The smart move would have been Biden to drop out, and a proper primary been ran. Gone are the days of the incumbency bump, at least at POTUS. The American public are fickle and desperate for change. Harris did her best, but Biden would have gotten trounced. I think with an actual primary, a front runner would have emerged that could be more free to distance him/herself from Biden's administration in ways Kamala couldn't.
I disagree with this for two reasons.
1) Lets say Biden did step out of running at midterms: We still would have had to identity politic our way through the primary (black woman - Harris, gay white guy - Pete, straight white guy - Newsom, etc) and that would have kept away some of the better challengers (Beshear, Sharpio, Schiff) but also brought in the circus (Bernie bros, Swalwell, Gillibrand). That’s the exact thing that regular voters, regardless of age and sex, are tired of.
You cause so much more damage to your candidate against someone like Trump who didn’t even debate, let alone campaign against his primary opponents. The overall focus of “Who would be best to defeat Trump and speak directly to the American people?” would have been lost behind “What type of image do we want to project?”
You say “Really? But Trump’s circus won.”
Of course it did, because the part during that 4 weeks where Biden was being pushed out everyone forgets is the jockeying, the identity politics, the media class waffling, and looking like a complete circus itself. And even worse than that, it made Trump look like he had successfully beat his rival.
The right decision at that time would have been to keep everything under wraps, have Biden campaign harder than ever while setting the stage, to come out a month later with a re-evaluation of his stress levels from both running the country and campaigning, he can’t do either, have him resign, and name a white guy as vice president. Aggressively put forth bills and legislation and force Republicans to vote against it for 90 days. Bring it to the floor. Explain to people that we need the house to flip to get stuff done.
And why that didn’t happen leads to our next issue…….
2) It doesn’t matter without turnout. We can sit here and blame white women, Latinos, black men, Muslims, and even white men aged 18-35 for voting for Trump. We can blame far left voters, Latinos, rural democrats, and men in general for not voting. But it’s a bigger problem. It’s the same people who are all playing the game to get in the best position possible. The consultant class. And then when they get there, they act like JFK’s staff pre and post assassination. They want to control everything, lock people out, and be the next David Axelrod. Or Rahm Emanuel. Or George Stepanopoulos. Have their own TV show like Jen Psaki or Nicole Wallace.
The massive problem within the consultant class of Dems is that they like to play the small edge game. They play to get to 270. They play to get 51 senators. They play to get 218 in the house. They took all that money, pumped into “areas and seats of importance” and lost is the Obama and Clinton era “Let’s go talk to everyone on every level”. That’s why there isn’t a social media apparatus. That’s why there isn’t a cohesive message built upon the backs of people at the lowest level. Ultimately, it’s why the numbers were bad AND they don’t know why it happened….. yet regular folks can figure it out within 24 hours.
We heard a lot about unfavorable maps and the Senate being tough to defend, but Dems lack unity within the party that when someone running for House is speaking to their constituents, they are also speaking for the president. There is no support system and everyone is basically playing for themselves unless they can be deemed important enough to go stump for.
They tone down the rhetoric so the voters they want won’t feel bad instead of finding new voters and motivating potential ones. They put out bland plans that the average American doesn’t understand so immediately assume it’s bad. They neuter every single thing while catering to the celebrities they want to hobknob with.
And after 2016 and 2024, it’s time for them to pass on the institutional knowledge and go on to follow their real dreams. Let other people do the real work that needs to be done.
