Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

Don't ever focus on national polls.

If he was even semi-functional he'd have a press conference actually holding up the 69-page pandemic prep prepared by prior administration and explaining how Trump threw it in the garbage

this should not be hard, it's like watching somebody behind a scrim

I mean I'll start buying that this is some kind of rope-a-dope strategy when the guy demonstrates he actually has a punch to pull

my wife has a 9 year old student whose father works high up in the Biden campaign (she informed my wife she'd just been on a zoom call with Biden the other week) and has told us that the VP pick is Kamala Harris. I trust 9 year olds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7spOEfRN-0

interesting!
having been the 9 year old daughter of a person in politics, i too trust her judgement :)

Letting Trump punch himself seems to be working fine

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN22O3FG

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/0512/For-some-seniors-virus-is-shifting-their-views-of-Trump

The public sees Trump as the stronger candidate for job creation, while Biden is seen as better suited on healthcare issues.

lol as if these were discrete issues!

from tomboto's second link:

According to a recent Morning Consult poll, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among voters over the age of 65 dropped 20 points between March and the end of April, making seniors more critical of the president’s performance than any other age group aside from 18- to 29-year-olds. Much of that decline seems directly related to the virus, which so far has posed a far more serious health threat to older people.

damn! that's quite a drop.

and he won them easily in 2016.

I guess it makes a difference when you suggest Grandma should die so you can go to Shake Shack.

I cast my vote for Bernie today in the Oregon primary. Warren was on the ballot, but at this point Bernie is the locus of any power progressives can still exert on the veep nomination and platform process, so I went that way. Tulsi Gabbard is also on the ballot and it will be mildly interesting to see if she manages to break above 1%.

That's interesting about the Unity Taskforce. Is it a real thing?

AOC and Kerry co-chairing on climate change ??

the drop among over-65's is a hopeful sign

xp

it's a real thing. it will be very interesting to see if the progressive voices can get any traction with all of the ancient people on the task force

I cast my vote for Bernie today in the Oregon primary.

GOOD MAN

aimless is solid as they come

Biden on Lawrence O'Donnell tonight:

Asked what he'd say to women who believe Tara Reade and are now struggling with their vote, Biden says: "If they believe Tara Reade, they probably shouldn't vote for me. I wouldn’t vote for me if I believed Tara Reade."

— Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) May 15, 2020

huh. fair

Can do

Did he tell them to still come out and vote for downballot candidates and local initiatives and so forth?

Really phenomenal replies to that tweet, twitter is great, more twitter please, everywhere

I hate people thinking about things I just want TWEETS and REACTIONS then I know how to feel. Obviously I don’t want large fonts calling me out as a rape apologist forever so I will choose Green Party 2020

Biden has this strange tic (for a politician) of telling people not to vote for him. It's not like he does it in some strategic way, either, where he is using it as a way to reassure voters about his basic fairness, his admirable adherence to other deeply held values, or any positive reason to counterbalance it; he just tells the voter 'I don't care what you think about me, so fuck off and vote for someone else, see if I care'.

This is not a happy talent.

Sort of a nothing point in the grand scheme of things, but something I was wondering today: if Biden wins and the Republicans keep the senate, can they launch the impeachment process or does that have to start in the House? You know they'll immediately hold hearings on all that stuff with Biden's son. Would that be pointed towards impeachment or would they be doing it just because they can do it?

Impeachment is in the gift of the House.

Thanks. I'd expect hearings very soon into his term--I guess they'll just be for the spectacle of it. (Or maybe his cronyism inside the Senate will circumvent that.)

"If they believe Tara Reade, they probably shouldn't vote for me. I wouldn’t vote for me if I believed Tara Reade."

Poll: One-third of Democrats believe harassment, assault allegations against Biden

"The Tara Reade allegations are a 50-50 issue and independents are the battleground," Dritan Nesho, CEO and head pollster of HarrisX, told Hill.TV.

i'm no math expert, but i believe that if you assume that 10% of these voters take biden's advice and don't for him, that means, carry the two,

NOMINATE SOMEONE ELSE

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/13/politics/cnn-poll-2020/index.html

In the new poll, 51% of registered voters nationwide back Biden, while 46% say they prefer Trump, while in the battlegrounds, 52% favor Trump and 45% Biden. Partisans are deeply entrenched in their corners, with 95% of Democrats behind Biden and the same share of Republicans behind Trump. The two are close among independents (50% back Trump, 46% Biden, not a large enough difference to be considered a lead), but Biden's edge currently rests on the larger share of voters who identify as Democrats.

hate people thinking about things I just want TWEETS and REACTIONS then I know how to feel. Obviously I don’t want large fonts calling me out as a rape apologist forever so I will choose Green Party 2020

― El Tomboto, Friday, 15 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Great way to ignore what the tweet posted is actually saying but you do you.

Don't ever focus on national polls.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 13 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

What's the reasoning for this?

presidential elections are won state by state, is i think what Alfred’s referring to?

Fair enough although I'd like to think Trump dropping below a certain % in a national poll would mean he is in trouble.

What Tracer said.

At least until 2016, I think Nate Silver always said that national polls at a certain point were very hard to overturn--that if you had even a three or four point lead you were going to win, because the few states that might have been closer weren't all going to suddenly turn against you in variance with the other states, that they tended to move up and down more or less in waves. Something like that.

Which of course is exactly what happened in 2016, the thing he said doesn't happen, so maybe he's changed his mind.

Sort of weird to pull out Silver in particular on this, since he was the one who right up to Election Day was saying it was quite close and Trump had a real chance; a lot of people thought Clinton was sure to win. And of course Clinton *didn't* have a three or four point national edge; she had a two-point national edge. If she'd had a three or four point national lead she would have won the election.

Right--that's what I meant by "at a certain point," at a threshold of three points or so. During the two Obama elections, he'd have a three-point lead and there'd be a lot of hand-wringing on the Democratic side because a number of states were inside that, maybe one or two points, and Silver would say that all those states are not going to march in lockstep and move in the other direction if the national polls stay around 3%; in that instance, he was saying the national lead was more instructive than state-by-state.

In 2016, you're right--he put Trump at around 30% when most everyone else had him at 5% or less. And the difference was between the perceived 3 or 4% and the actual 2%. That seems to be the gray area in there where national polls become less meaningful.

I was trying to look up a quote from Silver and found this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/can-you-still-trust-nate-silver/605521/

He seems to have fallen out of favour, but his caution in 2016 was way ahead of virtually everyone else.

NOMINATE SOMEONE ELSE

agree

Have people ever liked the eventual Democratic nominee, besides maybe Obama? Actual question.

I don't believe so, and I have been involved in this stuff pretty deeply my whole life bc of family stuff. Dukakis? Blecch. Clinton, whatever. Gore? Ugh. Only Obama actually moved people.

Clinton actually moved people, too.

Coincidentally... he and Obama won and all the people no one gave a fuck about lost. Hmmmmmmmm

HMMMMMMMMM

This is a bit of a tricky question because "people" -- what people? Decades old memories of what "people" were excited about? Who the f knows. I know that many people in my peer group did not become politically motivated to give more than a shred of 1 shit until Obama came along.

I did intentionally leave out any modifiers specifying which people. I figured it would be more revealing of the assumptions ilxors have about who counts as "people"

tbh i don't appreciate having my opinion squeezed like that. this thread continues to make me feel like shit :( why am i still here

I am older than a lot of people here and I was all in for Mike Dukakis. Hell, I still am.

And I busted my ass going door to door for John Kerry. And I am still mad about what was done to him, and what the fact that it worked has done to politics.

I'm sorry Lechera. You're right that I shouldn't do that. I guess my assumption about "who counts as people" doesn't include posters on the Biden thread. I have revealed myself to myself and it is, as ever, unpretty.

the only person I've ever supported whole heartedly in a primary who then won was Obama. I've backed losers every other time (bradley, brown, dean, warren)

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-74-former-biden-staffers-think-about-tara-reades-allegations