Just be straight with voters, say “OK, maybe I not up to this after all, I have Kamala on hand because I knew she’d be ready to go from day 1,” run with that, seize the news cycle.
The problem is Kamala isn’t actually popular or a good campaigner. Part of what’s hurting Biden is the fact that people assume Kamala is going to be president if he’s reelected.
That’s going to be a right wing attacking point very soon (if it isn’t already).
They’re going to say that a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for President Kamala Harris.
“The economy is actually great, Biden isn’t a reanimated corpse!”
(people constantly babbling about “ignoring your eyes and ears” being the final most essential command…to mobilize people for Joe)
Spoiler alert: nothing changed really
It already was a few months ago, now it’ll really be amped up.
Went from Biden +4.7 to Biden +2.8 in a tracking poll, and that’s before a week of media coverage about how he should drop out. And the #1 reason there wasn’t a bigger shift is because most people expected him to do awful, so they got what they expected.
It’s not going to get better from here. Now that it’s obviously legitimate the whole campaign will revolve around his dementia
That’s what you got from that article?!?!
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Yeah exactly. You can have some really bad moments in a campaign and survive them, but not when they confirm the #1 concern about your candidacy.
@skydiver8 you have mentioned that the new candidate wouldn’t be able to fundraise in time or get their infrastructure built in time.
A) What stops the Biden warchest from being spent on, say, Newsom? And/or against Trump?
B) What stops the infrastructure and staff from staying the same, and Newsom just sliding in at the top?
As long as Biden goes along with it, I don’t see why it would be impossible.
Look, I love your dedication and I love your insight. I have a ton of respect for walking the walk and making politics happen, but the answer here is obvious: the media outlets, at least the capitalist overlords thereof, want Trump, and also, Trump has created a cult of personality such that he can do no wrong in the eyes of his supporters. And rich assholes know he’ll do anything they want even if he’s a racist rapist idiot. Biden isn’t going to give rich assholes literally anything they want, and his supporters expect actual competency and not just a cult figure as a leader. No one is calling to replace Trump because everyone knows Trump is irreplaceable. He is the entire cult. Don Jr. ain’t it. McConnell ain’t it. Cruz ain’t it. The only thing Trump could do for his supporters to call for a replacement is to stop being Trump, stop being racist, stop being a misogynist, etc. Trump getting away with crimes shows how strong he is to the cult.
I, and basically everyone here, don’t have a cultish devotion to any Democrat. Fat lot of good that will do us for the next 4 years.
Been busy so haven’t been looking at many articles but have they come out saying he had a sore throat or something?? Seems bizarre not to because doing so could give some plausible reason for him to perform better next time via a better strategy of one sentence responses or whatever
Going with no, but I’m also sorta including VPs in the debates, as they’ve usually been a part of the ‘presidential debate’ bit. Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin were definitely worse. I’m too young to remember Mondale. And actually, Hillary might have been worse, too.
Nixon is thought to have literally lost an election because he refused to wear makeup. I’d go with that one
A) campaign finance laws. Sure, they could spend all they wanted on IEs (against Trump) but there’s a donation limit to a campaign committee (I think president this year is 2900?). IEs don’t build field operations and infrastructure. For that you need money that belongs to the actual campaign, and any new candidate would be starting there from scratch.
WAIT, there’s one exception. One candidate who could use the Biden/Harris war chest. Coincidentally, that’s the only person that everyone conveniently leaves out of their “replace Biden” talk, and also the only one that the DNC would even remotely consider calling on to replace him. Yep, you got it. Kamala Harris.
B) Infrastructure and staff are paid for by the Biden/Harris campaign. A new candidate needs a new filing committee with the FEC, and you can’t just move the money over because it’s a different person.
Sorry.
A) Can’t superpacs spend on whatever they want with like no donation limits? Can a retiring candidate not redirect all their money to a superpac?
B) Sounds like it can be handled with appropriate paperwork. Monday: You’re all fired by the Biden campaign. Tuesday: you’re all hired by the New campaign. Same jobs, same pay. Yeah it’s messy, taking over leases and stuff. But again, this is not the fault of the people who said he was too old a year ago, and it’s not going to be our fault when he loses.
The bottom line here is that this is a disaster and the people who said we couldn’t change candidates six months or a year ago are now doing the “oh you silly plebes” routine again, because things turned out the way the silly plebes predicted. Like maybe it is too late to change, but if so that just means the race is over.
Sorry, I should define my terms.
Super Pacs are who do IEs…Independent Expenditures. Sure Biden could dump his money over to a pac, but the IE money still can’t be spent to do field work under the name of the campaign. Superpacs can’t coordinate with campaigns at all. Also, they don’t usually have the staff to run full campaign operations or field organization…they usually just source out mailers and robotexts and TV ad buys.
Sure, the “Committee to Defeat Donald Trump” is more than welcome to buy access to the voter rolls via NGPVan and set up their own volunteer recruitment and field events, but to a normie who wants to make a few calls for the candidate, they’re not going to know to go to some random PAC that can’t actually work with the campaign on field ops. They’re gonna go look up “John Doe for President” and sign up to volunteer through their website. And due to FEC laws, the campaign is not allowed to point them to the CDDT pac.
All the rules are good and there for good reason, but in this ONE instance, it makes it really hard to pivot to a new person.
The way around this, probably, is that since Harris is also on the name of the committee, she could probably use the Biden/Harris warchest.
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How about this is the most important election of our lifetimes and I need your GIFT of $85 every time I send this email after something bad happens? This pint of Jeni’s ain’t gonna buy itself.
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