The first presidential debate is done and the aftermath has not been good for the incumbent, Joe Biden.
Some Democrat politicians and operatives reportedly texted CNN commentators with hopes that Mr Biden, 81, would step aside. Some floated the possibility of going to the White House and publicly stating concerns about him remaining as candidate.
But if Mr Biden were to drop out, it would be a free-for-all. There is no official mechanism for him or anyone else in the party to choose his successor, meaning Democrats would be left with an open (Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago from August 19-22.
Pete Buttigieg
He’s already accepted the nomination.
I was not crazy for him in 2016 but he has grown on me a lot. I think he is a great candidate! Biggest issue this election cycle is he is gay. Lot of bigots will not vote for him because of it and go for Trump.
I really hope he make a presidential run again!
Yes, but were any of those people not going to vote for Trump?
That answer would shock you. Lot of older people it’s still an issue especially in the Midwest and in the south. Your younger more progressive voters it will not change a thing. Hamas is probably the most polarizing issue for the younger voters right now
The interesting thing about Pete is I know life-long Republicans who said they would vote for him. Maybe it’s one of those, “he’s one of the good ones” situations.
Time to unleash Bernie, please
I voted for him last time. May be dumb, but I did believe in him more than Biden. I still don’t know if he could carry the party, but if love to watch him try.
If you don’t want someone who is too fucking old then don’t pick Bernie…
He’d have to resign as Governor first, and seeing as the convention is less than 2 months away it’s unlikely he would/could do it.
Quick, change the law so he can run for president whilst being governor, worked for Florida.
It’s time for Warren to step in!
Elizabeth Warren is just as old.
She’s too old to replace a president for being too old, but she’s younger than Biden was when he was nominated.
Who then?
She was my favorite in 2020 and I’d personally love Warren to be picked. She’s got the stature, ability to draw volunteers and donations, and could put together the campaign infrastructure quickly. I just think Biden stepping aside puts a bad highlight on age that despite her being obviously more vital makes her a poor choice. Plus there’s no possible way the moderate establishment that runs Biden’s Democratic party would ever voluntarily choose her.
I’m at the point where anyone who’s younger and not a RINO is a valid choice. I found Buttigieg and Harris to both be uninspiring political chameleons without any core beliefs in 2020, but if that’s what it takes, so be it. My dream, but only minutely realistic pick for an under 70 replacement? Katie Porter.
It’s time for Warren G to regulate!
There is no official anything when two duopolic corporations (with wildly similar interests) decide which candidates to bring forward. They decide which two will be the only viable choices.
Afaik there are no legal requirements binding them except the restrictions who is eligible (“being born in USA”, that sort of arbitrary weirdness).
Being born in the US is such a stupid requirement. Someone who immigrated here as a child in a relatively non-wealthy family would understand the average american so much better than the super wealthy politicians we have now
being born in USA", that sort of arbitrary weirdness
The actual requirement is “natural-born citizen”, which doesn’t really have a definition. John McCain was born on a US military base in Panama, Rafael Edward Cruz was born in Calgary, yet both were citizens at birth and nobody contested their status as “natural-born” when they ran for President
So vaguely USA flag styled placenta & a gun, got it.
I remember the McCain debate, yes, it makes sense for the ‘citizen’ part. Not sure why does it have to be from birth tho. But it was prob written in colonial times or something.
Are we sure that Ted Cruz was born and not hatched?
Any one 40-60 yrs old with moderate politics and an unobjectionable personality supported by a major party would really cause a splash.
with moderate politics
They’ll do great for one campaign until they actually have to govern and then it’s going to be 1996 and 2012 all over again and we’ll barely scrape by (if we’re lucky) against extremely beatable candidates. Moderates run good campaigns and terrible administrations because the average American voter has been propagandized into believing they want bipartisanship and small government when what they actually want is some affordable healthcare and housing which moderate politics are not going to deliver to them.
e; and actually the “do great for one campaign” thing might be optimistic or antiquated thinking based on how Biden barely won in 2020
Of course we want affordable health care and housing, but I’d absolutely kill for a Bill Clinton or Bush Sr over a Trump any day.
Oh they could win alright. Literally all they have to do is be leftist.
“We’re gonna keep your kids healthy, in a good daycare while you work, educated and fed, and your fucking boss is gonna pay for it all” is a simple mantra well used by unions.
Except they don’t do that. The purpose of a system is what it does, and liberals have done nothing but protect capital since FDR died.
It’s weird that you specify 40 when the Constitution says they only need to be 35. Doesn’t all of our recent political history show we need younger politicians?
Just made a large post on this elsewhere, but the TL;DR is that the party can’t just replace Biden. He has all the delegates from the primaries. Do you really think the party that is campaigning on preserving Democracy can get away with ignoring elections?
Now, it’s possible that Biden gets diagnosed with a severe case of not-gonna-win-itis which adversely affects his health to the point that he has to resign not only from the campaign, but from the Presidency. If that happens, Kamala Harris becomes the 47th President, and has the only real claim to take over the ticket. It has the fun side effect of making Trump reprint all his hats to say “45 - 48” instead of “45-47”.
(The Secret Service better take good care of President Harris, because whatever VP she appoints to take over that role needs to get a majority vote in both houses of Congress, and the House will never do it.)
the TL;DR is that the party can’t just replace Biden.
The Democratic Party can run whoever it wants. The primaries and party nomination are party-internal processes. They could say “now the rules are we choose a random US citizen”. They don’t have to do a primary at all. Some parties don’t. There was a point in time in US history when primaries weren’t a thing, and parties were quite happily doing their thing back then.
kagis for a starting date
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_election
The direct primary became important in the United States at the state level starting in the 1890s and at the local level in the 1900s.[17] The first primary elections came in the Democratic Party in the South in the 1890s starting in Louisiana in 1892.
The United States is one of a handful of countries to select candidates through popular vote in a primary election system;[12] most other countries rely on party leaders or party members to select candidates, as was previously the case in the U.S.[13]
EDIT: As a good example, the Libertarian Party – though much smaller than the Big Two – is the next closest. Under their rules, they participate in primaries, but they treat the primary simply as a way to obtain the preference of the electorate; the primary doesn’t bind the party, under their rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Libertarian_Party_presidential_primaries
The Green Party has a mix of conventions and primaries, depending upon state; a random member of the electorate may-or-may-not directly vote to select their party’s candidate.
I’d add that I don’t at all agree with some of the people in this thread, who are on the left end of the spectrum and mainly seem to be hoping that the Democratic Party will select someone further left than Biden because they personally would prefer a further-left candidate. In the American electoral system, voting is FPTP. That means that you tend to wind up with two large, big-tent, fairly centrist parties (which approximate party coalitions in parliamentary systems), and the smart move for each to win general elections is to run a centrist candidate.
A Big Two party can nominate someone out on the fringes, but then they will cede the general election to the other party if the other party runs a centrist candidate.
In fact, a major argument against primaries is that they may tend to choose a suboptimal candidate for the general election, since they tend towards electing candidates towards the center of the political party, and that that a more-winning strategy for a party is to choose someone not at the center of their party’s views, but between that and the center of the general electorate, and that the party members are more-likely to make use of strategic voting than are members of the electorate that votes for their party’s candidate.
A Big Two party can nominate someone out on the fringes, but then they will cede the general election to the other party if the other party runs a centrist candidate.
Phew, I’m glad we could never end up with a President Trump leading Republican party running rightward as fast as possible then.
Maybe centrist political wisdom is actually just trash and things like charisma, inspiration, and vision actually matter rather than some idea that all voters are on a single axis “politics” line.
Trump’s run on pretty anti-immigrant speech, but he’s pretty moderate in most other respects. He’s probably the least-religious president we’ve ever had, and ran for the “religion party” ticket; he had to run with Pence to make up for lack of appeal to social conservatives. He advocated for (well, or at least gave the impression of) fairly-protectionist policy and ran for the free trade party’s ticket. Since the start of the Cold War, the GOP’s tended to be the hawkish party, and he ran on a relatively noninterventionist platform (though I’ll concede that there’s always been a paleoconservative isolationist faction, but it’s been relatively weak for quite some decades).
Trump constantly says outrageous stuff – he definitely makes it a point to be politically incorrect – but his policy is actually not especially exciting.
I looked at his website way back in the 2016 election before he’d had any steam. This was back when Hillary was running a nice, typical website, long list of issues, you know what campaign websites normally look like. At that point in time, he – hillariously – had only three issues on his campaign website. And none of his actual positions represented much of a change from the status quo:
-
Opposition to FTAs; at the time, we had been negotiating TPA with the Pacific Rim countries and TTIP with the EU. Both had effectively failed already at this point. Trump gave the public the impression that he was responsible for this, but it was something that was going to happen under Obama or not. He also spent a long time complaining about NAFTA. Thing is, I already had listened to speeches from a few politicians who had played this game with NAFTA (e.g. Ron Paul complains a lot about NAFTA but is quieter about why he opposed it, because it wasn’t permissive enough, whereas most people listening to him are upset that it isn’t restrictive enough). I had a pretty good guess that Trump was going to pull similar shennanigans on policy, looked at his white paper and sure enough, no specific changes, just lots of fluffy emotional text giving the impression that he was in opposition. And in office, he took NAFTA, negotiated a few minor changes, and then renamed it to USMCA. Having kicked the legs out from decades of time that manufacturing unions had built opposition to NAFTA, he left the thing alone. So, he advocated for a position that sounded unusually close to the position that the folks on the left side of the spectrum wanted and, in fact, essentially left existing policy alone.
-
Opposition to immigration. Now, you could make a fair argument that he worked pretty hard to sell a nativist image. But his actual policy also wasn’t particularly notable. He put through one regulation that SCOTUS was pretty sure to shoot down and kept it a constant source of political theater for a significant chunk of his term. He made an enormous deal out of his wall, kept it in the news, gave the impression without ever saying so that he was going to build a wall along the entire border. But this isn’t even a new game to play from Trump. Bush Jr used the same shtick back when he ran. In his case, it was a “fence” and played a less-prominent role in his campaign.
-
Gun rights. He has no specifics and this is trivial to do: just don’t involve yourself in additional restrictions. This has been a pretty stock generic Republican point because it costs nothing to do ever since the Democrats did the federal Assault Weapon Ban, which was not popular and sunsetted; it’s something that every candidate just slaps on their page.
Hell, Trump was a Democrat back when Bush Jr was in office.
But Trump is far right. The news says so.
If you read news media that favors the Democratic Party, it will say that Trump is far right. If your regular news sources favor the Democratic Party, you have probably read a lot of articles over past years that say that.
If you read news media that favors the Republican Party, you will find plenty of material that will say that Biden is far left.
But Biden’s not far left! That’s ridiculous!
Yup. But presenting someone as being extreme is a good way to make them less appealing. You can find people who will self-identify as “left-of center” or “right-of-center”, even “left” or “right”. But very few politicians will call themselves “far left” or “far right”. That’s usually a label used by the media favoring the other side.
There are a lot of things that I don’t like about Trump. But they mostly deal with his presentation and the tactics he uses. I dislike his willingness to make contradictory statements. I don’t like the fact that he tries to piss people off about someone else – especially via dishonest claims – and exploit that anger. But he’s extraordinary mostly in his presentation, not in the policy that he’s adopted. We had him for four years. US policy didn’t change much, certainly not from mainstream Republican Party policy.
When Trump first ran for office, I remember Bill Kristol – a conservative commentator who really dislikes Trump – stating that most of what Trump says is misdirection. Basically, Trump can’t force the media to say what he wants. But he can make a colossal amount of noise about something outrageous that they cannot resist covering, so that they talk about that instead of whatever meaningful actual policy stuff is going on. The coverage may not be positive, but it lets him direct the media narrative – it’s all about whatever outrageous thing he said on Twitter. I was a bit skeptical at the time. I could believe that Trump wouldn’t change much on NAFTA because I’d seen other Republican politicians play the same game he was, but had a harder time buying that on immigration. But that was, I think, pretty accurate as an assessment.
LOL. Yeah, sure thing bud. People could be excused for believing this fantasy before his election, but they were dumb then too. And he’s on track to win again after everything he did and the transformation of the party into the vision that matches his fascist rhetoric.
-
Also, fun trivia bit:
They could say “now the rules are we choose a random US citizen”.
There were historically some systems of government who not merely had random people chosen as candidates, but random people chosen to run the society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
In governance, sortition (also known as selection by lottery, selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, stochocracy, aleatoric democracy, democratic lottery, and lottocracy) is the selection of public officials or jurors using a random representative sample.[1][2][3]
In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.[4][5] Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.
The primaries aren’t actually legally binding. This is a misconception that keeps going around but the party makes the rules for the convention and it’s the convention that nominates the candidate. Furthermore, Russia has more democratic elections than the primary we got this year. A single name on the ballot isn’t an election. It’s a roll call.
Yep. It’s too late. Should’ve done this ages ago if you were going to do it.
At this point it’s starting to feel like Biden’s holding the nation at gunpoint and making us have a second Trump term. He’s always been a terrible politician, running twice for the nomination and failing to get a single delegate, until Obama made him VP. Honestly I suspect part of the reason Obama chose him is because he didn’t wanna play kingmaker and figured Biden was too old to run again.
Then in 2020 I think the argument was Biden could benefit from Obama’s popularity. I certainly thought that was a terrible pick, but not totally lacking in logic. But in 2024 there was utterly no rational basis for Biden to be running in the first place. Now that he’s been a complete disaster, he’s just fucking us as a nation for his own narcissism.
Yeah, but the question is who else. Any suggestions?
Take the L and use the incoming 4 years to plan for a candidate that doesn’t suck
If Trump wins, there will never be a real election again. Conservatives will move to the Russian election model. This is an end-game election.
And it will be again in 2026. And 2028. And 2030 if those don’t work…
The Nazis are in the Reichstag. It ends with the death of the Republic or a civil war, period.
Yes, hand the executive branch to the guy who attempted a coup to stay in power last time, backed by the Project 2025 guys, and come back in 4 years for the election that will surely still actually take place. Sure. Great plan.
Anybody. Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders, AOC, John Elway, I don’t care. Biden keeps saying he’s the only guy who can beat Trump. After last night’s debate it should be obvious that he’s the only guy who can’t beat Trump.
Because it is sooo late in the arbitrary-election-cycle, no matter what the Dems do, they’re fucked.
Go with Biden?
Then they’re fucked.
Go with Kamala Harris, whom the white-supremacists have been working against for years?
Then they’re fucked.
Find somebody else?
There isn’t time, so then they’re fucked.
This highlights the category of political-lesson that you have to “fail early & fail often” ( to use a phrase from successful serial-startup founders ) in order to find the robust candidates whom you can currently win with.
UNlike the way the Dems have played.
The CNN+NYT “shutting down” of progressive-issues & progressive-voices, in the last election, burned too much potential out of existence, and that traction is gone: non-recoverable.
The mega-entitlement of the Biden insitution is buckling & collapsing with increasing obviousity.
I fucking told everyone so, again & again & again, but it was all my “delusion” & “incompetence” & “defectiveness” & “lies”, was it??
Trump is going to become the US’s dictator,
& is going to begin the 2nd half of the US’s Civil War ( the Confederates only pretended to surrender, & now are earning a “reverse takeover” ), & the butchery will probably reduce the US’s population by 2/3rds, within 12y, counting all the consequences both direct & indirect ( complete failure to manage a hurricane’s landfall costs much more life than does managing it competently: multiply that by a dozen per year, & you’ve got human-costs up the gills, without even considering atmospheric-rivers, megadroughts, quakes, wildfires, or any other kind of disaster to multiply costs on, right? ).
it is infuriating to see people insist that “social pressure will make this work”, millions of times,
while it measurably, proveably, isn’t working, but that is what Natural Selection at the species-level means, isn’t it?
Terminal Species-ending Butchery.
Sunak’s obliteration of his own party, Kim Campbell’s obliteration of her own party, what was that Liberal premier who wiped out her own party, in Ontario, can’t remember that one’s name…
Social-pressure never acts when it is needed, it only acts when it gets around to feeling comfortable with acting, and that is consistently too-late.
So, when will the Democratic Party admit they need to change gears??
After they’ve fundamentally lost, is when.
Imagine running a bunch of freight-trains that way: “oh, we’ll slow-down when we feel a collision beginning, but until then, we’re really fine, & there’s no indication of any real need to be doing anything different, is there?”
Feelings are the wrong metric for preventing this kind of catastrophy.
frustration-rage
Authority needs to have hard walls, bright lines, & deadly-force biting its corruptions/entitlements/dishonesties/DarkHexad enactments, etc.
Political-process won’t ever allow any such rule, in its dominion, of course…
And that is why political-process cannot be permitted to own our world’s fate: its conflict-of-interest, & its inescapable-corruption disallow integrity from ruling, & without integrity, then only “Justice”, with falsifying-quotes, the phony version of Justice, remains…
So, The Great Filter’s going to extinguish yet another world, from this Universe, is it?
Political-machiavellianism/dishonesty’s going to snuff all LivingPotential, LivingWorth, LivingOpportunity of this whole world, while the “social consensus” indulges in orgiastic clusterfucking, until existential-viability itself is gone…??
Ah, but at least everyone will be able to feel that they “weren’t responsible”, right?
Social-feelings: that’s the real LORD, and so long as it’s happy, then existence, itself, isn’t actually necessary, right??
bitterness
It’s hard being intelligent enough to see the problems but lack the political will power and opportunity to change them.
I believe you. I think Trump has a very good chance of winning and the result could be conflict among different states or groups within them. Unless the conspiracy theorists are right and the Gavin/Kamala ticket is already selected for the ballot and the win. But it seems likely Trump will win. The upper classes have engaged in price gouging because a Democrat was in office, Biden never called them out on it in aggressive way because he lacked the aggressive nature and rage and gall to do it, and an incredible number of people are feeling stressed out by price changes. There are also many swing voters unhappy with immigration policies and think they are too mild. Between the two issues, Biden would lose even if he did seem energetic and lucid.
Do you think it’s bad enough that it makes sense to flee the US? And to where would one even flee? There are wars in Eastern Europe, it’s not even clear Western Europe is safe. I have always though Trump was likely in the pocket of Russia or an actual Russian Spy, so when Trump wins he will unequivocally support Putin, which will be a disaster because Western Europe can’t stand up to the evil of Putin and Trump alone… especially not when there are Chinese and Saudi alliances that Putin has been working on.
It’s terrible but the best option is probably for Biden to escalate the war now, which he is unlikely to do since he’s sort of become a bit of a hippy. Putin sees Biden’s hippy weakness as well. If Trump is a Russian spy, the US intel agencies likely know and have to decide whether to do something to protect the country, even something that some might seem nefarious.
It’s a terrible situation and mostly a distraction from the environmental catastrophy on the horizon.
Do you think it makes sense to leave the US now? I am not that attached to anything and could go anywhere. I am white but don’t like bigots, which may impact my options.
Bro had absolutely zero business writing this banger but he did it anyways, what a madlad.
Respect
I mean, I think it devolved into a literal mental breakdown at the end. That or it was just a freeform poem all along.
Nah he’s basically saying people mind more to stroke their egos and what others in their in-group think of them , so much in fact, they be willing to risk humanity itself just to not give their perceived enemies the satisfaction
Too many articles focusing on replacing Biden when they should be focusing on Trump being a federal convict walking around free.
Not enough articles saying why Biden is so unappealing that quite a few people prefer the convict. Physician, heal thyself.
Is it too much to ask for the most important office in the world not be held by an old demented man?
No. Unfortunately there’s two of them.
Who’s more crazy tho. The one who wants to put a senile old man through what is in all intents and purposes elder abuse, or the one who doesn’t?
You lost me on that one. What?
It’s not elder abuse for Trump because Nazis aren’t people.
Nazis are people… They’re just shitty people… It’s important not to allow dehumanization of anyone
There will be more of that around July 11th when he has his sentencing hearing. Biden shit the bed Yesterday.
Lol wtf. The BBC implying that Biden did such a shit job he could stop running.
They asked the question because …
Some Democrat politicians and operatives reportedly texted CNN commentators with hopes that Mr Biden, 81, would step aside.
That’s from the summary and article, if you had bothered to read it.
Treating the opinions of any asshole with a cell phone as “news” is one of the leading causes of the downfall of civilization.
That’s from common fucking sense, if you bothered to have any.
Unfortunately news doesn’t cease to be if you dislike it.
A man 14 months older but mentally 10 times more mentally sound
I honestly think the job of being President of the USA is too taxing on the body. I don’t think Bernie is up to the task anymore.
Little do they know that taxing is Bernie’s kink.
This guy
Is wondering how Trump is allowed to run for a third term.
Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
That doesn’t hold up logically. Editors can ask any question they want in a headline.
Just get the Bern in there
