in 2012, and yes Biden is clearly a mere shadow of his former self, and in major mental decline. I think it's clear that *if it were anyone other than Trump* we would shake our heads at the very notion of that Biden fella standing in the room making decisions when things are moving faster than kids at a BCG consult. Or representing the USA among leaders of foreign countries. Or so much as being the CEO of a small cap firm we have money in. Edit: Also, I'm pretty sure DeSantis is smarter than either of them. Smarter than Trump by 12-15 IQ points -- and that makes him *worse* IMO.
> I think it's clear that *if it were anyone other than Trump* we would shake our heads at the very notion... > Edit: Also, I'm pretty sure DeSantis is smarter than either of them. Smarter than Trump by 12-15 IQ points -- and that makes him *worse* IMO. Emphasis in the original. Belied by your own edit.
What rights specifically?
>The Biden campaign just needs to circle the wagons and change the topic. Have Obama call his people and tell them to shut the fuck up and get on board. This has already happened, and Biden has lost ground in the polls. He probably needs to be up 3% nationally to be a coin flip to win due to Electoral College effects. He's closer to trailing by 3% nationally. The optimal reaction very much depends on whether you are winning or losing. Biden is currently losing. Circling the wagons can keep current Biden voters in line, but it doesn't do anything to attract new support.
> The Biden campaign just needs to circle the wagons and change the topic. They have been trying to 'circle the wagons and change the topic' on the question of his age since before the primaries started. It worked until it didn't: it is not a one-time problem that you can finish dealing with and move on, it is a fight that is going to have to be refought each and every time Biden looks old in public. >Then, you go right back to reminding America who Trump is, what he did and what he'll do if elected again. We knew who Trump was in 2016. That didn't stop candidate quality from mattering in the race against him then, and it won't stop it from mattering now.
This was the worst presidential debate in history.
I think this take leaves out some important points. The next and only remaining debate is scheduled for September 10th, which is more than two months away. If Biden's poll numbers haven't recovered by then, it's hard for me to imagine Trump showing up. Trump didn't feel the need to debate any of his primary opponents and there would be no advantage to him in giving Biden a chance to redeem himself. If Biden stays in, I think there's a good chance the first debate will be the only one. Second, Biden didn't just lose; he seemed incoherent at times. Third, it was entirely plausible to believe Obama just had a bad night in 2012, because he'd been out on the campaign trail having plenty of unscripted conversations and sitting for interviews. There have been widespread doubts about Biden's capacity for months, yet he hasn't done any interviews and his appearances are always on a teleprompter, so when he failed to rise to the moment, it confirmed voters' fears. Finally, even if we accept the Obama example as a constructive comparison, the analogy is diminished by the post-debate response. In the days following Obama's poor debate performance against Romney, he went directly to the people. He sat down for a national [interview on ABC](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-vows-determined-performance-debate/story?id=17442090) and [called in to a nationally syndicated radio show](https://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2012/10/10/barack-obama-tom-joyner-mitt-romney-debate-election-2012/1624549/) to address the doubts. Biden tried to show his vigor at a rally the following day, but it was again on the teleprompter. He hasn't done any unscripted events yet and his team has seemed intent on not allowing the voters to see any of those for months. I do think it's still possible for him to turn this around, but the way to do it is not by hiding.
Does that *really* work in any reasonable estimation? Do people even need to be reminded who Trump is? Biden needs to have humility and step out gracefully, make way. A much younger candidate - *not* Harris - would electrify the race - similar to what Obama brought when he first ran.
Yes. Clearly they do. And they will be subjected to a huge media campaign to make sure they do. And replacing Biden isn't as easy as just swapping him out with Whitmer or Newsom and continuing. It's way too late for a new candidate to put together an entire funding apparatus now. They don't just take over the Biden-Harris campaign money. All those people on the ground work for Joe. And you can't have Biden step down and not have Harris slot in as the candidate without facing all kinds of questions about the legitimacy of both. That's what you *have* to avoid.
FWIW Ezra Klein has been the most prominent voice on the left talking about replacing Biden and was doing so way, way before the debate. He’s actually addressed all of the points you’re making (Harris, fundraising, the mechanics, etc.) pretty throughly. I don’t think it’s a horse race thing, people in the Democratic Party are reacting to polling numbers and prior to the debate the majority of Americans, including Dems, thought he’s too old for a second term. You should check out Ezra Klein’s latest op-ed if you’re curious.
All fair points. It's just so frustrating to see this all play out; how on earth are Democrats risking handing someone like Trump a second term. He should be a walkover...
There's always a risk of losing an election, no matter the candidate. Would Newsom beat Trump? You sure? The slick California liberal? Whitmer? We all saw how America reacted to a woman at the top of the ticket in 2016. I'll say again, this is an overreaction that feeds the horse-race reporting. It looked like Trump was done in May, now he's not. That drives the media in an election year.
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The expectation is not for democrats to fix anything. The expectation is for them to present a candidate that people want to vote for. It's an incredibly low bar to clear, and they are failing spectacularly. The purpose of the entire election is to prevent Trump from having a second term and they are going with a candidate that might very well not survive another 4 years.
I’m not sure you can replace Harris, she’s the only politician the public has had a say in electing. You can’t say it’s the election to save democracy if you’re putting up Gavin Newsom, parachuted in by party apparatchiks rather than the person who was on the ticket.
> The incumbent typically loses the first debate. People aren't upset because Biden recapitulated Obama's poor performance in his first debate against Romney. They're upset because he was frequently incoherent and visibly incapacitated by age. "Lost the debate" is an understatement.
So? https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/07/politics/political-prediction-market-hillary-clinton-donald-trump/index.html
I encourage you to bet big against what they're saying, at least on the play money ones, if you think they're currently pushing nonsense
Joe steps aside only when Jill tells him to do so.
This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I've always seen the American political system, elections and what's labelled as a democracy to be nothing more than a distraction and appeasement of the lower classes, while the elite continue running the country uninterrupted. Like a petty sports rivalry to get people invested in it and feel like they're somehow involved. Honestly, really consider if the president does have much power. People were panicking and thinking the US will change drastically when Trump became president. But nothing of significance changed, any significant promises that we're diverging from the status quo have been broken, nothing more than part of the show that is the election cycle. Then look at when Biden and the left gained power they desperately wanted, did they accomplish anything of note? Maybe free healthcare (not that hard to accomplish when most developed countries have done it)? Nope. Kind of reminds me of my childhood where school presidents in school making so many big promises, then when they take the role they achieve absolutely nothing because the people that actually run the school silently sit them down and tell them, "sorry billy we can't do that". I would guess the actual people with power steering the country to be the corporations , lobbies and top individuals in the military complex, cia and other secretive government agencies Even if the president did have much power, is it much of a democracy when your input on the country is just between 2 candidates/parties. Game theory would suggest that it would yield little choice as both will be centrists, where the difference might not be meaningful if America actually cared about meaningful elections and giving their citizens a real voice in choosing the direction of the country, they would replace the first past the post voting system with any of the other representative or at least non devolving to bipartisanship systems. But if you're like me and think the elections are nothing more than entertainment for the masses (like giving a child a game controller that's not connected to the playstation while you play your game type of entertainment) you'd be silly to expect a change
Presidents have a huge say in foreign policy and how we use the military but not much impact domestically.
I'd bet the people at the top of cia, military and other non elected officials have more influence in what's done overseas. They keep the president informed, but I don't think Biden or Trump is making much in the way of significant decision making there. Foreign policy is so steady across different presidents, despite election promises to the contrary.
Bush got us into Iraq. No one but he would have done that. He was massively influenced by Cheney, but that was his choice. Biden got us out. These are huge significant changes that cost trillions of dollars and directly influence the lives of millions of people (not Americans, so we don't care very much). I mostly vote for a President on their willingness to keep us out of wars.
Biden, before the invasion, was very outspoken for getting the US in to Iraq. He also voted for it. I think the result wouldn't have been any different if you replaced Bush with Biden at the time. And it was inevitable that troops would get pulled out of an invasion after installing an Iraqi government that was beneficial to America, and the dust settles a little, regardless of who is president. Most wars end at some point. I wouldn't give Biden much credit for getting you out, and he was just as likely to get you in it.
The choice in president likely isn't apocalyptic or doing anything irreversible. But it does have major impact. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/the-positive-case-for-joe-biden That post has some fairly concrete differences between Trump and Biden. Choice in president does change where billions, even trillions of dollars get allocated to.