Some California House Democrats don’t want the process to replace the president on the ticket to seem like a Kamala Harris coronation.
Another option is for Harris to be viewed as the strong front-runner and still allow for an open process, just with the understanding that few, or even no, viable Democrats would challenge her out of fear of being ostracized. In recent weeks, Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan both said they would not run against Harris.
That would be something of a pro forma process then, still selecting Harris.
Apparently Harris isn’t polling much better than Biden overall:
Public and private polls show Harris marginally outperforming Biden, but that she runs stronger than other would-be contenders with crucial demographics, particularly Black voters. Harris supporters and allies contend those surveys merely represent her floor and that support for Harris would grow once she assumed the mantle as the titular head of the party.
However, it might be that she is expected to perform better in the specific states at issue (assuming that switching up the candidate doesn’t alter which states might be swing states…that’s a substantial change).
On 538, Harris is polling better or the same in national polls. The real issue is Trump’s large lead in all but 1 swing state.
Well.
A contested convention would put the spotlight on the democrats for weeks. Political journalists would have to change underwear every ten minutes.
So AOC is clearly talking about Pelosi then. That is almost shockingly unsurprising.
The problem many of Biden’s detractors had with him was that Harris would be next in line for the presidency.
then, when we all vote for a progressive, the dnc will just nominate a corporate centrist anyway
You forget that only 20 states have open primaries. Unless independents and NPA voters reregister, it’s likely going to be a moderate Democrat.
when we all vote
You – as in, the public – wouldn’t be part of this process. The primaries have already happened; the door for a public vote on the matter is closed. This is talking about what kind of party-internal process should happen. She’s talking about whether members of the Democratic Party would get some ability to pick potential alternatives, rather than simply party leadership simply selecting someone.
Whatever happens will happen at the Democratic convention (if Biden steps down and if anything happens at all).
It is almost as if it would be better to have actual primaries rather than the DNC choose the nominee. But apparently 2016 taught them nothing.
They can’t at this point, as the primaries have already happened. Their only option to change candidate now is to have the party select someone else.
I went digging through the list of other presidents that decided not to do a second term in the past, and the latest an incumbent president ever announced that they weren’t doing another term was towards the end of March in the election year, which permitted time for the primaries.
That also allowed for a lot more time for the new candidate to start putting together a campaign. It’s still on a time crunch relative to the normal situation, but they had seven months before the general election to sell themselves to the American public. We’re down to three-and-a-half months and we don’t even know if this is gonna happen.
EDIT: There is one perk of it being so late, which is that Trump has already selected his running mate. That means that unless Trump’s willing to dump Vance, it’s possible to build a ticket specifically optimized to beat Trump/Vance – Democratic strategists know what they’re facing in building their ticket, whereas Republican strategists did not.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I was more criticizing the fact that the party did not allow for a real, competitive primary, similar to what they did in 2016 with the “super delegates” that were committed to Clinton before the primaries were even over. If we had an actual primary we may be could have avoided this chaos.
I love this idea. Open primaries are how it should be. Let the blue team do something dynamic and engaging while depriving the orange guy of his beloved spotlight AND showing the population it is least somewhat self aware.
Kamala Harris has less chance of winning than Biden does. Nobody has ever been a big fan of Kamala Harris. She’s not popular based on actions or personality, she’s a cop, she’s a woman, and she’s not white.
If the intention is to truly get someone who will win more reliably than Biden, it’s going to have to be another old white guy. Or at least a white guy.
It sucks, but that’s where we are.
Honestly, I think the only way out of this hole is going Harris-Sanders. I think a lot more would jump on board then.
In my other comment responding to this parent comment, I linked to an article where Five Thirty Eight was doing statistical analysis on Harris’s potential performance: and they said that both Harris and Biden were hurt by being insufficiently moderate and doing poorly with moderates. But even aside from that, my expectation is that if the Democratic Party picks a candidate with the explicit goal of winning the general election, it’s most-likely going to be, if anything and given the freedom to do so, shifting more-centrist from where things are today, not further to the left. The primary system will tend to pick candidates that are further from the center than would be an optimal choice from a strategic voting standpoint, since you want a candidate that will win (which includes appealing to swing voters), not the most-favored candidate by voters who vote in the party primary.
I would assume that the party would further optimize to win in the Electoral College, so from a party-chosen candidate, I’d expect to see someone that would disproportionately look like what a swing voter in a swing state would want. You’d want someone that would look good to someone who is undecided between the Republican and Democratic ticket in Michigan or Wisconsin, say. A purple voter in a purple state.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in 538, they’ve been wrong more often than right since Obama
Nothing you said above was incorrect as far as I know, but it sure as fuck was depressing.
I agree it’s not Harris, but to say we need yet another unrelatable motherfucker to replace this already old unrelatable motherfucker is not correct.
I’m not saying it’s what we need. I’m saying it’s what would actually succeed. And I agree it’s a problem.
Kamala Harris has less chance of winning than Biden does.
These guys tried to quantify it based on the limited poll information that we have available:
https://abcnews.go.com/538/kamala-harris-stronger-candidate-biden/story?id=111656941
Let’s get one caveat out of the way: We don’t have that many public polls testing Harris against Trump. From April 1 through July 2, just over a dozen polls asked about this alternative matchup. But we do have polls from all the major swing states, thanks largely to tracking from Morning Consult, and we have enough national surveys to calculate a Harris-versus-Trump national polling average — and thus to forecast how she would perform in states without any polls.
For the most part, national polls have shown Harris doing about the same as Biden in head-to-head polls against Trump. In a March Fox News poll for example, Trump led Harris by 6 points and Biden by 5 points (well within the survey’s margin of error). And as recently as June 28, a Data for Progress poll showed the president and vice president each losing to Trump by 3 points (also within the margin of error). That said, a June 28-30 CNN/SSRS poll found Harris losing to Trump by only 2 points while Biden was trailing by 6. This was also within the margin of error but was nonetheless a bigger gap and could mark the beginning of a shift for Harris.
When we plug all these polls into a polls-only version of the 538 forecasting model — which jettisons the economic and political priors our full model uses, giving us an apples-to-apples comparison between candidates — Harris has a slightly higher chance of winning the Electoral College than Biden, but it’s not a significant difference: 38-in-100 versus 35-in-100. On a state-by-state level, Biden looks stronger than Harris in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Harris’s odds are higher than Biden’s in Nevada.
Harris also does slightly better than Biden in our forecast of the national popular vote. The model forecasts that Trump would outpace Harris nationally by 1.5 points, while he would outrun Biden by 2.1 points. However, this could be an artifact of our model not having any Harris-versus-Trump polls that include independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who tends to take slightly more votes away from Democrats than Republicans when included in a poll.
However, Harris’s popular-vote edge is almost entirely negated by the bigger Electoral College bias against her. In our polls-only forecast pairing Biden against Trump, the Democratic candidate needs to win the popular vote by just 1.1 points to win the presidency. That’s thanks to Biden doing better in Pennsylvania, the likeliest tipping-point state in our model. Harris, by contrast, would need to win the popular vote by 3.5-4 points to win Pennsylvania and, with it, the Electoral College.
However, whether Harris would truly be a stronger candidate than Biden also depends on information besides the polls. In our full forecast model — which includes a variety of non-polling economic and political variables, which we call the “fundamentals” — Harris does much worse than Biden across the board. Whereas Biden has a 48-in-100 chance to win the Electoral College, Harris has only a 31-in-100 chance.
This is thanks in large part to the boost our model confers on Biden as the incumbent president, which is worth an extra point for Biden over Harris in our fundamentals-only forecast of the national popular vote. However, one factor our model does not consider is whether presidents’ approval rating and economic growth impact incumbents running for reelection more than non-incumbents running from the same party, and that may actually push Harris’s numbers over Biden’s. In other words, your mileage may vary depending on how much you believe that Biden should get a boost because he’s the sitting president. There is no objectively correct answer here; one of the reasons election forecasting is hard is that it requires judgment calls like these.
You are really going to need to tl;dr that. I’m not one to not read, but that’s just excessive.
Seven paragraphs is too much? I read the full thing before seeing your comment. It’s well written and easy to read.
I mean, it’s not a really simple result.
I guess in a nutshell:
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There is limited Trump-vs-Harris state polling data available. Some has to be predicted based on other polls, and there won’t be many sources to work with.
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Harris polls slightly better nationwide than Biden, but it’s not by much.
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However, the model they use, which makes use of information above-and-beyond just poll results, also predicts Biden to have a better chance of winning the Electoral College.
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However, this model is built based on assumptions that may not hold for this particular unusual situation, and the authors are not sure how well those assumptions will hold up.
Thank you.
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She’s polling better than Biden
Random dude picked from the street would poll better than him
Among whom, though?
The more those clowns try to push Biden out, the more I want him to stay in. He’s unlikely to beat Trump, but so is anyone else they have any likelihood of nominating.
It’s funny because the thing hurting the dems the most is this infighting bullshit, not Biden.
I don’t have the information to know whether-or-not swapping out Biden is the right move. That’s a technical question that depends on data that I don’t have visibility into, dunno what voting preference is at a state level versus Trump.
But I will say this – if the Democrats are gonna pull the trigger and run someone else, they better do it really quickly if they intend to do so, or stick with Biden. Because any such potential candidate is going to already have their campaign period be very abbreviated.
Like, if they’re serious, I think they should set a date now, one not far down the road, and say that if they haven’t committed to someone else by that date, then they go with Biden. Otherwise, they run the risk of both killing Biden’s campaign and not giving the successor enough time to campaign. Like, this either needs to be done really soon or not happen and be permanently put to bed.
