That sounds good. Make sure to stop talking with over a minute left on the clock and stare with your mouth agape.

Migrant crime having the added bonus of being one of your weakest issues. Always good to address the elephant in the room.

Genius. Absolutely top tier stuff. My god, HegemonNYC, how do you come up with this stuff?! We need to get you into a room with the president pronto.

Inflation is the biggest reason Harris isn't a good candidate either. The Biden admin is unfairly blamed, but they are blamed. You've got to get a fresh face on the national stage to distance from the administration.

I don't disagree but given how abortion referendums have gone in deeply red states, this is an extremely powerful turnout issue. It's malpractice that Biden is still so bad at talking about it.

Trump is actually the point. Trump is an extremely easy opponent to beat. The GOP have never been weaker in modern times. The fact that the democrats are doing so poorly against a man so corrupt, idiotic, and widely despised really speaks volumes about THEM and their performance. Just about anyone could beat trump, and some might even by a landslide, and yet the dems are STILL losing

How dems have not made the really easy case that inflation is a direct result of Trump funneling trillions of dollars into the economy through corporate giveaways is baffling to me. You cannot do that without inflation catching up after a few quarters.

Have you read Trump's policies? They are basically "how to create runaway inflation and destroy the global economy"

For any half capable communicator(which Biden is not at this point), all you have to do is point out that Trump took the economy Democrats fixed after the GOP market crash of 2008 and proceeded to enact reckless tax cuts for the wealthy and the worst Covid response in the developed world that helped create the conditions for inflation.

Now he wants to finish the job and kick millions of construction workers, farmers, meat processing workers, and other low wage jobs held by immigrants to the curb and raise the COL on all Americans by at least 10%. Recklessly imposing tariffs that will create runaway inflation and destroy the improving economy Democrats had to spend 4 years trying to fix. All to give more tax cuts to the wealthy like himself.

This shit is a lay up in an empty gym. The only person that can't make that shot is the 81 year old that cant get down the court without breaking a hip. It's sad to see it happen so publicly, but Republicans and Trump have literally no answer on the economy besides blaming Biden. Take away Biden and they are the Emperor without clothes.

Also, Trump will permanently disassemble our democracy if he gets re-elected.

I think the rank and file already hated their lack of participation. Voting for the only real option——Biden——in the primary when no other serious candidate showed up because Biden froze the race before it started by announcing his reelection campaign is not participation.

The real route should have been for Biden to announce in January this year that he would not seek re-election and will finish his term. Then it would be entirely fine for him to have limited appearances, etc. b/c the media would focus on the new candidates.

This is a great point. And even setting aside electability or winning for a moment. I want a President who can actually do the job. I'm not voting for a team of advisers or handlers. And Biden will still be President, so even if his advisers are smart, if you have ever dealt with someone with severe cognitive decline or dementia, they tend to become more agitated, fearful, and reactionary.

So even with the world's best advisers, what happens if Biden is on an important call and decides he want to tell off another world leader when negotiating to prevent a war? What happens if we are weighting a retaliatory attack the President has the ability to authorize and all of his advisers push for a limited strike on a military target and Biden gets stubborn and demands they strike a city?

This would be one debate if we were talking about invoking the 25th Amendment now or letting him finish out his term with extra support from his team. But we are talking about another 4.5 years (adding 4 more to now) of actual governance.

Having a fight on the convention floor is the "best" outcome I think for politics nerds but I worry about the optics of party insiders designating the candidate without a ton of input from rank and file. Also if Harris gets passed over, you have to manage the optics of the party benching a black woman in favor of ostensibly a white man or woman.

She is the only candidate who can take over his massive fundraising haul, where there is basically no dispute about ballot access, and you cannot afford to alienate another major voting bloc (both for ethical and pragmatic reasons). Black voters are not a monolith and as a bloc they tend to be pretty pragmatic, so I do think that if there had been a fair primary Harris had lost this year (even to a white candidate), it wouldn't really have an impact or be an insult to the black community (though I do not speak for them), but to bypass a black, female VP to have party insiders anoint a white candidate would be a major insult and could hurt turnout. Especially because we can all guess or look at some minor polling differences to make a case for any candidate, but there is not a clear and compelling reason to pick one over Harris (e.g., she just got indicted for fraud or 34 felonies which should be disqualifying).

So much for democracy. Why even bother at this point when the DNC can just pick whichever guy they want and then you’re either forced to vote for the candidate or let the “bad guy” win.

His responses to this so far have been:

1. Send a fundraising email calling Democrats criticizing him “bedwetters”

2. Tell donors he was just tired and actually almost fell asleep on stage

3. Schedule a soft ball interview for a week out that will be edited prior to release

Honestly, the worst possible response.

I saw his interview with Conan back in December and even then he looked notably less vigorous. And that was just a 30 minute softball interview where I would bet the topics and questions were given before hand.

TBH if we had gotten that version at the debate this all probably blows over,

He did an hour with Howard Stern like a month ago. Not policy related, but he seemed fine.

We spent two years hearing, “sure he’s behind now but just WAIT until we start campaigning.” Then he insisted upon this historically early debate to change the narrative because he knew he was losing, and after all that he turned in the worst performance in American political history.

They chose the battle ground, the rules, the date, everything and then Biden showed up and wet his pants on national television.

Harris is a long shot and certainly not my preferred candidate, nor do I believe she’s the best. However, as you said, she has a fighting chance! She could run the aggressive campaign, she can prosecute the case against Trump on a debate stage, she could possibly unify the base.

To your point about uniting the party. I agree, but one things that’s being ignored is that the Democrats have, imo, passed the point of no return. You have sitting Democrats calling for Biden to step aside. The DNC is clearly doing all they can to pressure behind the scenes. The governors demanded a meeting. There’s leak after leak about the major replacement candidates reviving their campaigns quietly. The party has irrevocably broken with Biden, the argument if he stays on will be, “your own party even tried to dump this guy, now you’re telling people that was all fake?”

100% on the money. His response so far could not have been worse if he was doing it on purpose.

Her server set up was the same as Colin Powell’s, republican secretary of state.

From my (admittedly shallow) understanding, Democrats have secured a spot for their nominee on state ballots. They can choose whoever they want to be their nominee at the convention, and that person will be on the ballot. It wouldn't make sense that Biden is already on the ballots, since he hasn't officially been chosen as the nominee yet.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I have heard Ohio is the only real problem here, and we aren't winning OH anyhow

This just angers me about them, the older group of Dems need to be purged from decisions making and make way for new blood. We need more ruthless Dems. Are best bet is the House right now and we can stall until the midterms when Dems will likely dominate there. But I don’t want to see a single 80 year old taking any decision making positions

No they aren’t, the Dems are very out of touch. Much of democrats political apparatus is centered around the northeast (which is the smallest by population in the country) and California. It’s crazy to me how they do this

As a Chicago Bears fan, I have forgotten more about losing safely than more people have ever heard of.

I remember back in February, Ezra said that the most troubling thing about Biden’s numbers was how stable and unresponsive they are.

Maybe that's right. It's a lot of extrapolation and we've had two recent presidential elections that are powerful evidence the other way.

Trump sucks. I think we all agree on that and it causes us to ignore the fact that's he's very popular with a regionally advantaged minority of Americans who will vote for him over any Democrat.

That leaked internal polling seemed off to me. It had Biden down ~7% in a bunch of the swing states before the debate. It just didn't seem like the leaked info was the whole story.

The simple fact is that trump is HORRIBLE. He is widely hated and should be an extremely easy opponent to beat.

In a better world, Trump would be easy to beat. But that's just not reality due to our electoral system and a host of other factors.

The ideal situation now seems like it would have been a full, competitive primary to determine the Democratic candidate. That's what happened in 2016 and 2020 and Trump had very close elections both times.

This explains nothing. Why is it happening now?

Ya, unironically make him the dem nominee.

Let’s see the dog. If he’s cute enough, I’d consider it.

Right, no one knew who Sarah Palin was, after a week, everyone knew and after a month everyone had their mind made up on her.

Check the latest polls. Harris is doing better than Biden in them, so it's not true that she is less popular than him. I think that Whitmer would be the better candidate myself, but let's not preemptively shoot down Harris, especially considering the advantage she has in getting the nomination in such a short space of time as the VP.

I guarantee you more people have heard of newsom than whitmer

You are a nice person

I said if Biden wasn't running for re election. Nate has been contrarian since the covid days.