“When Trump was running again for reelection, I really thought I had the best chance of beating him,” Biden said of his decision to run in 2020. “But I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old. And so I did talk about passing the baton.”
So then why the fuck didn't you let a proper primary happen grandpa!? Why didn't you step the fuck down sooner!?
He's legitimately delusional if he thinks that. He only won in 2020 because of a devastating worldwide pandemic that his opponent was in the middle of botching the response to, getting millions of people killed. If not for that we would already be at the end of Trump's second term.
The democratic party needed a real primary without meddling from DNC leadership.
Because you don't give up the incumbent advantage in US Presidential Elections. It is bad strategy, and not only eliminates a very real statistical advantage, it makes the party look very bad which can actively hurt the party beyond just losing the advantage.
There are people who have studied this shit their entire lives. You don't know better than them.
Nearly every incumbent in a Western democracy for the past two years has lost their re-election.
Desperately clinging to out of date concepts in the face of statistics is the reason why you're not a political analyst. The reason Biden stepped down and the reason Trudeau just retired is because polling data made it abundantly clear neither incumbent had a snowball's chance in hell of winning.
You know what would have been the adult move? Him resigning in early 2023 when people were starting to notice senior moments more and more often. Then we would not have had an incumbent who proved he belongs in the memory care ward on national television. You don't suffer a loss like that debate and hide behind strategy. They fucked us. They fucked the country over one senile man's ego.
Not running again in the first place, like the original plan was, would have helped too. Not this botched primary override shit. That's 3 primaries in a row the Dems have fucked with. Stop listening to the damn donors over the voters.
Actually do someone to help the people, you'd win in a land slide.
Just FYI, he didn't say it unprompted but was literally asked if he thought he would:
“It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” Biden said when asked if he believes he could have won the November election. The president based his assertion on his review of election polling. He conceded, however, that larger questions remained about his ability to complete another four year term.
“When Trump was running again for reelection, I really thought I had the best chance of beating him,” Biden said of his decision to run in 2020. “But I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old. And so I did talk about passing the baton.”
The phrase "could have won" carrying a lot of water there. Yes, in theory a golden retriever could have won (and, in my opinion, should have won) against Trump. But a lot of stars were going to have to align given July/August polling and Biden's public image.
Him stepping aside after the debate really was the smartest thing he could have done IMO, for him personally I mean.
That way, if Harris had won he could take credit for selflessly stepping aside and putting country first. And now that she lost he can just say "well I might have won, but you all forced me to quit" and there's no way to prove it definitively either way.
Personally I think Trump won the moment that assassin clipped him and he stood up doing the fist pump in front of the flag. That photo was pure 80s movie cheese and people eat that shit up.
I’ve never realized how smarmy Cindy (? I had no idea i knew more names than just Jan) looks in this. It’s honestly pretty accurate for siblings, but damn does it raise my younger sister ire.
In what universe? Certainly not the one where all polling data had Trump beating him in a landslide, where Biden was so unpopular that he was going to lose the Dems down-ballot races. Biden seriously thinks that the issue with Kamala Harris is that she was a black woman, instead of realizing the issue is that Kamala said she was going to be 4 more years of Joe Biden politics.
I actually hate the idea of using boomer as an insult to people who are just of the right age. To me, you gotta have a certain state of mind and actions to count as a shitty boomer. Just as there's some super cool old hippies out there, there's entitled 30-something Karens out there that need to hear "Ok Boomer."
And let the people pick and not corporations? Never going to happen.
Most states refuse to adopt anything but FPTP because it works in favor of the two parties. Governors across the 50 states have vetoed bills or state wide ballots to enable them. It's easier to win against one than five.
No, it just would have made Trump's victory even more sad and pathetic.
The goose is cooked, Out of Americans who care to get off their ass and vote, there are more Jingoistic Ultranationalists than there are not. Trump's victory was assured if the competition was Kamala or Biden.
I don't think this is true. A lot of the people who voted for Trump in the election are simply disillusioned with the status quo, and rightly so. They don't know enough to know which changes would help, but when only one side promised change, they went with that side.
Trump's victory was assured not by an overwhelming amount of fascist voters, but by an overwhelming amount of unhappy voters combined with Democrats' utter failure to challenge the system that made them unhappy.
Yeah I'm sorry no. If you voted for Trump for the reasons you state (or even decided to not not vote), then that's on you. Stop trying to blame Democrats. Be an adult and take responsibility for your actions.
You have to be extremely stupid to vote for Trump for the reasons you mention. Everything was easily available, there was no reason not to understand why it's idiotic, unless you're ignorant.
You specifically talk about some really fucking stupid "reasoning" for voting for Trump, and then immediately absolve the idiots who made their choice based on that reasoning. No. Just... No.
There is hope. If you read the polls section of the article you will notice that the ruling was very unpopular among people of both parties (among common people, of course I feel that Republicans in office don't agree with their constituents). I think now is the time for a strong campaign fiance reform push. If we can't get it done at the federal level we shall try the state level.
He can also throw a football over those mountains. And he can hold his breath for 17 minutes. He once flew to the moon in a hot air balloon, and had an affair with the Queen of the Moon. He likes green eggs and ham, but never once hopped on pop. He invented the post-it note and once fed a gremlin after midnight with no consequences.
They should have stopped putting him in the news 5 years ago. He's too old to even finish his term with any competence. He's still got 9 days to go and he looks and sounds mostly dead.
Fuck off, dude. Your legacy will be known not for your accomplishments but for how your hubris has done irreparable harm to the future of this country and future generations.
He should have won. He's smarter, more well spoken, has a better moral compass, a better track record on legislation, better health, better administration.
The comments here show pure distain for Biden and I don't understand why. He was better in every single regard and yet the people who claim to support that constantly spit on him at every opportunity. People who act like that way helped trump to victory. You would never see a republican act that way towards trump.
Which includes full send genocide and ignoring constituents who opposed this, including within his own administration.
They only switched to Kamala for the PACs that refused to give lobbying funds because even they knew Biden would easily lose.
Of course PAC money is no match for actual votes, so after Kamala got her campaign paycheck and told the uncommitted movement to get bent, she inevitably lost.
Yes even in the flawed democracy of the USA, constituents ultimately decide who wins. They didn't even bother lying or pandering to voting blocs for support. They straight up banned them from the main DNC rally and refused to meet their demands.
This is such a no brainer. Trump tries his best not to alienate his voter base which is why his policy is hot trash garbage all over the place, but he actually did the bargain basement job of a politician which is to promise changes for your vote, regardless of whether or not he actually fulfills them.
Biden and Kamala were both content in dropping millions of democratic voter demands and willingly losing to Trump to defend a POS ethnostate across the Atlantic.
Have you listened to trump speak? He cannot string together a single coherent sentence. The guy is a moron. The Senile talking point was manufactured by the right and parroted by people like you. Notice how it completely disappeared when it was trump vs harris.
Your mistake is thinking this was a binary choice. The reality is that both Trump and Biden were competing to convince people to come out and vote. Not to vote for them but just to vote. Nearly everyone would already know if they'd vote Democrat or Republican, the only question was whether they were going to vote at all. Unfortunately Republican and Democrat voters require different motivations.
For Republicans all they need is a target. Someone to be angry at and blame all their problems on. Trump gives them that in spades. They just want someone to tell them it's someone else's fault their life is shit but that they've got a plan to fix it by making someone else suffer. Trump was only too happy to do exactly that.
Democrats meanwhile want to hear exactly how a candidate is planning on fixing problems. Usually not just any problems either, but specifically the problems they care about most. That could be global warming, racism, the wealth gap, workers rights, gun violence, the genocide in Palestine, the housing market, or something else entirely. That is what motivates them to show up to the polls. Biden (and then Harris) largely failed to do that. Instead he put forward plans that either inched towards solving those problems at a snails pace, or like in the case of Palestine outright ignored the problem.
So yes, Biden is objectively a better president than Trump in every metric except for one. The one that actually mattered. The ability to convince people to get off their asses and head to the polls. Honestly at this point the problem isn't even Biden or even Harris, it's the entire DNC and their milquetoast platform.
Ah look someone on the "left" trying to convince people not to vote for the democrat because of Palestine. You must be so happy that this wont be an issue next election because Trump will ensure Palestine doesn't exist.
This section is so insane. Its shows how well republicans are able to completely rewrite history through propaganda. Biden stuttered a few times in a 1hr+ debate and answered every question intelligently but he fucked up his words on one question. Trump couldnt answer a single question and proved he had no idea what a tariff was or how tax works. But Trump got a single favourable soundbite so I guess he dominated???
After his disastrous performance in his single debate against Trump, during which the president struggled to form coherent answers to questions and seemed utterly lost in the setting, public confidence in his ability to pull off an electoral victory imploded.
You can't keep letting the right get away with narrative shifting like this. Even if Trump had done nothing the right would be online posting that he had the greatest performance of all time. Support your damn candidate if you want to win.
During the debate Biden looked like the resident of an old folks home who walked down the wrong hallway and can't find his way back to the common room.
Everyone who watched the debate saw that. It was a DISASTER for him.
It's not right wing narrative. After I watched the debate I was pissed and felt like the Biden administration had hid the fact that Biden isn't in a condition to be president because that's what happened.
Trump didn't have any coherent answers but you could at least hear him
I literally called it the night of the debate that they were going to overreact to him being sick, and not even talk about the multiple lies that Trump told. Sure enough within a week, he was stepping down.
In a world where we could have stopped doing the fascists' work for them by calling him old and senile and attacking him at every step? Yeah. I think he would have. Americans like old white guys who enable genocide. Americans hate women. Especially brown women.
That said? I also think we needed the "We have a better choice" of Kamala and the real problem is just that people don't fucking care enough to vote.
So for all my many many many many problems with how the Democrats have handled the election and the fallout of it... I'll give a mulligan on this.
They had internal polling showing Trump would take 400 electoral votes after that debate. If you don't remember how disastrous it was then go watch it again.
And there was the better part of a year between the debate and the election. Attention spans are short considering we elected a guy who attempted a coup and has financial ties to the Kremlin.
Again, the biggest shifts in voter demographics were white men and hispanic men. Who both voted for the white old guy dem but not the woman dem.
I'll never get over how people gave me shit for thinking dropping out of the race 4 months before the election to push for kamala was the dumbest fuckin thing any of them could've done.
Biden was polling worse than Kamala, so yes you still deserve shit. Biden had no chance in hell of winning. The dumb thing was running Biden at all in the first place and then switching to someone who wouldn’t denounce the crisis in Palestine.
Honestly we should've been able to run a wet paper bag against Trump and win. But backing down 4 months before the election was the most cowardly tail tucking thing they did. If he was gonna back down it should've been from the beginning.
and then switching to someone who wouldn’t denounce the crisis in Palestine.
Why do people here think they deserve to be catered to?
I support Palestine and I'm completely against Israel's genocide.
However, I'm not delusional. I understand the (voting) demographics in the US. And given the track record of progressive voters and parties (that is: completely uninvolved at every level, and crawling out of a hole every 4 years to be a spoiler candidate, only to vanish for another 4 years, respectively), I have no expectation that one of the two major parties in our bullshit two party system, is going to cater to or pander to my pet issues. No matter how important they may be. Why the fuck would they? We're not even a real voting bloc.
Leftists seem to think that they're just entitled to representation without doing a single fucking thing to create it. Instead they just whine about other people on the left (yes, including Democrats).
Kamala didn't do anything different either. Her entire campaign was "I'm not Trump or Biden" even though she had pretty much all the same policies as Biden.
Right here, happy to tell Joe Biden he's fucking wrong and his party knows it.
Biden's ass got thrown to the curb because even armchair political analysts with access to only public data could read the writing on the wall. He was so unpopular he was effecting donors and down-ballot races.
The only reason Joe doesn't realize he had no chance is because he's so dementia-addled he has forgotten. Kamala Harris running on Joe Biden's platform could not do it, how on earth do you seriously think Joe could?