The polls use to underestimate Trump. In 2022 they underestimated Democrats. No democrat polls statistically better than Biden. There are ballot access issues with any swap. There are money issues if it’s not Harris.
Watch AOC’s instagram live. And consider the elites harping on this may want Biden out to purge the populist anti-monopoly team he has assembled.
I would love someone to explain to me how millions of Biden voters suddenly will switch to Trump because Biden is old. It’s nonsensical.
Biden trailing is 100% a media failure. They said the economy was bad when it’s good. They harped on crime when it was falling. They ignore Trump’s daily incoherent ramblings and act like Biden’s age is a bigger deal. The media is allowing a fascist takeover by not focusing on the true stakes.
AOC's Instagram live was a tour de force of incisive, thoughtful thinking and captured the complexity and nuances of the current situation in ways that the pundits and media elite seem unable to fathom. I hope Margaret listens to it if she hasn't already and puts as much stock in the thoughts of someone with a track record of defying the polls and shocking the political world by appealing directly to voters, as she apparently is doing with pundits like Wasserman who were wrong in 2022 and really don't understand the mechanics of running successful campaigns on the ground.
Margaret, I'd love to know your opinion on how the media fell for falsehood that Trump's convention speech was about "unity." If the media cannot accurately report the contents of a speech, we are in trouble.
Who fell for it? I’ve read only scathing takedowns of his inability to sustain unity for longer than 28 minutes (or whatever it was) and his inability to shut up after that.
The AP, for example. And there were SO many articles that went out to front pages across the US that were about "unity" based on the speech Trump had prepared, rather than the speech he actually gave (because he was still giving it when they went to print, and it got steadily more unhinged as he went along, both in content in and just the fact that it Kept. Going.)
I think this is right about pre-writes, and Lord knows, doesn’t that show you how much the media has forgotten about covering Trump!Why would you trust a written draft to be what he actually says?!
The coverage I saw (I am very carefully curating my media intake these days so as not to have an aneurism and be robbed of my chance to cast a third ballot against American fascism) was all by people who saw the speech in its entirety before opening their mouths. I’ve since poked around and have seen the covered that you folks are referring to. I retract my question.
Many of those so-called articles were actually pre-writes, a somewhat common practice that's gotten way out of hand in journalism today. Many journalists were given access to partial copies of Trump's RNC speech, before he delivered it, and wrote their pieces based on that.
Of course, doing that is almost the same as writing a "report" based on a "one sheet" - a common form of shorthand notes in broadcasting - from a PR person. So of course what gets spat out sounds like propaganda - because it is.
As you correctly noted,, those who waited for the speech as delivered saw & heard something entirely unhinged, which is who Trump really is.
But that's not the narrative the media wants to run with. And so many outlets will ignore it.
CNN also had stories about what a unifying speech it was, including commentary from Van Jones. The Washington Post's lead headline was that it was a "lengthy speech."
Remember, this was a presidential nomination acceptance speech that included praise for a fictional cannibal.
Yeah. Agree. I'll be a little picky here and say that I don't believe the AP is delusional, but that like the NY Times, Sullivan's former employer, many headlines of importance, including this one from the AP, read as click-bait and no longer represent in any way the actual content of the articles they head. It's frustrating as a reader because now you have to read the story to discern the article's general content. So, here's the AP headline:
AP: "Trump urges unity after assassination attempt while proposing sweeping populist agenda in RNC finale"
And here's a proper headline based on the actual content of the article:
"Trump urges unity for Seventeen Minutes then returns to vindictive style in RNC finale"
Gary, the media, including the New York Times, in order to increase their page views and click throughs, are currently engaged in a practice, called “burying the lead “, an intentional journalism tactic, whereby the article leads off with a controversial, ephemeral, teaser headline and initial paragraph in order to tease the reader to read on further. Many teaser headlines are built on things designed to rile up the reader, for instance, "Republicans Claim Global Warming is a Hoax."
The journalist does not contest the misstatement outright, and seeks to hook the reader to get them to keep reading down through the article, past all the advertisements, to see if the journalist will actually comment, if the misleed/lie is true or not. That’s why you see all these mainstream media articles with Trump announcement of unity in the first paragraph, because the journalists are manipulating the readers into crying out that it’s not true, that he’s a divider and then getting them to read through the rest of the article and past all the ads to see if Trump will in fact be identified as a divider.
And the NYT has a stated policy that they will not call his untruths lies. They will “report” and let their readers judge. Straight out of the mouth of the last Ed Dean Baquet and carried on by the new guy Joe Klein, who also said democracy is not an issue for them because of “polls.”
Microsoft has PROVED that 60% of all cyber attacks into the U.S. come from Russia. This includes: food and supplies, elections and polls, banks and finance, medical and hospitals, airlines, and on and on. Russians have tainted our election polls FOR ONE PURPOSE - to help Donald Trump win. Russians know that Americans believe the polls - so what if the polls are providing tainted research and incorrect numbers? The entire movement to get Biden to step down is based on this possible incorrect information.
“On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement. ‘Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as the elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate YOU on this’.” (Journalist Craig Unger talks about Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history.” VOX Politics, by Sean Illing, January 12, 2019.)
When Nikonov congratulated the Russian DUMA for Trump’s win of the U.S. presidency, the Russians were celebrating “one of the greatest intelligence and clandestine operations in modern history.” The Russian KGB had trapped, skillfully developed, and maneuvered a Russian “asset” into the highest political position in the United States - President Donald Trump.” (Unger)
If Joe Biden steps down now - in the last stage of this election process - it will only help Donald Trump win. Help convince Biden to stay in the election.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. I lived and worked in six dictator-led countries (mostly Russia) over 20 years and became bi-cultural in the process. There are days when the Russian side of my brain over-rules the American side. Having said this, there are few Americans who grasp Russian logic, thinking, and how a dictator country or a dictator operates..
In the 1990's when Americans were flying to Russia to start joint ventures with Russian business partners, there was a warning published by the Moscow Business Guide that said: "The most fundamental concepts that have guided your judgement for a lifetime are not even known, much less understood here." Many, many of these Americans died because they lacked a basic understanding of life in a mafia-style environment.
My comments about American election polls come from direct comments from Russian friends who are in the information business. And while there is no evidence - to quote you - "that Russia infiltrated and corrupted the polling processes itself" - please do not generally underrate Russia's advanced cyber capabilities - a mistake made by the American general public.
Let me quote from Russian Roulette (P. 59) and quoted in From Democracy to Democrazy: "For years U.S. officials had been grappling with Russian cyber intrusions. As far back as 1996, Russian hackers penetrated our Defense Department networks and stole documents that if piled up would be three times the height of the Washington Monument. In the 2000's the Chinese were perceived as the biggest cyber threats to the United States . . .but the Chinese were noisy about it. They left readily identifiable fingerprints. Ledget (former head of the the National Security Agency) had long since become convinced the Russians were the more sophisticated and stealthy adversary , , , For example, the Chinese would break into your house, smash your window, steal your cutlery. The Russians, on the other hand, would pick your lock, reset the alarm, and steal the last five checks in your checkbook and a copy of your signature, and leave the same way. You would not even know they were there." So if you do not believe me, then please believe the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency!
And while I am swimming against the tide concerning Biden staying in the race, I still strongly believe that there is no one in the field better than Biden and his 50 years of experience and wisdom to combat the enormous wickedness and the many-sided destructiveness of Trump and his Russian ties.
I think Harris has done a great job and should Biden succumb to illness or die, she is there is support his needs and responsibilities.
There are so many reasons why Biden should NOT drop out! Polls are notoriously wrong. The logistics of getting someone new on the ballot in all 50 states are daunting. Republicans already plan legal challenges. If you think the battle is uphill NOW, changing candidates will make it more like climbing Everest!
Disgusted to see even you've become a hack Margaret, though given the total incompetence raging through the media industry, I probably shouldn't be surprised.
As Prof. Allan Lichtman noted this week, the mainstream media spent weeks trashing Biden, which caused his poll numbers to slip. Then, polling hacks like Wasserman point to those same polls *that they influenced* and say "See, he can't win because his poll numbers are down, so we need to push him out."
The number of unethical traitors in this nation is appalling.
In the same way that Biden is being taken down, he could be lifted up. But that wouldn't fit the media narrative - one that I warned about, I believe in your comments section, among other places, a month ago.
As I recall, I said the political media was desperate for metrics, after a very lackluster year, and that they needed to create chaos. And they were going to do it by attacking Joe Biden until they got what they wanted.
You can make whatever claims you want about not wanting Trump, but your actions belie those claims. So I think we're pretty much at quits, you & I. You clearly care more being part of the herd, something I didn't think I'd say about you. But if there's anything I've learned about the past few weeks, it's that the American news media - especially the political news media - needs nothing so much as a nearly complete annihilation, since there are so few people in it who actually care about the stakes.
I'll give you the weekend to have a chance to respond before I unsubscribe and block you on all platforms, Margaret.
To say I'm disappointed in you is probably one of the biggest understatements I can imagine.
As for whether Biden should step down, I'll simply say this:
Unless you're Joe Biden? That's not your call.
There is one and only one person who can make that decision - and that's Joe Biden. All this other bullsh**, crying, and wringing of hands? Only serves to help Trump & the fascist Republicans.
If and only if Joe Biden does decide to step down, the ONLY acceptable alternative is Kamala Harris, for reasons I shouldn't even need to state, and won't.
And in the meantime, anyone worth a damn will support every other Democrat running - even the gutless traitorous ones who could have called Joe Biden *privately* and shared their concerns directly with him, which is what would be the ethical and proper action, as opposed to putting out op-eds, going on TV, and claiming the love him, while stabbing him in the back.
That's the kind of thing disloyal "friends" and "allies" do when they think it will benefit them more personally than doing what they should done.
Private "family" business should stay private for reasons that are obvious to all, even if some are too cowardly, stupid, or worthless to admit it.
Lots of folks out here showin' their asses these past few weeks.
Guess it's good to know they, like you Margaret, can't be trusted any longer.
I am disappointed that Margaret had one conversation and now joined the chorus of President Biden should step down. To say two-thirds of Democrats want him to step down is not true. Even in the House there has not been an equivalent percentage. Furthermore, most polling is done by Republican owned companies. It is totally inappropriate what media, especially Margaret’s two former employers, have been doing over the past three weeks. Finally, there is an article in a British newspaper today titled about a Civil War in US in 2040, but now thinks it will happen sooner. Please ponder the fact of newspapers joining elites to overturn 14 million Democratic votes is a perfect example of actions done in countries ruled by authoritarians.
As she notes in this clip, out of 100,000 door knocks, under the standard re-engagement & expansion categories, 76% of those people say they're still #RidinWithBiden. About 16% wee undecided, and a small percentage admitted they aren't going to vote for Biden-Harris.
But the data shows the voters are still with Biden, even if the donors, pollsters & other elite media aren't.
He NEVER said he would be a one term candidate. He said he would be a bridge to the next generation. No president or candidate would say that. The people who didn’t want him or like him in 20 heard what they wanted to. To say he wasn’t viable is just wrong.
Thank you! A friend of mine who I generally respect said that. The left is susceptible to misinformation, too. I did an extensive search and unnamed aides "hinting" that "maybe" he would be a one-term president circa 2019 is the closest I got. But my friend was all mad at Biden for going back on his "promise." ?!
See my comments above. Follow the links and read the material. The aids are all named. They claim to be quoting Biden's feelings. Biden never said he would be a one-term president, but he strongly implied it would be on the table. Now it's off the table, and he never explained why.
I read the stories when they came out and reread them. It never came out of Biden’s mouth so stop saying he was going to just because so “close aide” said so. He also said he wants to finish the work that has been started. To say he wasn’t viable is just nonsense. If thst were the case 14 million people including me would have voted for someone else during the primaries.
You're replying to me, here, where I said that I disagreed with my friend's characterization of this as Biden *promising* to be a one-term president. He just plain did not.
Now, to address the new things you bring up, I think the reasonable time for that all to be discussed was when he decided to run in 2024. Before the primaries. Not now.
It's extremely reasonable for him to assume that once the decision to run in 2024 was made, once the primaries are over, once we're like six weeks out from the beginning of early voting, he would stay in the race.
I agree with you it's reasonable for Bidne to feel that "I'm the candidate." It's also reasonable of volunteers like me who have worked for the Dems for many elections cycles to fell gaslit by Biden's staff, handlers, and the DLC and DNC, angry that he didn't step down earlier, with his obviously degraded mental capabilities. The argument we have is not against Biden, but against what AOC calls the "strata" of "donors, politicians, pundits, media analysts, etc . . .".
How exactly is it then that someone like Margaret Sullivan, an important figure in the national media, can be surprised at Biden's decline? Doesn't she have sources inside the administration? Doesn't she know what's going on? How is it that Biden's slipping was effectively hidden from America?
The fact of Biden's campaign is falling due to his decline is an indictment of entire hierarchy of the Dems. I work for Dem candidates as a volunteer. I campaigned for Sanders, for Hillary, for Biden.
I didn't write that Biden "said he would be a one term candidate."
I wrote "Biden said he would consider being a one term president."
I stand by what I wrote. If I wrote it again, I would write "Biden implied . . ."
There's no disagreement here that I can see between me and you. I can live with what Biden said. I don't need to paraphrase
Here's what Slate reported:
#####################################
Some one-term truthers also cite a March 2020 speech in which Biden called himself a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders. Here’s what he said specifically: “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
So did Biden promise or pledge or signal that he would be a one-term president? No, not explicitly. A bridge can be short, like the world’s shortest international bridge, or long, like … various other bridges. As I said Tuesday, it’s really most appropriate to say that the president “floated” serving one term before backing away from the idea. It was also spelled “Berenstein Bears” before we switched dimensions. Glad I could get this all sorted out for everyone!
This is the judgement of the Slate writer? reporter?. It’s not a fact. Go by Biden’s words. The writer is parsing and that isn’t good journalism. To even say “floated” is the report’s own opinion.
July is not the time to revisit the possibility that there may be better candidates. There were not better candidates in 2020, that’s why the party coalesced around Biden. And it’s not at all clear there were better candidates in 2024.
It’s clear you personally think there is a better candidate but you are not the party and the party, through its process, has decided.
Trying to subvert that now, against the will of the people voted for him in the primary, is a pretty ugly thing. You are guessing that they will all fall in behind your new magical “not Biden, not Harris” candidate but they aren’t going to trust you, don’t you get that? You will be another Donald Trump claiming the election is rigged so you are justified in overturning its result.
You just are not reckoning with the fact that just switching the candidate out at the last minute has enormous costs.
I have the utmost respect for Dave Wasserman, but I think looking at polls is not actually the move here.
The problem is that a poll is just a snapshot of public opinion. It is not necessarily predictive.
And -- this is the part that is your wheelhouse -- public opinion has been shaped to a large degree by the kind of coverage Biden has been getting. Push notifications by the New York Times saying that a Parkinson's disease specialist visited Biden, when that was just a physician amongst the group that see Biden, a guy who has been seeing presidents since 2012. And much much more.
Biden stepping down seems like a great way to reward the NYT and others' finger on the scale. I don't entirely know their motivations. I think they truly were worried about Biden -- but are they correct? I also think that they are extremely incentivized to get their readership as worked up as possible. An anxious, panicky readership is a clicky readership.
The dude had a bad debate. Absolutely. He's got a stutter and it seems like he wasn't feeling well and presidents often have bad debates first time out. Obama did in 2012, and Obama is widely regarded as the smoothest and most gifted speakers in the modern era (and probably beyond). Biden also had an excellent rally and good interviews afterwards.
Now, it may be that he was sufficiently "off" in the phone calls etc. he's had with influential people that this is a whole other layer. Maybe he really is slipping.
But in terms of what we've actually SEEN, the NATO presser for example was really quite good and showed someone on top of things.
There is a self-fulfilling prophecy/feedback loop here that goes something like:
- Biden trucks along being viable, if old
- The NYT decides "guy has got to get out" (see Josh Marshall's reporting on this for example)
- The NYT puts in a concerted effort to raise the alarm
- This freaks out donors
- Donors start being activist about it and saying "get out or we won't donate"
- This freaks out the party elites who don't want donors to be freaked
- This becomes more and more of a story (drowning out, for example, a terrible convention speech from Trump_
- This depresses polls
- Donors and party elites point to polls as additional evidence for why they should be freaked out
- and we're off to the races
Another HUGE problem is that even if we use polls as a decision-making metric, Harris is not doing that much better and has a lot of room to be doing much worse. And there is not really a viable option besides Harris.
So that raises the terrible specter of Biden being ahead in important metrics (like 538's electoral college chance of winning, which had Biden ahead as recently as yesterday), but then in a month or so, Harris doing WORSE. We have to look not just at where things are but what the alternatives are.
There are also the issues of tossing the incumbency advantage, and
In terms of polls, people are just starting to tune in. This is something I see in my real life -- people are starting to ask me stuff, starting to chatter. Convention season is when it all really starts for normies who have not been paying attention. And Trump is just comically beatable. He's falling asleep everywhere, undecided voters called his convention speech "insane," people hate Project 2025 and are just starting to learn about it, the Supreme Court is horrible and corrupt and people don't actually want that. There is a ton of ways to BUILD on this.
Chaos is a great way to set us way back.
I fear that a lot of the damage has already been done, vs. everything just continuing along without the post-debate freak-out. But I remain unconvinced that tossing Biden is the best move, even now. (It might be! I am just unconvinced as of right now.)
This comment is off the top of my head after a ton of reading from very smart people and I don't know what parts go with which people. I can track that down on request.
Agreed. Very good summary. Too many people think it will be a snap to replace him because they don’t understand campaigns or how they work. To get a campaign up and running takes months and thousands of people. Not to mention lots and lots of money. They also don’t understand there are filing deadlines and rules which differ from state to state. To disenfranchise millions of voters that you need is just—why not fall on your sword now. Something I point out elsewhere is that many of these same people calling for his head didn’t like him in 2020 and were gleeful when he did badly in Iowa and NH. They were gobsmacked when he started winning and the party coalesced around him. And so many of the political reports have their fee fees hurt because the Biden admin doesn’t leak and as for the NYT, they want to damage him because he wouldn’t give them an interview. I wouldn’t either. The Times coverage—as has most of the media’s—has been pretty abysmal for the past four years.
The waffeling Democratic party has created a self fulfilling profecy for Biden, the best performing president in the last 75 years.
The GOP can stand united behind a lying, criminal sex offender without an ioda of self doubt or self reflection. The Democrats can't stand behind our super-star president because he badly fumbled his debate with a whirling devish lair.
I guess we're supposed to believe we're "morally superior" because we have a circular firing squad to kill of Joe Biden because he's 81 and not 60.
Rubbish! We're just cowards, afraid of the fight with an energized GOP and two candidates who are VERY beatable.
Your opinion means more to me than just about any other; thus my "like" for your excellent column. But still . . . I am entirely conflicted about whether President Biden should stay in the race. My wide reading of fact-based journalism tells me that Biden is in trouble. And trouble for Biden means disaster for the nation. My heart, though, whispers that he should take the high road and retire. But still . . . many of my friends on social media say Biden has been a great president and should stay in the race. But still . . . no one can predict the near future with accuracy. One thing I do know: The ex-prez has not changed his spots. He is and always will be a threat to our republic.
You base this on a conversation with the Cook Report? So disappointed in you. How accurate has their polling been recently? (not very). At least come up with a scenario of what happens next because I'm sure Mr. Wasserman's polling doesn't show Kamala doing any better. It will be chaos and division at the Convention where all of the delegates are pledged to Biden. This is really how Trump wins and you're helping to set that stage.
They are not pollsters. Wasserman is an analyst. His genius is on election night, comparing returns with what we know demographically about where the votes are still out. I trust his “I’ve seen enough” on election night implicitly. But I don’t think he has any special talent for predicting the future before any votes are cast.
It breaks my heart to see you go down this path and place so much stock in the arrogant D.C. punditry, Margaret, after all the good work you've done in this newsletter trying to steer us away from horse-race political journalism and knee-jerk narratives. Wasserman's and your take here are flawed on so many levels, and in my humble opinion, reflects the simplistic, narrow-minded thinking of the media and pundit elite.
1) Anyone who expresses this level of confidence in polls four months before the election, when a huge swath of the electorate hasn't even begun paying attention yet, is not respecting reality or history, or really the fundamentals of democracy and that we the voters (and not imperfect opinion polls) decide our fate. Wasserman and his organization were among those who bought into the "Red Wave" narrative about the 2022 midterms, and were proved dead wrong. It is also July, not October, and most of the campaign is yet to unfold.
2) This narrative that "Trump always outperforms the polls" ignores the reality of the past two years, where Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates have consistently underperformed the polls. Since the Dobbs ruling, Democratic candidates running on abortion rights and democracy, and pro-abortion rights ballot measures, have consistently outperformed polls showing tight races. Heading into the 2022 midterms, polls showed Fetterman tied or even slightly behind Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate race (mostly because of a terrible debate performance after his stroke in which the pundits questioned why he was staying in the race). He won that race going away by 5 points, but people like Wasserman now discount such a possibility in the presidential election in the same state (and those 2022 polls showing Oz overtaking Fetterman were as of Election Day, not four months before). Also, pollsters change their methodologies when they have big polling misses such as in 2020 (which was complicated by pandemic factors that are not present this time), so it's entirely possible they've accounted for whatever factors caused Trump to outperform the polls in 2020, or even overcompensated. And incumbent presidents routinely outperform the polls on Election Day by significant margins (true not only of Trump but of Obama and George W. Bush), but this is a fact pollsters conveniently ignore, assuming there's no way that incumbency could benefit Biden in the same way it did Bush, Obama and Trump. I'm guessing you and Wasserman never discussed that historical trend of poll overperformance by incumbents?
3) All journalists who have studied past elections should know that elections by their nature are very fluid affairs, and things can change quickly, especially after Labor Day when more voters tune in. This is why the highly respected FiveThirtyEight forecast has continued to give Biden an even chance or better to win, ever after the chaos of the past month, because it's based largely on fundamentals and economic and historical trends, not on pundit quick takes. Yet, we're supposed to believe the pundits and now the media elite that the election is basically over in July? Was the '92 election over when polls showed Clinton running third behind both Bush and Perot? Was the 2016 election over when pundits wrote off Trump over the summer that year, like they are Biden this year?
4) You and others like Ezra Klein have been great advocates for preserving democracy, but what does it say when in a moment of panic over the fate of democracy, you and others declare the election basically a lost cause months before anyone has had a chance to vote (the whole point of democracy)? What does that say to people like me who are planning to call swing state voters in a few hours in support of the only candidate fighting to save our democracy? That we're wasting our time because the pundits have already called the election before voters have had a chance to weigh in? How does that square with democratic principles? The pundit/media elite narrative over the past month has been beyond hypocritical and arrogant when it comes to the fight for democracy. The message of people like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein basically is: "Yes, we think Biden has been a successful president; yes, millions of Democratic voters selected him through the Democratic (and democratic) primary process (when concerns about his age were well-known to those voters), but the average voter is too stupid to believe facts over propaganda, so he needs to drop out and we, the party and pundit elite, need to be trusted to choose who is best able to save American democracy, because the voters can't be trusted to do so themselves." It's the height of arrogance.
5) The pundits want us to trust the polls that Biden can't win, but the same polls have not shown conclusively that Harris or anyone else would do any better. So we're only supposed to trust the aspects of polls that further the narrative that the pundits decided on minutes after the debate and have clung to ever since, but discount those aspects that run counter to that narrative? How is that logical? Whatever excitement boost the new candidate and party got if Biden dropped out could be more than offset by the inevitable "Dems in Disarray" narrative about a panic-stricken, weak-kneed party abandoning its incumbent president (who they agree has done a good job) weeks before voters will start voting.
I'm glad you're doing the work you're doing because of your ability to reach thousands upon thousands of people that nobodies like me are unable to reach. But that doesn't mean that the pundits and elites always know more than the nobodies like me (or any average voter) does. Maybe it's worth listening to our voices now and then and not just the expert elite pundits who think they have everything figured out (even though they've been wrong before and will likely be wrong again).
I covered a lot of these points in detail in my own Substack (that virtually no one outside my inner circle reads) last week. I hope you and some others here will check it out, because I think a lot of the points I raise make as much sense (or more) than anything the likes of Wasserman, Silver and Klein are saying right now from their Beltway Bubbles. And unlike the pundits, who are being paid handsomely to promote their "I know best" narratives, people like me are doing it only because we love our democracy and country and want desperately to save it.
There are dmso many reasons why Biden should NOT drop out! Polls are notoriously wrong. The logistics of getting someone new on the ballot in all 50 states are daunting. Republicans already plan legal challenges. If you think the battle is uphill NOW, changing candidates will make it more like climbing Everest!
Wassermann was a red waver who didn’t take the 2022 results well and attacked those who were right. The Cook Report is aligned with CBS and not what it was when Charlie Cook ran it. Indeed, its present leader attacked Biden’s state of the Union as unpresidential. I agree with AOC that the corporate media fear Biden’s antitrust enforcement more than anything and will stop at nothing to defeat him and probably any other democratic candidate.
That being said the Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries and perhaps Obama positions can’t be sloughed off. I believe they’ve observed the President and think that what happened at the debate could happen again. If the polls can ease this, then so be it. But, the most remarkable thing about this poll is that Trump, even after everything breaking his way, isn’t exceeding the 46-47% where Rs have been stuck since 2008.
Just upgraded to paid so I could comment. Maybe that will help offset any (possible) exodus. So sorry we live in this world right now.
What an astonishingly lousy three+ weeks it’s been. I’m an anxious voter who values democracy, like everyone here, and also a political scientist in the middle of updating an intro college textbook in its 12th edition (it’s called Keeping the Republic, a title we thought was meaningful a quarter century ago, but not a screaming fire alarm). The usual routine is that we write all the important updates in the summer prior to an election, plug in the election results in Nov, and profs have a current textbook from which to teach in January.
Omfg.
In my usual fashion I have been gaming out all the alternatives and trying to develop an explanation that of what I think is going to happen, as well as narrative to account for what I don’t think will happen, but might.
We usually get it right. The big exception was 2016, when the polls and the imagination both simultaneously failed us.
So I like you and every other person who watched that debate and, while horrified, managed not to jump to the conclusion that I’d been duped by a Biden admin covering up for an incapacitated president, I have been agonizing over what happened, what will happen and what I think best should happen.
I can sympathize with everyone going through the process in good faith who can recognize how uncertain these times are. I may not agree with their conclusions but I can understand the path that got them there.
I have more trouble sympathizing with the people who are certain they are right about what happened and where we should go from here. That certainty seems to represent one of several things I don’t think decisions should be based on — arrogance, panic and anxiety management, injured egos who feel duped (hello reporters!) and people with prior agendas seeing an opportunity to exploit to get something they have not been able to get through other means.
Certainty has no place in a situation where we are creating new realities — which should change our assessments — on the fly. In the immediate aftermath of the debate the polls were NOT bad. They are scary af after three weeks of relentlessly negative and often feral and vengeful media coverage. What would they have looked like after a more measured response? Since there is very little chance that the media coverage has zero impact on the polls, I can’t quite take them as indicators of actual voter sentiment unless I saw the same numbers after a period of factual and neutral coverage. Alas, social scientists don’t get to run this kind of experiment.
We do get to be skeptics of the conventional wisdom though. And we get to ask questions and poke around for hard answers.
We also get to say, if Biden is indeed losing right now (he is not, he is behind in the polls, which is very different) show me a realistic (no Sorkinesque magical thinking allowed) path for a non-Biden candidate to win.
No one, absolutely no one, has been able to do that. Every attempt I’ve seen relies on some pretty odd leaps of faith (America will watch a mini primary nightly to see democracy in action! The party will pull together in unity as soon as the convention ends! There is no cost to a party who changes nominees at the last minute!)
The one thing I feel pretty certain of is that Biden should be pushed out only if we have assessed (to the best of our ability) the risks to a Democratic victory of all the possible paths forward and it’s more risky to democracy for him to run than for the party to replace him.
I have not seen anyone engage in that kind of good faith analysis. I keep running the options in my head with imperfect information and an exhausted brain and each time I come back to the position that the least risky option is for Biden to stay in the race.
Even that is hard to say for sure, because in that scenario I assume that that decision brought closure and the party could rally behind him the way they were before the debate and that the media can can remember that they are supposed to be reporters, not king makers.
I still think it’s our best shot to defeat Trump. I also indulge some of my own magical thinking here because I think the way to pull it off is to have some of the party leaders Ruth leverage — someone like Clyburn — say “Joe, I’m with you but you have to give me something to work with. Have to damn cognitive work up, show you are taking voters concerns seriously. Right now to half the party you look like Grandpa yelling that you’ll never give up your keys. Why don’t you March those keys down to the DMV and get certified safe to drive. The only reasons not to do that are stupid pride or the fear you won’t pass. Taking the test is an act of confidence.”
Very few people in the country are taking that cautious, analytic approach right now. AOC is one of them. This is long but it’s astute, cautious and wise. She’s one of the shrewder political brains in the party. Listen to her.
Well, this is quite the manifesto of your beliefs. You seem very passionate about them. What you personally believe doesn’t move me much, though. Passion doesn’t give you more than one vote and I can tell from what you write that you don’t understand much about American political behavior or public opinion. Yes, I know. You believe things very strongly. When all is said and done you only speak for you.
(Your beliefs don’t alter facts, either. I’m not going to fact check this whole long thing, but I know Biden never “pledged” to be a one term president. Just didn’t. There is nothing bad faith about the fact that he got to the middle of his second term and thought that he was best suited to prevent Trump from getting back to the WH. He may be mistaken about that though I don’t think he was, but it’s hardly an act of bad faith for which he deserves the contempt you show here.)
Democracy means accepting the results of the voting process even when you lose. Biden won the primaries. (Yes, I’m sure you believe that the primaries were unfair but tough. Parties get to set the rules they want. They aren’t under any obligation to hold primaries at all. They tinker with the rules all the time. Their job is to get people elected to office and if more democracy brings more chaos and fewer electable candidates, they are going to limit the democracy and lean more on party elites to make decisions. This is true about parties regardless of anything you believe. They get to set the rules, Biden and Harris won by those rules, and by rejecting the process as rigged you aren’t far off what Trump did in 2020. Sorry, but truth.)
You can’t have it both ways on Pelosi, btw. I agree that Pelosi is one of the sharpest, best minds in the party. So is AOC. Your dismissal of her is pretty gross and sounds emotion-driven to me. Both have long records of making shrewd political decisions and that is true independently of how I feel about the substance or those decisions. What both of them will tell you is that if the candidate is not Biden it must be Harris. If you trust Pelosi on her judgment that Biden should get out (and I would like more info on her reasons — all I see see is unsourced reports) then surely you should trust her when she calls on the party to rally around Harris, no?
Right now I think this thing can go in any number of directions. Maybe Biden stays, maybe he and Dem leaders orchestrate a movement to get the delegates to rally around Harris, maybe it’s the free for all you want. If it’s one of the first two options, are you going to vote Democratic? Will you vote for Biden if he is who is running against Donald Trump in Nov? Will you vote for Harris if she is the nominee?
Let’s say at the end of the day, Biden listens to reason and stays in the race. Are you going to vote for him to keep Trump out?
My read of your text is that we are more aligned than you seem to believe in places. I respond to what people write, not what I feel might be their emotional state.
Of course, I will vote for Biden if he is the candidate. I will do what I always do for the Democratic candidate, make phone calls, knock on doors, register, voters. Because I get out the vote and register new voters, I do have influence beyond my single vote.
I am a complex thinker and believe I am allowed to have complex views on things. I am upset about some things that Joe Biden did, and has done historically, when he was a senator. And, I also know that the response of his administration to the chaos he inherited was instrumental to pulling the nation away from the pandemic, and into an economic recovery. Even Bernie Sanders has to be cheering Biden on this. The fact that Biden‘s performance in his first term has been extraordinary, superlative, does not mean that his putting Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court was not a mistake, which it was. People are allowed to make mistakes in life. It’s OK. I have made plenty.
Because I am upset about how Biden treated Anita Hill does not mean that I feel contempt for him. Human beings are allowed to be upset, and deserve not to have their anger labeled by others as contempt. Anger is a human emotion which, in its healthy form signals, that an important value has been transgressed.
During the Clarence Thomas Senate Judiciary hearings, Anita Hill, a black lawyer, had her testimony of Thomas' sexual harassment of her, along with her character, impugned by Republicans who wanted to put Thomas on the Supreme Court. (I have read your CV and can see that you know all this, having lived through it, like I did.) Senator Biden was chair of the committee and denied Hill the opportunity to have witnesses testify (who wanted to testify) in ways that would have corroborated Anita Hill's testimony. Hill would eventually become a law professor and go on to an ordinary career. Biden would eventually become president. Thomas would do his thing as a plant of the billionaire class.
I can be in favor of Biden's Presidency and at the same time have the historical memory of what it felt like to see all these Republicans gloating about getting Thomas onto the Supreme Court while Anita Hill took an incredible amount of emotional abuse from Republican Senators.
Nancy Pelosi has 37 years of experience in the House. AOC has 5. Pelosi held the Democratic Caucus together during some very tough times. AOC, while savvy, is still learning the craft. AOC has good political instincts. Pelosi is an operator. I read the AOC/Sanders support for Biden as an endorsement of the idea that the DLC/DNC processes are broken and they believe there is no path forward that will be better other than Biden. I respect Bernie's and AOC's positions, as the perennial liberal/progressive underdogs. It's a new wrinkle that I feel must be accorded value, but I'm not sure I'm in agreement with this strategy.
I think you are correct my critique of AOC was too harsh. I modified it.
I think what really bugs me is the Dems have all this brainpower on the Hill that comes to the fore -- suddenly now -- when it is too late and there are no decent options. This wasn't necessary, it's a self-induced error.
We can never know exactly what was or is in President Biden's mind; only those in his intimate circle do. But this situation is not entirely the media's doing. It's a structural issue caused by capture of the infrastructure by class interests.
You seem not to realize that Pelosi already made a public statement in favor of open nominations at the convention, if and only if Biden drops out, with no favoritism for Harris.
I agree with the consensus view that the Media intentionally created a firestorm from a campfire for their own unhealthy reasons.
I agree with you we are in the middle of something whose outcome is quite uncertain.
I don't think my being a non-specialist in political theory and campaigning is all that important when it comes to having insight. Sullivan herself is recommending that people, in order to understand what's at stake, listen to the comedian John Oliver whose "work has been described as journalism or investigative journalism, labels that he rejects." (Wikipedia)
I think it's necessary, at least for me, to feel some emotion about these things. This is what tells me I care about things. Navigating joys and disappointments is part of life.
So why isn’t Pelosi stepping aside? She’s older than Joe! The Democratic elite are terrified of losing their big donors in Hollywood. That is what this is about.
And Pelosi, while a brilliant tactician in the room, is not a pollster nor someone who has had to do any particular thinking about campaigning in a very long time -- she's cruised to easy victory by like 60 points. This is not her area of expertise, even though she's making it so.
Magaret, your article this morning gives me much sadness. As I respect you and the CPR so much. I too must realize that President Biden must step aside and give all his delegates to VP. Harris. I have writen many posts on social media. fighting these odds, I remember that Ron Reagan was also in the begging stages of dementia during his second term.
I sincerely hope that the DNC realizes that they can NOT have an open convention or mini primary at this stage of the election cycle. VP. Harris must be the chosen candidate.
There is no plan if he does. Do you not understand this?
Media is driving this chaos. They want this chaos. Media does not care about democracy at all or Project 2025 except as a story. Though most of them don’t even bother to cover it at all. It’s malpractice of the highest order.
The Democratic party donor class got spooked by the debate, and now, because of their ignorance and blind panic, they could well cause a Trump victory. When was the last time the polls were accurate?
Biden has slowed physically, as we all do as we age, and his communications take a big hit when he appears to be physically tired. I think people have conflated this with old age cognitive decline. I would bet that he would look and sound a lot different if he didn't have to campaign.
The polls use to underestimate Trump. In 2022 they underestimated Democrats. No democrat polls statistically better than Biden. There are ballot access issues with any swap. There are money issues if it’s not Harris.
Watch AOC’s instagram live. And consider the elites harping on this may want Biden out to purge the populist anti-monopoly team he has assembled.
I would love someone to explain to me how millions of Biden voters suddenly will switch to Trump because Biden is old. It’s nonsensical.
Biden trailing is 100% a media failure. They said the economy was bad when it’s good. They harped on crime when it was falling. They ignore Trump’s daily incoherent ramblings and act like Biden’s age is a bigger deal. The media is allowing a fascist takeover by not focusing on the true stakes.
AOC's Instagram live was a tour de force of incisive, thoughtful thinking and captured the complexity and nuances of the current situation in ways that the pundits and media elite seem unable to fathom. I hope Margaret listens to it if she hasn't already and puts as much stock in the thoughts of someone with a track record of defying the polls and shocking the political world by appealing directly to voters, as she apparently is doing with pundits like Wasserman who were wrong in 2022 and really don't understand the mechanics of running successful campaigns on the ground.
Yes. 100% this.
Margaret, I'd love to know your opinion on how the media fell for falsehood that Trump's convention speech was about "unity." If the media cannot accurately report the contents of a speech, we are in trouble.
Who fell for it? I’ve read only scathing takedowns of his inability to sustain unity for longer than 28 minutes (or whatever it was) and his inability to shut up after that.
The AP, for example. And there were SO many articles that went out to front pages across the US that were about "unity" based on the speech Trump had prepared, rather than the speech he actually gave (because he was still giving it when they went to print, and it got steadily more unhinged as he went along, both in content in and just the fact that it Kept. Going.)
I think this is right about pre-writes, and Lord knows, doesn’t that show you how much the media has forgotten about covering Trump!Why would you trust a written draft to be what he actually says?!
The coverage I saw (I am very carefully curating my media intake these days so as not to have an aneurism and be robbed of my chance to cast a third ballot against American fascism) was all by people who saw the speech in its entirety before opening their mouths. I’ve since poked around and have seen the covered that you folks are referring to. I retract my question.
I feel ya re: the aneurism
Many of those so-called articles were actually pre-writes, a somewhat common practice that's gotten way out of hand in journalism today. Many journalists were given access to partial copies of Trump's RNC speech, before he delivered it, and wrote their pieces based on that.
Of course, doing that is almost the same as writing a "report" based on a "one sheet" - a common form of shorthand notes in broadcasting - from a PR person. So of course what gets spat out sounds like propaganda - because it is.
As you correctly noted,, those who waited for the speech as delivered saw & heard something entirely unhinged, which is who Trump really is.
But that's not the narrative the media wants to run with. And so many outlets will ignore it.
There are many examples. As Jenna FB mentions, here's the AP's delusional account of the speech: https://apnews.com/article/trump-republican-national-convention-nomination-assassination-attempt-5f1f337ac39477e9d1c53d3e027edda3.
Here's another from USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/07/19/trump-speech-rnc-biden-drop-out-campaign/74461711007/
CNN also had stories about what a unifying speech it was, including commentary from Van Jones. The Washington Post's lead headline was that it was a "lengthy speech."
Remember, this was a presidential nomination acceptance speech that included praise for a fictional cannibal.
Yeah. Agree. I'll be a little picky here and say that I don't believe the AP is delusional, but that like the NY Times, Sullivan's former employer, many headlines of importance, including this one from the AP, read as click-bait and no longer represent in any way the actual content of the articles they head. It's frustrating as a reader because now you have to read the story to discern the article's general content. So, here's the AP headline:
AP: "Trump urges unity after assassination attempt while proposing sweeping populist agenda in RNC finale"
And here's a proper headline based on the actual content of the article:
"Trump urges unity for Seventeen Minutes then returns to vindictive style in RNC finale"
Gary, the media, including the New York Times, in order to increase their page views and click throughs, are currently engaged in a practice, called “burying the lead “, an intentional journalism tactic, whereby the article leads off with a controversial, ephemeral, teaser headline and initial paragraph in order to tease the reader to read on further. Many teaser headlines are built on things designed to rile up the reader, for instance, "Republicans Claim Global Warming is a Hoax."
The journalist does not contest the misstatement outright, and seeks to hook the reader to get them to keep reading down through the article, past all the advertisements, to see if the journalist will actually comment, if the misleed/lie is true or not. That’s why you see all these mainstream media articles with Trump announcement of unity in the first paragraph, because the journalists are manipulating the readers into crying out that it’s not true, that he’s a divider and then getting them to read through the rest of the article and past all the ads to see if Trump will in fact be identified as a divider.
And the NYT has a stated policy that they will not call his untruths lies. They will “report” and let their readers judge. Straight out of the mouth of the last Ed Dean Baquet and carried on by the new guy Joe Klein, who also said democracy is not an issue for them because of “polls.”
Microsoft has PROVED that 60% of all cyber attacks into the U.S. come from Russia. This includes: food and supplies, elections and polls, banks and finance, medical and hospitals, airlines, and on and on. Russians have tainted our election polls FOR ONE PURPOSE - to help Donald Trump win. Russians know that Americans believe the polls - so what if the polls are providing tainted research and incorrect numbers? The entire movement to get Biden to step down is based on this possible incorrect information.
“On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement. ‘Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as the elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate YOU on this’.” (Journalist Craig Unger talks about Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history.” VOX Politics, by Sean Illing, January 12, 2019.)
When Nikonov congratulated the Russian DUMA for Trump’s win of the U.S. presidency, the Russians were celebrating “one of the greatest intelligence and clandestine operations in modern history.” The Russian KGB had trapped, skillfully developed, and maneuvered a Russian “asset” into the highest political position in the United States - President Donald Trump.” (Unger)
If Joe Biden steps down now - in the last stage of this election process - it will only help Donald Trump win. Help convince Biden to stay in the election.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. I lived and worked in six dictator-led countries (mostly Russia) over 20 years and became bi-cultural in the process. There are days when the Russian side of my brain over-rules the American side. Having said this, there are few Americans who grasp Russian logic, thinking, and how a dictator country or a dictator operates..
In the 1990's when Americans were flying to Russia to start joint ventures with Russian business partners, there was a warning published by the Moscow Business Guide that said: "The most fundamental concepts that have guided your judgement for a lifetime are not even known, much less understood here." Many, many of these Americans died because they lacked a basic understanding of life in a mafia-style environment.
My comments about American election polls come from direct comments from Russian friends who are in the information business. And while there is no evidence - to quote you - "that Russia infiltrated and corrupted the polling processes itself" - please do not generally underrate Russia's advanced cyber capabilities - a mistake made by the American general public.
Let me quote from Russian Roulette (P. 59) and quoted in From Democracy to Democrazy: "For years U.S. officials had been grappling with Russian cyber intrusions. As far back as 1996, Russian hackers penetrated our Defense Department networks and stole documents that if piled up would be three times the height of the Washington Monument. In the 2000's the Chinese were perceived as the biggest cyber threats to the United States . . .but the Chinese were noisy about it. They left readily identifiable fingerprints. Ledget (former head of the the National Security Agency) had long since become convinced the Russians were the more sophisticated and stealthy adversary , , , For example, the Chinese would break into your house, smash your window, steal your cutlery. The Russians, on the other hand, would pick your lock, reset the alarm, and steal the last five checks in your checkbook and a copy of your signature, and leave the same way. You would not even know they were there." So if you do not believe me, then please believe the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency!
And while I am swimming against the tide concerning Biden staying in the race, I still strongly believe that there is no one in the field better than Biden and his 50 years of experience and wisdom to combat the enormous wickedness and the many-sided destructiveness of Trump and his Russian ties.
I think Harris has done a great job and should Biden succumb to illness or die, she is there is support his needs and responsibilities.
Elizabeth
There are so many reasons why Biden should NOT drop out! Polls are notoriously wrong. The logistics of getting someone new on the ballot in all 50 states are daunting. Republicans already plan legal challenges. If you think the battle is uphill NOW, changing candidates will make it more like climbing Everest!
Disgusted to see even you've become a hack Margaret, though given the total incompetence raging through the media industry, I probably shouldn't be surprised.
As Prof. Allan Lichtman noted this week, the mainstream media spent weeks trashing Biden, which caused his poll numbers to slip. Then, polling hacks like Wasserman point to those same polls *that they influenced* and say "See, he can't win because his poll numbers are down, so we need to push him out."
The number of unethical traitors in this nation is appalling.
In the same way that Biden is being taken down, he could be lifted up. But that wouldn't fit the media narrative - one that I warned about, I believe in your comments section, among other places, a month ago.
As I recall, I said the political media was desperate for metrics, after a very lackluster year, and that they needed to create chaos. And they were going to do it by attacking Joe Biden until they got what they wanted.
And wadda ya know? Oliver Darcy - who is reviled by the execs and many media elites these days - confirmed I was correct on Thursday morning, with this: "Shakeups in the 2024 race provide much-needed jolt in interest for news outlets" ( https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/18/media/news-outlets-viewership-2024-election/index.html )
How very convenient.
You can make whatever claims you want about not wanting Trump, but your actions belie those claims. So I think we're pretty much at quits, you & I. You clearly care more being part of the herd, something I didn't think I'd say about you. But if there's anything I've learned about the past few weeks, it's that the American news media - especially the political news media - needs nothing so much as a nearly complete annihilation, since there are so few people in it who actually care about the stakes.
I'll give you the weekend to have a chance to respond before I unsubscribe and block you on all platforms, Margaret.
To say I'm disappointed in you is probably one of the biggest understatements I can imagine.
As for whether Biden should step down, I'll simply say this:
Unless you're Joe Biden? That's not your call.
There is one and only one person who can make that decision - and that's Joe Biden. All this other bullsh**, crying, and wringing of hands? Only serves to help Trump & the fascist Republicans.
If and only if Joe Biden does decide to step down, the ONLY acceptable alternative is Kamala Harris, for reasons I shouldn't even need to state, and won't.
And in the meantime, anyone worth a damn will support every other Democrat running - even the gutless traitorous ones who could have called Joe Biden *privately* and shared their concerns directly with him, which is what would be the ethical and proper action, as opposed to putting out op-eds, going on TV, and claiming the love him, while stabbing him in the back.
That's the kind of thing disloyal "friends" and "allies" do when they think it will benefit them more personally than doing what they should done.
Private "family" business should stay private for reasons that are obvious to all, even if some are too cowardly, stupid, or worthless to admit it.
Lots of folks out here showin' their asses these past few weeks.
Guess it's good to know they, like you Margaret, can't be trusted any longer.
I am disappointed that Margaret had one conversation and now joined the chorus of President Biden should step down. To say two-thirds of Democrats want him to step down is not true. Even in the House there has not been an equivalent percentage. Furthermore, most polling is done by Republican owned companies. It is totally inappropriate what media, especially Margaret’s two former employers, have been doing over the past three weeks. Finally, there is an article in a British newspaper today titled about a Civil War in US in 2040, but now thinks it will happen sooner. Please ponder the fact of newspapers joining elites to overturn 14 million Democratic votes is a perfect example of actions done in countries ruled by authoritarians.
I'd go even further.
Polls today are notoriously unreliable, more than at any other point in modern history.
But Jen O'Malley Dillion delivered hard data from campaign field work on Morning Joe on Friday.:
https://x.com/_silversmith/status/1814675631868690466
As she notes in this clip, out of 100,000 door knocks, under the standard re-engagement & expansion categories, 76% of those people say they're still #RidinWithBiden. About 16% wee undecided, and a small percentage admitted they aren't going to vote for Biden-Harris.
But the data shows the voters are still with Biden, even if the donors, pollsters & other elite media aren't.
He NEVER said he would be a one term candidate. He said he would be a bridge to the next generation. No president or candidate would say that. The people who didn’t want him or like him in 20 heard what they wanted to. To say he wasn’t viable is just wrong.
Thank you! A friend of mine who I generally respect said that. The left is susceptible to misinformation, too. I did an extensive search and unnamed aides "hinting" that "maybe" he would be a one-term president circa 2019 is the closest I got. But my friend was all mad at Biden for going back on his "promise." ?!
See my comments above. Follow the links and read the material. The aids are all named. They claim to be quoting Biden's feelings. Biden never said he would be a one-term president, but he strongly implied it would be on the table. Now it's off the table, and he never explained why.
I read the stories when they came out and reread them. It never came out of Biden’s mouth so stop saying he was going to just because so “close aide” said so. He also said he wants to finish the work that has been started. To say he wasn’t viable is just nonsense. If thst were the case 14 million people including me would have voted for someone else during the primaries.
You're replying to me, here, where I said that I disagreed with my friend's characterization of this as Biden *promising* to be a one-term president. He just plain did not.
Now, to address the new things you bring up, I think the reasonable time for that all to be discussed was when he decided to run in 2024. Before the primaries. Not now.
It's extremely reasonable for him to assume that once the decision to run in 2024 was made, once the primaries are over, once we're like six weeks out from the beginning of early voting, he would stay in the race.
I agree with you it's reasonable for Bidne to feel that "I'm the candidate." It's also reasonable of volunteers like me who have worked for the Dems for many elections cycles to fell gaslit by Biden's staff, handlers, and the DLC and DNC, angry that he didn't step down earlier, with his obviously degraded mental capabilities. The argument we have is not against Biden, but against what AOC calls the "strata" of "donors, politicians, pundits, media analysts, etc . . .".
How exactly is it then that someone like Margaret Sullivan, an important figure in the national media, can be surprised at Biden's decline? Doesn't she have sources inside the administration? Doesn't she know what's going on? How is it that Biden's slipping was effectively hidden from America?
The fact of Biden's campaign is falling due to his decline is an indictment of entire hierarchy of the Dems. I work for Dem candidates as a volunteer. I campaigned for Sanders, for Hillary, for Biden.
Please don't mistype what I wrote or implied:
"He NEVER said he would be a one term candidate."
I didn't write that Biden "said he would be a one term candidate."
I wrote "Biden said he would consider being a one term president."
I stand by what I wrote. If I wrote it again, I would write "Biden implied . . ."
There's no disagreement here that I can see between me and you. I can live with what Biden said. I don't need to paraphrase
Here's what Slate reported:
#####################################
Some one-term truthers also cite a March 2020 speech in which Biden called himself a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders. Here’s what he said specifically: “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
So did Biden promise or pledge or signal that he would be a one-term president? No, not explicitly. A bridge can be short, like the world’s shortest international bridge, or long, like … various other bridges. As I said Tuesday, it’s really most appropriate to say that the president “floated” serving one term before backing away from the idea. It was also spelled “Berenstein Bears” before we switched dimensions. Glad I could get this all sorted out for everyone!
############################################
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/biden-president-trump-rematch-one-term-promise-nate-silver.html
Also here is what The Hill wrote:
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/474027-biden-indicates-he-will-only-serve-one-term-as-president-report/
This is the judgement of the Slate writer? reporter?. It’s not a fact. Go by Biden’s words. The writer is parsing and that isn’t good journalism. To even say “floated” is the report’s own opinion.
I'm liking your comment because I think we are aligned at the values level.
July is not the time to revisit the possibility that there may be better candidates. There were not better candidates in 2020, that’s why the party coalesced around Biden. And it’s not at all clear there were better candidates in 2024.
It’s clear you personally think there is a better candidate but you are not the party and the party, through its process, has decided.
Trying to subvert that now, against the will of the people voted for him in the primary, is a pretty ugly thing. You are guessing that they will all fall in behind your new magical “not Biden, not Harris” candidate but they aren’t going to trust you, don’t you get that? You will be another Donald Trump claiming the election is rigged so you are justified in overturning its result.
You just are not reckoning with the fact that just switching the candidate out at the last minute has enormous costs.
Not reading White boy fantasy fiction.
If you or ANYONE think that Dems can just skip over Harris? You can f*** off all the way to hell.
You’ve clearly never worked on a campaign, nor do you know anything about campaign finance.
You also clearly don’t know that I have 30+ years in professional media, and have long-standing acquaintanceship with Margaret
The list of things you don’t know is vast - and I’ve got no time or patience for any of your foolishness.
Either get behind Biden & Harris, or be considered a fascist.
Those are your choices.
I have the utmost respect for Dave Wasserman, but I think looking at polls is not actually the move here.
The problem is that a poll is just a snapshot of public opinion. It is not necessarily predictive.
And -- this is the part that is your wheelhouse -- public opinion has been shaped to a large degree by the kind of coverage Biden has been getting. Push notifications by the New York Times saying that a Parkinson's disease specialist visited Biden, when that was just a physician amongst the group that see Biden, a guy who has been seeing presidents since 2012. And much much more.
Biden stepping down seems like a great way to reward the NYT and others' finger on the scale. I don't entirely know their motivations. I think they truly were worried about Biden -- but are they correct? I also think that they are extremely incentivized to get their readership as worked up as possible. An anxious, panicky readership is a clicky readership.
The dude had a bad debate. Absolutely. He's got a stutter and it seems like he wasn't feeling well and presidents often have bad debates first time out. Obama did in 2012, and Obama is widely regarded as the smoothest and most gifted speakers in the modern era (and probably beyond). Biden also had an excellent rally and good interviews afterwards.
Now, it may be that he was sufficiently "off" in the phone calls etc. he's had with influential people that this is a whole other layer. Maybe he really is slipping.
But in terms of what we've actually SEEN, the NATO presser for example was really quite good and showed someone on top of things.
There is a self-fulfilling prophecy/feedback loop here that goes something like:
- Biden trucks along being viable, if old
- The NYT decides "guy has got to get out" (see Josh Marshall's reporting on this for example)
- The NYT puts in a concerted effort to raise the alarm
- This freaks out donors
- Donors start being activist about it and saying "get out or we won't donate"
- This freaks out the party elites who don't want donors to be freaked
- This becomes more and more of a story (drowning out, for example, a terrible convention speech from Trump_
- This depresses polls
- Donors and party elites point to polls as additional evidence for why they should be freaked out
- and we're off to the races
Another HUGE problem is that even if we use polls as a decision-making metric, Harris is not doing that much better and has a lot of room to be doing much worse. And there is not really a viable option besides Harris.
So that raises the terrible specter of Biden being ahead in important metrics (like 538's electoral college chance of winning, which had Biden ahead as recently as yesterday), but then in a month or so, Harris doing WORSE. We have to look not just at where things are but what the alternatives are.
There are also the issues of tossing the incumbency advantage, and
In terms of polls, people are just starting to tune in. This is something I see in my real life -- people are starting to ask me stuff, starting to chatter. Convention season is when it all really starts for normies who have not been paying attention. And Trump is just comically beatable. He's falling asleep everywhere, undecided voters called his convention speech "insane," people hate Project 2025 and are just starting to learn about it, the Supreme Court is horrible and corrupt and people don't actually want that. There is a ton of ways to BUILD on this.
Chaos is a great way to set us way back.
I fear that a lot of the damage has already been done, vs. everything just continuing along without the post-debate freak-out. But I remain unconvinced that tossing Biden is the best move, even now. (It might be! I am just unconvinced as of right now.)
This comment is off the top of my head after a ton of reading from very smart people and I don't know what parts go with which people. I can track that down on request.
Agreed. Very good summary. Too many people think it will be a snap to replace him because they don’t understand campaigns or how they work. To get a campaign up and running takes months and thousands of people. Not to mention lots and lots of money. They also don’t understand there are filing deadlines and rules which differ from state to state. To disenfranchise millions of voters that you need is just—why not fall on your sword now. Something I point out elsewhere is that many of these same people calling for his head didn’t like him in 2020 and were gleeful when he did badly in Iowa and NH. They were gobsmacked when he started winning and the party coalesced around him. And so many of the political reports have their fee fees hurt because the Biden admin doesn’t leak and as for the NYT, they want to damage him because he wouldn’t give them an interview. I wouldn’t either. The Times coverage—as has most of the media’s—has been pretty abysmal for the past four years.
The waffeling Democratic party has created a self fulfilling profecy for Biden, the best performing president in the last 75 years.
The GOP can stand united behind a lying, criminal sex offender without an ioda of self doubt or self reflection. The Democrats can't stand behind our super-star president because he badly fumbled his debate with a whirling devish lair.
I guess we're supposed to believe we're "morally superior" because we have a circular firing squad to kill of Joe Biden because he's 81 and not 60.
Rubbish! We're just cowards, afraid of the fight with an energized GOP and two candidates who are VERY beatable.
Your opinion means more to me than just about any other; thus my "like" for your excellent column. But still . . . I am entirely conflicted about whether President Biden should stay in the race. My wide reading of fact-based journalism tells me that Biden is in trouble. And trouble for Biden means disaster for the nation. My heart, though, whispers that he should take the high road and retire. But still . . . many of my friends on social media say Biden has been a great president and should stay in the race. But still . . . no one can predict the near future with accuracy. One thing I do know: The ex-prez has not changed his spots. He is and always will be a threat to our republic.
You base this on a conversation with the Cook Report? So disappointed in you. How accurate has their polling been recently? (not very). At least come up with a scenario of what happens next because I'm sure Mr. Wasserman's polling doesn't show Kamala doing any better. It will be chaos and division at the Convention where all of the delegates are pledged to Biden. This is really how Trump wins and you're helping to set that stage.
They are not pollsters. Wasserman is an analyst. His genius is on election night, comparing returns with what we know demographically about where the votes are still out. I trust his “I’ve seen enough” on election night implicitly. But I don’t think he has any special talent for predicting the future before any votes are cast.
It breaks my heart to see you go down this path and place so much stock in the arrogant D.C. punditry, Margaret, after all the good work you've done in this newsletter trying to steer us away from horse-race political journalism and knee-jerk narratives. Wasserman's and your take here are flawed on so many levels, and in my humble opinion, reflects the simplistic, narrow-minded thinking of the media and pundit elite.
1) Anyone who expresses this level of confidence in polls four months before the election, when a huge swath of the electorate hasn't even begun paying attention yet, is not respecting reality or history, or really the fundamentals of democracy and that we the voters (and not imperfect opinion polls) decide our fate. Wasserman and his organization were among those who bought into the "Red Wave" narrative about the 2022 midterms, and were proved dead wrong. It is also July, not October, and most of the campaign is yet to unfold.
2) This narrative that "Trump always outperforms the polls" ignores the reality of the past two years, where Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates have consistently underperformed the polls. Since the Dobbs ruling, Democratic candidates running on abortion rights and democracy, and pro-abortion rights ballot measures, have consistently outperformed polls showing tight races. Heading into the 2022 midterms, polls showed Fetterman tied or even slightly behind Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate race (mostly because of a terrible debate performance after his stroke in which the pundits questioned why he was staying in the race). He won that race going away by 5 points, but people like Wasserman now discount such a possibility in the presidential election in the same state (and those 2022 polls showing Oz overtaking Fetterman were as of Election Day, not four months before). Also, pollsters change their methodologies when they have big polling misses such as in 2020 (which was complicated by pandemic factors that are not present this time), so it's entirely possible they've accounted for whatever factors caused Trump to outperform the polls in 2020, or even overcompensated. And incumbent presidents routinely outperform the polls on Election Day by significant margins (true not only of Trump but of Obama and George W. Bush), but this is a fact pollsters conveniently ignore, assuming there's no way that incumbency could benefit Biden in the same way it did Bush, Obama and Trump. I'm guessing you and Wasserman never discussed that historical trend of poll overperformance by incumbents?
3) All journalists who have studied past elections should know that elections by their nature are very fluid affairs, and things can change quickly, especially after Labor Day when more voters tune in. This is why the highly respected FiveThirtyEight forecast has continued to give Biden an even chance or better to win, ever after the chaos of the past month, because it's based largely on fundamentals and economic and historical trends, not on pundit quick takes. Yet, we're supposed to believe the pundits and now the media elite that the election is basically over in July? Was the '92 election over when polls showed Clinton running third behind both Bush and Perot? Was the 2016 election over when pundits wrote off Trump over the summer that year, like they are Biden this year?
4) You and others like Ezra Klein have been great advocates for preserving democracy, but what does it say when in a moment of panic over the fate of democracy, you and others declare the election basically a lost cause months before anyone has had a chance to vote (the whole point of democracy)? What does that say to people like me who are planning to call swing state voters in a few hours in support of the only candidate fighting to save our democracy? That we're wasting our time because the pundits have already called the election before voters have had a chance to weigh in? How does that square with democratic principles? The pundit/media elite narrative over the past month has been beyond hypocritical and arrogant when it comes to the fight for democracy. The message of people like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein basically is: "Yes, we think Biden has been a successful president; yes, millions of Democratic voters selected him through the Democratic (and democratic) primary process (when concerns about his age were well-known to those voters), but the average voter is too stupid to believe facts over propaganda, so he needs to drop out and we, the party and pundit elite, need to be trusted to choose who is best able to save American democracy, because the voters can't be trusted to do so themselves." It's the height of arrogance.
5) The pundits want us to trust the polls that Biden can't win, but the same polls have not shown conclusively that Harris or anyone else would do any better. So we're only supposed to trust the aspects of polls that further the narrative that the pundits decided on minutes after the debate and have clung to ever since, but discount those aspects that run counter to that narrative? How is that logical? Whatever excitement boost the new candidate and party got if Biden dropped out could be more than offset by the inevitable "Dems in Disarray" narrative about a panic-stricken, weak-kneed party abandoning its incumbent president (who they agree has done a good job) weeks before voters will start voting.
I'm glad you're doing the work you're doing because of your ability to reach thousands upon thousands of people that nobodies like me are unable to reach. But that doesn't mean that the pundits and elites always know more than the nobodies like me (or any average voter) does. Maybe it's worth listening to our voices now and then and not just the expert elite pundits who think they have everything figured out (even though they've been wrong before and will likely be wrong again).
I covered a lot of these points in detail in my own Substack (that virtually no one outside my inner circle reads) last week. I hope you and some others here will check it out, because I think a lot of the points I raise make as much sense (or more) than anything the likes of Wasserman, Silver and Klein are saying right now from their Beltway Bubbles. And unlike the pundits, who are being paid handsomely to promote their "I know best" narratives, people like me are doing it only because we love our democracy and country and want desperately to save it.
https://craiglazzeretti.substack.com/p/pundit-panic-attacks-media-hysteria
There are dmso many reasons why Biden should NOT drop out! Polls are notoriously wrong. The logistics of getting someone new on the ballot in all 50 states are daunting. Republicans already plan legal challenges. If you think the battle is uphill NOW, changing candidates will make it more like climbing Everest!
Wassermann was a red waver who didn’t take the 2022 results well and attacked those who were right. The Cook Report is aligned with CBS and not what it was when Charlie Cook ran it. Indeed, its present leader attacked Biden’s state of the Union as unpresidential. I agree with AOC that the corporate media fear Biden’s antitrust enforcement more than anything and will stop at nothing to defeat him and probably any other democratic candidate.
That being said the Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries and perhaps Obama positions can’t be sloughed off. I believe they’ve observed the President and think that what happened at the debate could happen again. If the polls can ease this, then so be it. But, the most remarkable thing about this poll is that Trump, even after everything breaking his way, isn’t exceeding the 46-47% where Rs have been stuck since 2008.
Just upgraded to paid so I could comment. Maybe that will help offset any (possible) exodus. So sorry we live in this world right now.
What an astonishingly lousy three+ weeks it’s been. I’m an anxious voter who values democracy, like everyone here, and also a political scientist in the middle of updating an intro college textbook in its 12th edition (it’s called Keeping the Republic, a title we thought was meaningful a quarter century ago, but not a screaming fire alarm). The usual routine is that we write all the important updates in the summer prior to an election, plug in the election results in Nov, and profs have a current textbook from which to teach in January.
Omfg.
In my usual fashion I have been gaming out all the alternatives and trying to develop an explanation that of what I think is going to happen, as well as narrative to account for what I don’t think will happen, but might.
We usually get it right. The big exception was 2016, when the polls and the imagination both simultaneously failed us.
So I like you and every other person who watched that debate and, while horrified, managed not to jump to the conclusion that I’d been duped by a Biden admin covering up for an incapacitated president, I have been agonizing over what happened, what will happen and what I think best should happen.
I can sympathize with everyone going through the process in good faith who can recognize how uncertain these times are. I may not agree with their conclusions but I can understand the path that got them there.
I have more trouble sympathizing with the people who are certain they are right about what happened and where we should go from here. That certainty seems to represent one of several things I don’t think decisions should be based on — arrogance, panic and anxiety management, injured egos who feel duped (hello reporters!) and people with prior agendas seeing an opportunity to exploit to get something they have not been able to get through other means.
Certainty has no place in a situation where we are creating new realities — which should change our assessments — on the fly. In the immediate aftermath of the debate the polls were NOT bad. They are scary af after three weeks of relentlessly negative and often feral and vengeful media coverage. What would they have looked like after a more measured response? Since there is very little chance that the media coverage has zero impact on the polls, I can’t quite take them as indicators of actual voter sentiment unless I saw the same numbers after a period of factual and neutral coverage. Alas, social scientists don’t get to run this kind of experiment.
We do get to be skeptics of the conventional wisdom though. And we get to ask questions and poke around for hard answers.
We also get to say, if Biden is indeed losing right now (he is not, he is behind in the polls, which is very different) show me a realistic (no Sorkinesque magical thinking allowed) path for a non-Biden candidate to win.
No one, absolutely no one, has been able to do that. Every attempt I’ve seen relies on some pretty odd leaps of faith (America will watch a mini primary nightly to see democracy in action! The party will pull together in unity as soon as the convention ends! There is no cost to a party who changes nominees at the last minute!)
The one thing I feel pretty certain of is that Biden should be pushed out only if we have assessed (to the best of our ability) the risks to a Democratic victory of all the possible paths forward and it’s more risky to democracy for him to run than for the party to replace him.
I have not seen anyone engage in that kind of good faith analysis. I keep running the options in my head with imperfect information and an exhausted brain and each time I come back to the position that the least risky option is for Biden to stay in the race.
Even that is hard to say for sure, because in that scenario I assume that that decision brought closure and the party could rally behind him the way they were before the debate and that the media can can remember that they are supposed to be reporters, not king makers.
I still think it’s our best shot to defeat Trump. I also indulge some of my own magical thinking here because I think the way to pull it off is to have some of the party leaders Ruth leverage — someone like Clyburn — say “Joe, I’m with you but you have to give me something to work with. Have to damn cognitive work up, show you are taking voters concerns seriously. Right now to half the party you look like Grandpa yelling that you’ll never give up your keys. Why don’t you March those keys down to the DMV and get certified safe to drive. The only reasons not to do that are stupid pride or the fear you won’t pass. Taking the test is an act of confidence.”
Very few people in the country are taking that cautious, analytic approach right now. AOC is one of them. This is long but it’s astute, cautious and wise. She’s one of the shrewder political brains in the party. Listen to her.
https://x.com/yashar/status/1814172695166419325?s=46
Well, this is quite the manifesto of your beliefs. You seem very passionate about them. What you personally believe doesn’t move me much, though. Passion doesn’t give you more than one vote and I can tell from what you write that you don’t understand much about American political behavior or public opinion. Yes, I know. You believe things very strongly. When all is said and done you only speak for you.
(Your beliefs don’t alter facts, either. I’m not going to fact check this whole long thing, but I know Biden never “pledged” to be a one term president. Just didn’t. There is nothing bad faith about the fact that he got to the middle of his second term and thought that he was best suited to prevent Trump from getting back to the WH. He may be mistaken about that though I don’t think he was, but it’s hardly an act of bad faith for which he deserves the contempt you show here.)
Democracy means accepting the results of the voting process even when you lose. Biden won the primaries. (Yes, I’m sure you believe that the primaries were unfair but tough. Parties get to set the rules they want. They aren’t under any obligation to hold primaries at all. They tinker with the rules all the time. Their job is to get people elected to office and if more democracy brings more chaos and fewer electable candidates, they are going to limit the democracy and lean more on party elites to make decisions. This is true about parties regardless of anything you believe. They get to set the rules, Biden and Harris won by those rules, and by rejecting the process as rigged you aren’t far off what Trump did in 2020. Sorry, but truth.)
You can’t have it both ways on Pelosi, btw. I agree that Pelosi is one of the sharpest, best minds in the party. So is AOC. Your dismissal of her is pretty gross and sounds emotion-driven to me. Both have long records of making shrewd political decisions and that is true independently of how I feel about the substance or those decisions. What both of them will tell you is that if the candidate is not Biden it must be Harris. If you trust Pelosi on her judgment that Biden should get out (and I would like more info on her reasons — all I see see is unsourced reports) then surely you should trust her when she calls on the party to rally around Harris, no?
Right now I think this thing can go in any number of directions. Maybe Biden stays, maybe he and Dem leaders orchestrate a movement to get the delegates to rally around Harris, maybe it’s the free for all you want. If it’s one of the first two options, are you going to vote Democratic? Will you vote for Biden if he is who is running against Donald Trump in Nov? Will you vote for Harris if she is the nominee?
Let’s say at the end of the day, Biden listens to reason and stays in the race. Are you going to vote for him to keep Trump out?
My read of your text is that we are more aligned than you seem to believe in places. I respond to what people write, not what I feel might be their emotional state.
Of course, I will vote for Biden if he is the candidate. I will do what I always do for the Democratic candidate, make phone calls, knock on doors, register, voters. Because I get out the vote and register new voters, I do have influence beyond my single vote.
I am a complex thinker and believe I am allowed to have complex views on things. I am upset about some things that Joe Biden did, and has done historically, when he was a senator. And, I also know that the response of his administration to the chaos he inherited was instrumental to pulling the nation away from the pandemic, and into an economic recovery. Even Bernie Sanders has to be cheering Biden on this. The fact that Biden‘s performance in his first term has been extraordinary, superlative, does not mean that his putting Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court was not a mistake, which it was. People are allowed to make mistakes in life. It’s OK. I have made plenty.
Because I am upset about how Biden treated Anita Hill does not mean that I feel contempt for him. Human beings are allowed to be upset, and deserve not to have their anger labeled by others as contempt. Anger is a human emotion which, in its healthy form signals, that an important value has been transgressed.
During the Clarence Thomas Senate Judiciary hearings, Anita Hill, a black lawyer, had her testimony of Thomas' sexual harassment of her, along with her character, impugned by Republicans who wanted to put Thomas on the Supreme Court. (I have read your CV and can see that you know all this, having lived through it, like I did.) Senator Biden was chair of the committee and denied Hill the opportunity to have witnesses testify (who wanted to testify) in ways that would have corroborated Anita Hill's testimony. Hill would eventually become a law professor and go on to an ordinary career. Biden would eventually become president. Thomas would do his thing as a plant of the billionaire class.
I can be in favor of Biden's Presidency and at the same time have the historical memory of what it felt like to see all these Republicans gloating about getting Thomas onto the Supreme Court while Anita Hill took an incredible amount of emotional abuse from Republican Senators.
Nancy Pelosi has 37 years of experience in the House. AOC has 5. Pelosi held the Democratic Caucus together during some very tough times. AOC, while savvy, is still learning the craft. AOC has good political instincts. Pelosi is an operator. I read the AOC/Sanders support for Biden as an endorsement of the idea that the DLC/DNC processes are broken and they believe there is no path forward that will be better other than Biden. I respect Bernie's and AOC's positions, as the perennial liberal/progressive underdogs. It's a new wrinkle that I feel must be accorded value, but I'm not sure I'm in agreement with this strategy.
I think you are correct my critique of AOC was too harsh. I modified it.
I think what really bugs me is the Dems have all this brainpower on the Hill that comes to the fore -- suddenly now -- when it is too late and there are no decent options. This wasn't necessary, it's a self-induced error.
We can never know exactly what was or is in President Biden's mind; only those in his intimate circle do. But this situation is not entirely the media's doing. It's a structural issue caused by capture of the infrastructure by class interests.
You seem not to realize that Pelosi already made a public statement in favor of open nominations at the convention, if and only if Biden drops out, with no favoritism for Harris.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/19/pelosi-support-open-nomination-biden-drop-out-00169893
I agree with the consensus view that the Media intentionally created a firestorm from a campfire for their own unhealthy reasons.
I agree with you we are in the middle of something whose outcome is quite uncertain.
I don't think my being a non-specialist in political theory and campaigning is all that important when it comes to having insight. Sullivan herself is recommending that people, in order to understand what's at stake, listen to the comedian John Oliver whose "work has been described as journalism or investigative journalism, labels that he rejects." (Wikipedia)
I think it's necessary, at least for me, to feel some emotion about these things. This is what tells me I care about things. Navigating joys and disappointments is part of life.
Thanks again. The key for me was when Pelosi urged him to step aside. And now you. Let’s hope he does it soon.
So why isn’t Pelosi stepping aside? She’s older than Joe! The Democratic elite are terrified of losing their big donors in Hollywood. That is what this is about.
And Pelosi, while a brilliant tactician in the room, is not a pollster nor someone who has had to do any particular thinking about campaigning in a very long time -- she's cruised to easy victory by like 60 points. This is not her area of expertise, even though she's making it so.
Magaret, your article this morning gives me much sadness. As I respect you and the CPR so much. I too must realize that President Biden must step aside and give all his delegates to VP. Harris. I have writen many posts on social media. fighting these odds, I remember that Ron Reagan was also in the begging stages of dementia during his second term.
I sincerely hope that the DNC realizes that they can NOT have an open convention or mini primary at this stage of the election cycle. VP. Harris must be the chosen candidate.
Thank you for this article, it has given clarity.
There is no plan if he does. Do you not understand this?
Media is driving this chaos. They want this chaos. Media does not care about democracy at all or Project 2025 except as a story. Though most of them don’t even bother to cover it at all. It’s malpractice of the highest order.
The Democratic party donor class got spooked by the debate, and now, because of their ignorance and blind panic, they could well cause a Trump victory. When was the last time the polls were accurate?
Biden has slowed physically, as we all do as we age, and his communications take a big hit when he appears to be physically tired. I think people have conflated this with old age cognitive decline. I would bet that he would look and sound a lot different if he didn't have to campaign.